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Walter Johnson offers new research on the history of capitalism. He insinuates that slavery played an essential part of early American economic expansion. In the article, “Toward A New Legal History of Capitalism and Unfree Labor: Law, Slavery, and Emancipation in the American Marketplace”, written by Matthew A. Axtell, illustrates the legal institutions of property and contract through the different works of Walter Johnston. Axtell begins the article with a review of literature that leads to the formation of Walter Johnson’s first book, Soul by Soul. Johnston’s main concentration is, “people-as-property continued to be one thing that characterized slavery at its most basic level, the thing that needed to be more closely studied and critiqued.”[1] In his second book, River of Dark Dreams, Johnston decides to pursue a wider view that offers new research on the concept of “slave racial capitalism”. In the concluding pages of the article, Axtell advocates the pursuit of understanding legal institutions of property and contract that will assist in broadening our research in the history of capitalism.
Soul by Soul emphases the slave market and human transactions that took place rather than previous historiographies that choose to outline planation life. Previous historians, like Eugene Genovese, highlighted “antebellum laws regulating slaves and slaveholders on Southern plantations.”[2] Johnston chooses to research the slave market based on how white people reduced black people as commodities rather than human beings. However, what makes his research more interesting is his argument “that the law of the slave market created space for slaves ‘to shape their own sale’.” [3] Here slaves were able to participate in selling their own worth and made opinions on their transactions to slaveholders. Johnston chose to not focus on the domination of one group over the other, but rather he exposed “the inner legal workings of the slave market” that contributed to the gathering of information that became primary advocacy for the “abolitionist critique of slavery.”[4] In 2003, Johnston strove to move away from his previous findings on “agency” and concentrate on the “critique of slavery as a pathological symptom of modern-day capitalism.”[5]
River of Dark Dreams, concentrates on Antebellum Slave Market, but expands its attention to the interlinings of capitalism, slavery, imperialism, and white domination. Dreams strives to illustrate the history of capitalism, “while Soul entered into a decades-long discussion about the scope of African American resistance and self-determination in the face of white oppression.”[6] The book portrays three different stories: the first portrays the rise of global capitalism and the fading of the yeoman farmer with the rise of the cotton kingdom; the next is how slaveholders brought the system to the international level, and the last story, explains “how ‘slaves’ agency was structured in dominance’ by the South’s master class.”[7] The book is composed of fourteen chapters that look at how the history of capitalism played in the Antebellum Market Place.
The major contribution to Johnston’s second book is the introduction of “slave racial capitalism”. Johnston is able to pull together two major explanations of capitalism discussed by previous scholars, such as Elkins and Engerman, by finding connections with cultural understanding, demonstrated by Gutman and Genovese. Axtell offers this statement from the New York Times: “After decades of ‘history from below,’ a new generation of scholars is increasingly turning to what, strangely, risked becoming the most marginalized group of all: the bosses, bankers and brokers who run the economy.” By assessing stories from the perspectives of the bosses, bankers, and brokers, it offers a new interruption of looking at the Antebellum Market through a business and legal lens that as not been done before. Axtell further continues this line of discussion, by offering that the North and the South were not as different as one might assume. But rather, on the business level both regions were trying to grow with the rise of the capitalistic market emerging in early modern America. Therefore, “Northern factories and Southern plantations were not opposing systems, but deeply entwined.”[8] However, what Axtell brings to the attention of the readers is, though Johnston may steer away from this topic, if the North and South were so intertwined on an economic level, why did the Civil War occur?
Though law is not directly looked at in Dreams, Axtell argues that it can be found indirectly through Johnston’s work. “Slave racial capitalism” is best seen as a political theory that can assist in understanding antebellum Southern political economy. The portrait that Johnston illustrates is “capitalist law and order that is one-way technology of racial domination, is so disturbing that law-minded readers may seek a way out.”[9] Legal practice can be demonstrated through slaveholders and their slaves as capital assets. Slaveholders used slaves as capital assets in order to access cash or credit within lending markets in the South. Axtell offers that “within a cash-strapped capitalist system, it would be only a matter of time before the domino effect of property disaggregation, beginning with slave mortgages, spread into less secure sectors of the antebellum economy.”[10] By creating mortgages or contracts to rent out one’s slaves, brings to the focus private practice of the legal system and its involvement in the system of slavery. Johnston conveys how slaveholders may have seen themselves as capitalists, entering into contracts under the impression of selling or buying, which would legally bind them to other participant within the contract. In conjunction, slaves could also participate in the selling and buying which could affect the contract between sellers. Axtell points out, “within a liberal capitalist legal order, it would be very difficult for masters to stop slaves from helping dictate where ‘slave racial capitalism’ would eventually lead.”[11]
As new work is presented within the realms of the history of capitalism, the more crosswords there could be in trying to understand this emerging concept. Walter Johnston was able to provide Dreams, a new aspect of “capitalism as law giving and lawless at the same time; has much to recommend it, especially in its capacity to point out the violence of dispossession lurking behind even the most superficially benign market transaction.”[12] Axtell continues to state that by Johnston offering this new concept of “slave racial capitalism” allows for more research to be done on legal institutions of conducting transactions within the Antebellum Marketplace. By pulling out the business transactions, lawyer files, and courtroom discussions it will offer new light on liberal capitalist institutions that also affected slavery on a legal level.
Work Cited
Axtel, Matthew A. “Toward a New Legal History of Capitalism and Unfree Labor: Law, Slavery, and Emancipation in the American Marketplace”. Law & Social Inquiry 40 (2015): 270-295. Accessed September 12, 2016.
[1] Matthew A. Axtel, “Toward a New Legal History of Capitalism and Unfree Labor: Law, Slavery, and Emancipation in the American Marketplace”, Law & Social Inquiry 40 (2015): 279.
[2] Matthew A. Axtel, “Toward a New Legal History of Capitalism and Unfree Labor: Law, Slavery, and Emancipation in the American Marketplace”, Law & Social Inquiry 40 (2015): 276.
[3] Ibid, 278.
[4] Ibid, 278.
[5] Ibid, 280.
[6] Ibid, 272.
[7] Ibid, 280.
[8] Ibid, 283.
[9] Ibid, 286.
[10] Ibid, 287.
[11] Ibid, 289.
[12] Ibid, 294.