REVIEW ARTICLE MONICA HELLER AND BONNIE MCELHINNY. Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press. 2017. xii + 310 pp. Pb (9781442606203) $44.95, eBook (9781442606227) $35.95. Reviewed by JACQUELINE URLA Where does language figure in the production and reproduction of social difference and inequality? This question has been approached in many different ways – by authors working on gate-keeping and conversational interaction, work on language ideologies, in critical discourse analysis, in education, and the abundant work on language in relation to gender, race, and class hierarchies – to name just a few. If the question is not new, it is nevertheless put before us in an acute way in the contemporary moment in which the gap in income inequality has grown astronomically, and where intolerance and xenophobic political discourse are disturbingly normalized. ‘Once again, not for the first time in history, language is coming to the fore in struggles for power’ (p. xv). Monica Heller and Bonnie McElhinny understand the project of their collaborative book to be a response to this historical moment and animated by a passion ‘to develop an approach to linguistic analysis in which political economy, social difference, and social inequality are at the centre’ (p. xxii). Towards this end, the book follows two inter-related questions: How does language figure in the workings of two of the main economic and political orders of the modern era: capitalism and colonialism? And, in turn, how have those forces shaped the development and questions pursued in the study of language? The latter issue in particular is one that they believe has too often been sidelined by conventional intellectual histories of the various branches of linguistics, philology, and sociolinguistics. This book, by contrast, seeks to model for readers a historically oriented political economy of knowledge production about language by focusing on how material conditions and interests have shaped how scholars have studied and conceptualized language. The scope is large; capitalism and colonialism are multifaceted and mutating behemoths and the time frame is long – they start in the sixteenth century. The outcome is a daring road map for what a twenty-first century history of language studies – from early comparative philology, missionary linguistics, and dialectology, to contemporary sociolinguistics and generative Address correspondence to: Jacqueline Urla, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Massachusetts U.S.A jurla@anthro.umass.edu Twitter: @jackieurla Journal of Sociolinguistics 22/5, 2018: 595–607 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd