One of Cox's points of contention with Marx was to argue that foreign trade, and not commodity production for the private accumulation of capital, was the primary driving force in capitalist development.

[3] Additionally, he was an important scholar of racism and its relationship to the development and spread of global capitalism, and a member of the Chicago School of Sociology.

[5] Although Cox never married or had children, he was close to his three nieces: Ann V. Awon-Pantin, Esther Awon-Thomasos, and Juliet Awon-Uibopuu.

[1] After his family emigrated to the United States, he attended Central YMCA High School and Crane Junior College in Chicago.

[1] At that point in his higher education, he gave up plans to practice law in Trinidad, and opted to become an academic in the U.S.[7] He next attended the University of Chicago where he studied in the Economics Department and obtained a master's degree in 1932.

His dissertation was entitled "Factors Affecting the Marital Status of Negroes in the United States", and it was written under the supervision of William Fielding Ogburn.

[11] In 1948, Cox published his most profound and influential book, Caste, Class and Race, just ten years after obtaining his Ph.D. in Sociology.

If, therefore, parts of this study seem Marxian, it is not because we have taken the ideas of this justly famous writer as gospel, but because we have not discovered any other that could explain the facts so consistently.