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Key Quote: “If a new consensus is emerging, one that instead treats slavery as the interstate high system of the American past, its origins can be traced to several distinctive conversations in the scholarship, as well as to a swell of public interest and social activism.” (6)
Key Terms: “Slaveholding Republic”(1)
In the new perspective in American’s slaveholding past, Slavery’s Capitalism, Sven Beckert, and Seth Rockman pull together an essay collective based on a 2011 conference entitled as the book (sponsored by Brown and Harvard Universities). They explore how the slavery labor regime, to innovative technologies like the whip, places the United States with a globalizing economy based on slavery. Each essay explores different aspects of slavery, like how the whip increases cotton productivity and how the gin was innovative it not solve the labor that goes into growing and seeding cotton. Other essays cover, planter bookkeeping, valuations of human capacity, to local credit lending keeping the economy going. The ultimate goal is to allow this collection to envision not just slavery an economy but widening this framework with new scholarship that creates an authentic capitalist market economy.
The essays all have similar formats to keep the book’s message cohesive, starting out with a primary account of a particular role of the slave/slaveholding narrative (Charles Ball, Eli J. Capell, Helena and her two daughters, Mathew Carey to English settlers). The collection of essays embodies slavery as a national economy dependency for the United States. I appreciate the time spent on reflecting not just on the slaveholding planters, but the economy and forward effects it had on industrialization. In Gould’s book last week, we agreed that American essentially copied British Imperialist powers and utilized treaties that provide us global recognition through this “pushing” for recognition. Dshanebeck points out this idea of both Gould and Becket/Rockman book that American at this stage is trying to prove something globally, at any cost. This push that Beckert and Rockman essay book asserts are we quickly turn our emerging society into a global dominating force through various aspects of slaveholding. Moreover, they come right now and admit that new scholarship points to the North’s industrialization success that utilized all of the raw cotton to produce textiles, therefore benefiting directly from slave hands as well.
Now here are my only criticisms of the book. First, Beckert claims his is cutting edge scholarship, however, fails ever to mention his article he produced in the December 2004 American Historical Review titled Emanicpation/Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War. In this article, he asserts the southern cotton industry climbed to global capitalist heights, making it cheaper to sell, export and ship over the Atlantic and were still beating the costs to create textiles with British cotton. He already spins this as a capitalist market in this article. My other disappointment with this read, is they mention many scholars that have spoken about cotton economics. However, he fails to mention Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul. This book Walter utilizes Narratives by former slaves, docket records of disputed slave sales, notarized acts of sale, letter written by slaveholder and newspaper editorials to reinforce southern paternalism and create a cotton economy. Johnson argues the chattel principle that is the “abstract value that underwrote the southern economy could only be made material in himan shpae-frails, senitent and resistant. And thus the contraditiocn was daily played out in a contest over meaning (Johnson, 29). Also, Johnson utilizes the same Charles Ball and gives him agency to his slave-life. In the first chapter of the Beckert book, they paint Charles Ball as a man that quickly figures out that southern slavery is how quickly you can pick and how much you can pass through your hands in fear of the whip technology. Johnson exemplifies Ball illustrated the Acts of Sale (Chapter 6 Johnson) on the idea of extensive accommodation of human labor. As two buyers examine Ball, he overhears that a purchaser has specific needs for a slave to be phuscally stonr and to be good in the field. he utilizes these coversations from the slave pen to share his slae to a potiential buyer that would best suite his ideal master. Ansering to potenial slae holders in the affirmative assithim him to extection holder information while particpating int he patriarch replationships between hold and the slave withing the slave pen.