Slavery’s<\/i> Capitalism<\/em>, a\u00a0hot-off-the-presses tome edited by Harvard’s Sven\u00a0Beckert and Brown’s Seth Rockman, is a\u00a0compilation of\u00a0historical\u00a0essays dedicated to the nineteenth-century emergence of America as an economic power; one that, the\u00a0authors\u00a0argue, 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\u00a0international markets and standard business\u00a0practices. (Ibid) This viewpoint holds current political poignancy, as viewing modern capitalism as fruit from the ‘poisonous tree’ of slavery\u00a0and has not only contributed to tired calls for reparations, but also a significant challenge\u00a0to the system of capitalism, generally, in the popular major party candidacy of Senator\u00a0Sanders.<\/p>\n

A chapter of\u00a0particular 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\u00a0foundation of\u00a0slaves and capitalism as essential to his grandiose vision of America’s future within the ‘American System’ platform of the\u00a0Whig Party. (B&R 243, 244) Shankman reveals that even though there were reforming tendencies in the Whig party, the economic theories underlying its politics\u00a0cannot be detached from\u00a0slavery. (B&R 244) This can perhaps be understood as\u00a0a 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.\u00a0(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)<\/p>\n

I appreciated Mr. andrewjarrakelly’s citation of Kenneth Pomeranz’s\u00a0The Great Divergence\u00a0<\/em>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\u00a0at labeling the antebellum Southern\u00a0economy as altogether backward, especially in comparison with the more\u00a0modern capitalist experiments of the North (B&R 119) Slavery,\u00a0a fairly substantial elephant in the room, has prevented widespread recognition of seeming\u00a0‘modernization’ that came along with institutionalized human-trafficking and labor bondage.\u00a0As Walter Johnson also recognizes\u00a0in\u00a0River of Dark Dreams<\/em>, Beckert and Rockman point out that with investment in slaves came the desire to maximize efficiency, with\u00a0transference and worth becoming “routinized and predictable.” (B&R 12) Reading\u00a0Slavery’s\u00a0Capitalism\u00a0<\/em>makes clear that capitalism in America, and indeed the world, was owned by the issue of slavery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Slavery’s Capitalism, a\u00a0hot-off-the-presses tome edited by Harvard’s Sven\u00a0Beckert and Brown’s Seth Rockman, is a\u00a0compilation of\u00a0historical\u00a0essays dedicated to the nineteenth-century emergence of America as an economic power; one that, the\u00a0authors\u00a0argue, 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":169,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions\/169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}