Throughout the slave societies of the Atlantic World, enslaved people earned money and acquired goods and property for themselves despite their bondage, sometimes even accumulating enough cash to purchase themselves or members of their families. But entrepreneurialism never really provided a reliable path to liberation. On the contrary, as Justene Hill Edwards demonstrates in Unfree Markets, slaveholders were far more likely to turn the resourcefulness of enslaved people against them, using it as a tool of exploitation that bolstered their own profits and tightened slavery's grip. “For enslaved people,” Edwards writes, “capitalist enterprise did not equal freedom” (p. 4).
Edwards centers her analysis on the slaves’ economy of South Carolina, where enslaved Africans developed informal trade networks from the earliest years of colonial settlement in the late seventeenth century. Providing much of their own subsistence on a landscape where it could be hard to acquire, the enslaved traded openly in foodstuffs and other goods with white colonists and travelers even beyond Lowcountry rice plantations, and they hired themselves out in Charleston, pushing the boundaries of enslavement and aiming to ameliorate their conditions. Colonial legislators began regulating these activities in the 1680s in response to complaints about slaves dealing in stolen goods, purchasing alcohol, and competing with white provisioners. But there was no serious effort to end the slaves’ economy, mostly because slaveholders looking to hold down costs and keep the enslaved perpetually busy saw it as serving their interests. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was interwoven with how slavery and the more formal colonial economy worked.
In some ways, the broad operational strokes of the slaves’ economy in South Carolina remained remarkably consistent from the colonial period through the era of the Civil War. Enslaved men and women earned money and procured goods by dealing mostly in agricultural products they produced in their own time and by being hired out as skilled and unskilled laborers. Some white Carolinians complained that allowing such activities undercut white workers and undermined white economic prospects and that it encouraged rebelliousness, theft, indiscipline, and a sense of freedom among the enslaved that endangered white supremacy. Local and state lawmakers periodically instituted regulations to control or crack down on the slaves’ economy in the form of enhanced slave patrols, prosecutions and punishments of enslaved people accused of stealing or otherwise breaking the law, and badge and ticket systems that licensed self-hire and trade by the enslaved. Yet the slaves’ economy continued to grow and thrive. That was true in part because enslaved people were enterprising people who would do whatever was necessary to survive, gain some measure of autonomy, and perhaps procure small material pleasures. And it was true because engaging economically with enslaved people as workers, consumers, and trading partners provided tangible benefits for white slaveholders, merchants, and employers that they had no intention of giving up.
However, the details, context, and meaning of the slaves’ economy changed significantly over time. Edwards details how, for example, the instabilities and dislocations wrought by the American Revolution simultaneously provided greater opportunities than ever for the economic enterprises of the enslaved, encouraged their enslavers to increase their reliance on slave hiring that provided flexibility and profit, and magnified the ire and frustration of white workers and craftspeople both toward the enslaved and toward slaveholders who countenanced their economic initiative.
But the core claims of Unfree Markets begin to emerge in earnest as Edwards turns to exploring the implications of the shifting economic axis of South Carolina in the nineteenth century from the Lowcountry rice economy toward the Upcountry cotton economy. As short-staple cotton became a cash crop, it extended the geographic range of slavery in the state and opened commercial agriculture to more white yeomen, which gave enslaved people access to a wider array of goods and to regular dealings with white people across the class spectrum on a vast terrain of farms and plantations and rivers and towns. The enslaved adapted their profit-seeking behaviors accordingly. They became savvier and more skilled, and they developed a mindset as attuned to evolving capitalist values and norms as that of their white trading partners and their enslavers. If moneymaking offered self-interested engagement with markets that brought a bit of material solace and fellowship with other enslaved marketeers, however, its motivations also came from the growing ruthlessness of their enslavers.
As Edwards demonstrates, enslaved people in South Carolina became more entrepreneurial and inventive because antebellum slaveholders saw their agricultural ventures entirely as businesses devoted to cotton production. That demanded squeezing every bit of profit out of the land and out of the laborers who made the crop. Taking greater control over the economic activities of the enslaved and reframing that domination as benevolence was a key strategy for doing so. Slaveholders who preferred to pay as little as possible to provision their workforce with food and clothing could skimp and thereby effectively coerce the enslaved to provide more for themselves. Claiming they offered incentives to work and lessons in capitalist diligence and thrift even as they tracked the independent production of the enslaved in their account books and folded it into their own operations, slaveholders hedged against the risks of their single-minded capital investments in cotton by preying on the aspirations of those they already held in bondage.
Centered on how the enslaved themselves shaped and were shaped by both slavery and capitalism, Unfree Markets also never loses sight of the shifting politics of the slaves’ economy, the ambivalence and divisions it caused among white Carolinians, and the contradictions it presented for white supremacy in a society grounded in slavery and capitalism alike. Ultimately, though, for all of its clear and important contributions to the literature on slavery and capitalism in the United States, the book's most potent question may be a larger and more freighted one about whether capitalism and freedom have any necessary correlation at all.
