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Slavery’s Capitalism, a hot-off-the-presses tome edited by Harvard’s Sven Beckert and Brown’s Seth Rockman, is a compilation of historical essays dedicated to the nineteenth-century emergence of America as an economic power; one that, the authors argue, was built largely upon a market where millions of human beings were simply highly-valued property. Important to us in 2016, these histories are presented as representative of “the current political and cultural moment in the United States,[where] the time appears right to construct a new narrative of American economic development.” (B&R 12) A new historical “prism of slavery” is in progress, the editors hold, one that accounts for slavery’s role in the formation and functions of international markets and standard business practices. (Ibid) This viewpoint holds current political poignancy, as viewing modern capitalism as fruit from the ‘poisonous tree’ of slavery and has not only contributed to tired calls for reparations, but also a significant challenge to the system of capitalism, generally, in the popular major party candidacy of Senator Sanders.
A chapter of particular interest to me, an aspiring student of political parties and ideologies, was Andrew Shankman’s “Capitalism, Slavery, and the New Epoch: Mathew Carey’s 1819.” Shankman reveals that Carey, a political economist and Federalist, envisioned the foundation of slaves and capitalism as essential to his grandiose vision of America’s future within the ‘American System’ platform of the Whig Party. (B&R 243, 244) Shankman reveals that even though there were reforming tendencies in the Whig party, the economic theories underlying its politics cannot be detached from slavery. (B&R 244) This can perhaps be understood as a microcosm of the North at large, where even though while many in the region attempted to temporally disconnect themselves from the “peculiar institution,” one’s quality of life–be it in investments or in the clothes on their backs–was somehow connected to human bondage. The pro-slavery Carey, a Philadelphian, lamented that some Federalists attempted to portray southerners “as demons incarnate, and destitute of all the good qualities that dignify and adorn human nature”; a real ‘basket of deplorables,’ if you will. (B&R 244) Carey was frustrated to find out that his pro-slavery stance was nevertheless not enough to convince southerners to expand federal power as the American System saw pertinent, with the underlying cause for concern being that with great central power came opportunities to undermine slavery. (254-55)
I appreciated Mr. andrewjarrakelly’s citation of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence in his discussion of the historical question regarding the reasons the United States economy took off in the nineteenth-century in relation to the rest of the world. It has always been a question of mine whether the antebellum South was holding the United States back economically, with evidence being the country’s even greater economic expansion after the Civil War. Pre-war, cotton was by far the nation’s premier export, and it was entirely grown in the South; yet, there have been intellectual attempts at labeling the antebellum Southern economy as altogether backward, especially in comparison with the more modern capitalist experiments of the North (B&R 119) Slavery, a fairly substantial elephant in the room, has prevented widespread recognition of seeming ‘modernization’ that came along with institutionalized human-trafficking and labor bondage. As Walter Johnson also recognizes in River of Dark Dreams, Beckert and Rockman point out that with investment in slaves came the desire to maximize efficiency, with transference and worth becoming “routinized and predictable.” (B&R 12) Reading Slavery’s Capitalism makes clear that capitalism in America, and indeed the world, was owned by the issue of slavery.