Table of Contents

Introduction. Slavery's Capitalism
—Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman
PART I. PLANTATION TECHNOLOGIES
Chapter 1. Toward a Political Economy of Slave Labor: Hands, Whipping-Machines, and Modern Power
—Edward E. Baptist
Chapter 2. Slavery's Scientific Management: Masters and Managers
—Caitlin Rosenthal
Chapter 3. An International Harvest: The Second Slavery, the Virginia-Brazil Connection, and the Development of the McCormick Reaper
—Daniel B. Rood
PART II. SLAVERY AND FINANCE
Chapter 4. Neighbor-to-Neighbor Capitalism: Local Credit Networks and the Mortgaging of Slaves
—Bonnie Martin
Chapter 5. The Contours of Cotton Capitalism: Speculation, Slavery, and Economic Panic in Mississippi, 1832-1841
—Joshua D. Rothman
Chapter 6. "Broad is de Road dat Leads ter Death": Human Capital and Enslaved Mortality
—Daina Ramey Berry
Chapter 7. August Belmont and the World the Slaves Made—Kathryn Boodry
PART III. NETWORKS OF INTEREST AND THE NORTH
Chapter 8. "What have we to do with slavery?" New Englanders and the Slave Economies of the West Indies
—Eric Kimball
Chapter 9. "No country but their counting-houses": The U.S.-Cuba-Baltic Circuit, 1809-1812
—Stephen Chambers
Chapter 10. The Coastwise Slave Trade and a Mercantile Community of Interest
—Calvin Schermerhorn
PART IV. NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND NATURAL BOUNDARIES
Chapter 11. War and Priests: Catholic Colleges and Slavery in the Age of Revolution
—Craig Steven Wilder
Chapter 12. Capitalism, Slavery, and the New Epoch: Mathew Carey's 1819
—Andrew Shankman
Chapter 13. The Market, Utility, and Slavery in Southern Legal Thought
—Alfred L. Brophy
Chapter 14. Why Did Northerners Oppose the Expansion of Slavery? Economic Development and Education in the Limestone South
—John Majewski
Notes
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments

Promotional Information

Slavery's Capitalism explores the role of slavery in the development of the U.S. economy during the first decades of the nineteenth century. It tells the history of slavery as a story of national, even global, economic importance and investigates the role of enslaved Americans in the building of the modern world.

About the Author

Sven Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. Seth Rockman is Associate Professor of History at Brown University.

Reviews

"Slavery's Capitalism is a time capsule, neatly containing one of the most important developments in American scholarly and public life that took place during the Obama presidency. . . . The publication of Slavery's Capitalism at the tail end of the Obama era thus provides the perfect opportunity to take stock of what was accomplished in the last round of historicization: to see what is valuable in the paradigm of 'slavery's capitalism,' what is new about the 'new' history of capitalism in the United States, and what, if any, dangers of presentism its practitioners succumbed to. The book both incorporates and builds on a wave of recent scholarship on slavery and capitalism in the United States."
*Times Literary Supplement*

"The intimate relationship between capitalism and slavery has been too-long dismissed, and with it, the centrality of African and African American labor to the foundation of our modern economic system. Slavery's Capitalism announces the emergence of a new generation of scholars whose detailed research into every nook and cranny of emerging capitalism reveals the inextricable links between the enslavement of people of African descent and today's global economy."
*Leslie Harris, Emory University*

"The centrality of slavery to the economic development of the United States is revealed here more fully, in more dimensions, than in any other book. Anyone who wants to understand this profound revolution in historical thinking will find no better place to start."
*Edward L. Ayers, author of In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of America*

"This fascinating collection of essays adds striking new insights to the venerable debate over the relationship between capitalism and slavery. It demonstrates slavery's centrality to the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy, and how slavery was fully compatible with technological, managerial, and financial innovation, but also why southern slavery differed from northern capitalism in ways that helped to produce the irrepressible conflict."
*Eric Foner, author of Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad*

"With some of the best work in one of the hottest fields in American history, Slavery's Capitalism re-centers the history of American capitalism on racial slavery as the U.S. economy's initial engine for development. I admire the ambition of the scholarly project and applaud the topical range of the essays."
*Gary J. Kornblith, coeditor of Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America*