In 16th and 17th century Europe and the colonies of the New World, a war was waged against women. The witch hunts crossed borders and spread from France and Italy to Germany, Switzerland, England, Scotland, Sweden, reaching as far as Mexico and Peru. It was a deliberate attempt to humiliate women, demonize them, and destroy their social power. What fears fueled this orchestrated policy of genocide? Why was so much violence used? And why were women the main target?

"Caliban and the Witch" attempts to reconstruct the social conditions of the witch hunts, examining them as one of the pillars of the primitive accumulation of capital, as a process of "enclosures" that destroyed an entire world of subjects, practices, and knowledge that did not align with the progress of capitalist relations. The bourgeois ideals of female nature and domestic life were forged precisely in the torture chambers and at the stakes where the witches lost their lives.