Have you ever been researching a topic and formed a hypothesis? You continued to research, only to find that the evidence you've collected does not support your hypothesis. At this point, a sensible person would either abandon the topic entirely or rework their hypothesis to address the conclusions provided by the evidence. Silvia Federici did not do this. She clung to her faulty theory like a life raft and tried to paddle her way to a disjointed conclusion.

This book has me in an absolute rage. I recently added Federici's other book, Caliban and the Witch, to my TBR, but bought this little book first as it's an update to her first book. When I first started reading this, I felt like I maybe should have read Caliban and the Witch first, but by the end of this book, I was glad to read this first so I don't waste my time on the other book.

TL;DR: This book is xenophobic and poorly researched.

I'm going to make a list to try to organize my thoughts but I am absolutely fuming so no promises on coherency.

1. My first complaint is that this book is horribly xenophobic. Federici routinely refers to "Africa" as if it is a COUNTRY and not a CONTINENT CONSISTING OF MANY COUNTRIES WITH DIFFERENT CULTURES. She assumes that there is one, monolithic "Africa" and this is deeply problematic.
I knew I was in for an absolute mess when I encountered this line on page 12: "But if my reading of the witch hunt is correct, then a different historical understanding becomes possible, whereby the African slaves, the expropriated peasants of Africa and Latin America, and the massacred Native population of North America become the kin of the sixteenth and seventeenth century European witches, who, like them, saw their common lands taken away, experienced the hunger produced by the move to cash crops, and saw their resistance persecuted as a sign of a diabolical pact." YIKES! Comparing the persecution of European white women to the institutionalized slave trade that resulted from racist, colonialist empires does NOT sit well with me.
On page 52, Federici speaks of the return of witch-hunting in Africa and India and writes "many factors contribute to the resurgence of witch hunts, among them the disintegration of communal solidarity, due to decades of impoverishment and the ravages of AIDS and other diseases in societies where malnutrition is rampant and healthcare systems have collapsed." So many problematic stereotypes here that just smack of her believing that anywhere other than the US, Canada, or Europe are "backwards." No mention of the lasting impacts of empire anywhere in this "analysis."

Here is a list of some other problematic instances from her chapter titled "Witch-Hunting, Globalization, and Feminist Solidarity in Africa Today:"
"Although the fear of witchcraft is often described as a deep-seated feature of Africa's belief systems, assaults on witches intensified in the 1990s."
Comparing the resurgence of persecution in "Africa" to European 17th century witch hunts, Federici writes that we will not find an explanation for this phenomenon by "appealing to the African worldview."
"Thousands of children have also been tortured this way in Angola, with the complicity of their parents, probably eager to free themselves from youngsters they can no longer support." this is HORRIBLE! I think it's pretty obvious why it's horrible but yikes, yikes, YIKES.
But Africa isn't the only entity subject to Federici's xenophobia. On page 72, she says "Indeed we could not explain such brutality if we did not have both historical precedents and more recent examples coming from other parts of our "global village," like India or Papua New Guinea." girl I.....

2. This book is so poorly researched that I'm amazed it was even published. One of the chapters was published in an academic journal and I'm uncertain how it passed peer review. In fact, Federici herself admits on page 13 that the evidence for her theory is "circumstantial."

Federici doesn't cite ANYTHING. She references certain anecdotes and does not cite where they are from. For example, she talks about the history of companion animals and witch hunts on page 22 and doesn't cite where this info came from! How convenient that nobody can verify her work!

In addition to lack of citations, Federici doesn't appear to have done any primary source research or really any of her own fact gathering whatsoever. She references other people's work in support of her own theory, but it's clear that she has contributed no original research to this topic. She's just cobbling together other random bits she pulled from others in order to give this Frankenstein-monster-of-a-theory its wings.

Speaking of cobbling, she really doesn't say ANYTHING in this book that makes sense. Truly she is just pulling random quotes that suit her ill-fated hypothesis and ignoring everything else.

3. Conclusion: I have never in my life read such a poorly researched, problematic book in my entire life. I can't believe this and Caliban and the Witch are given any scholarly credit. I also can't believe I wasted my time reading this. Truly I would have DNF'd it but I powered through so I could write this review.