With the publication of this edited volume, scholars now have a comprehensive collective statement of the aims of the “new” history of American capitalism. That history, elaborately represented in recent books by Edward Baptist and Sven Beckert, seeks to rethink American history, and indeed world history, by reinvigorating old debates on the conjunctures between slavery and capitalism.Footnote 1 Slavery’s Capitalism, however, is not about how slavery gave rise to capitalism by furnishing the prior accumulation needed for industrial take off. Nor is it about how slavery sustained nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, while remaining somehow external to it. Instead, this volume places slave labor at the heart of a behemoth capitalist economy on the rise. The project represented by this volume is built upon three pillars: 1) Empirically, the contributors seek to look at the understudied relations between slavery and technological innovation, finance, northern interests, and nation building. 2) Methodologically, the volume brings business history, labor history, and political economy together in ways that have not been done before. 3) Theoretically, the volume departs from “Marxist theorizations that separate slavery and capitalism into antithetical modes of production”, and rejects “neo-liberal certainties regarding the tendencies of markets to maximize freedom” (p. 9). There is much in this history of capitalism that is new, and some that is not new. It says much that goes unsaid, and remains silent on important things that have been said. The sheer scope and ambition of the project is in itself something new to US history.
Parts I and II of the volume cover plantation technology and finance, respectively, and represent the most important intellectual contributions of Slavery’s Capitalism. In powerful, polemical fashion, Edward Baptist’s opening essay lays bare the implications of the new history of capitalism. Global capitalism was born out of slave labor, and swiftly expanded, primarily, through the intensified exploitation of the slave. Slavery was not fully impervious to technological innovation, as some of the more serious critics of the new history of capitalism suggest.Footnote 2 Baptist shows the whip to be a crude but useful technology. It inflicted pain and fear of pain, lengthening the working day and making slaves work faster and faster. The whip and not the factory conveyor belt was the first technology of labor speed-up. Caitlin Rosenthal shows that slaveholders invented scientific management with their ledgers, account books, and rigorous quantifying of slaves’ productivity. Daniel B. Rood reveals the Virginia origins of the McCormick Reaper, proving that the mechanical reaper was not the product of a dynamic, innovative northern capitalism, but of an integrated American capitalism with slavery at its core. Other contributors reveal the integration between slavery and finance, which historians, from Charles Beard to Eugene Genovese, have long seen as opposed to each other. Lured by high rates of return, financiers all over the world, including the Rothschilds, invested in the expansion of slavery. The financialization of slavery happened further at the local and state level. Through insurance policies, even deceased slaves possessed value, proving that, in some cases, capital is literally dead labor. Joshua Rothman’s illuminating essay shows how rampant speculation in land and slaves facilitated the expansion of Mississippi’s slave economy and contributed to the international financial panic of 1837. Indeed, the Mississippi slave economy in 1836 looked a lot like Los Angeles real estate markets prior to the 2008 crisis.
Parts III and IV deal respectively with networks of interests and nation-building ideologies. Eric Kimball shows that colonial New England was little more than an appendage to the Atlantic sugar plantation complex in the West Indies. Calvin Schemerhorn shows that through coastwise shipping, merchants from all parts of the US participated in the profitable trading of thousands of slaves. Stephen Chambers reveals, in an international history, how New Englanders owned Cuban plantations, shipped Cuban products abroad, and lobbied diplomats as far away as Russia to protect those trade interests. Such practices and interconnected interests necessarily shaped economic and political thought. For instance, Andrew Shankman shows that Matthew Carey – nineteenth-century America’s foremost political economist – placed slavery at the heart of his hopes for an “American System” of economic integration and expansion. The US republic could not unify and expand itself without expanding slavery, Carey believed. Albert Brophy shows that legal thinking, reflected in numerous court cases, upheld slavery for reasons of utility. Judges and legal thinkers favored slaveholders’ interests as much due to the economic importance of slavery as due to the traditional need to keep private property sacrosanct. In short, the contributors compellingly prove that slavery was not an economic system “peculiar” to the South. It was the American system. It integrated the American economy and tied the interests and ideals of the American upper classes into those of a unified ruling class.
Slavery’s Capitalism adds empirical depth to the continuing slavery–capitalism debate, especially in its research into finance and technology, yet adds fewer things theoretically and methodologically. Theoretically, the volume renounces Marxist and neoliberal economic theories, which the editors argue viewed slavery and capitalism as antithetical. Though their assumptions on Marx and Marxism are incorrect, their rightful denunciations of neoliberal orthodoxies add an urgent, polemical tone to the book. Indeed, this book, and others in its school, have provoked the neoliberal establishment to rage, a useful indicator of the book’s significance. However, the volume adds no theories of its own. This strategic eschewal of theory offers fresh air for more empirical research, without theoretical baggage. Similar research has indeed been coming out since the publication of this book. Yet, the eschewal may also dissuade scholars of capitalism from further asking serious questions falling under such “theoretical” categories as race, class, relations of production, imperialism – all of which were under-addressed in this volume, but always central to the earlier slavery–capitalism polemics. Methodologically, the volume combines business history, political economy, and labor history. Slavery’s Capitalism is most innovative in its use of business history, in treating the plantation as a business and viewing the slave economy through the perspectives and methods of management. The volume has much political economy as well. The contributors place slavery within the wider frames of American and global commodity production and offer original readings of nineteenth-century economic thought. Labor history, however, is conspicuously absent. Apart from Edward Baptist’s essay, the labor of slaves and slaves’ keen insights into the nature of slavery’s capitalism remain little interrogated in this book.
The omission of labor is the major limitation of this book, for a number of reasons. For instance, to speak of capitalism, or of markets, abstractly, while omitting analyses of labor processes and laborers, is to replicate at least one of the “neoliberal certainties” this book set out to critique. Slave resistance, in particular, received little discussion. Only Daina Ramey Berry discusses slave resistance, and then only in the form of suicide. Thus, the picture of slavery in Slavery’s Capitalism is that of overbearing markets, merchants, managers, machines, and utterly dehumanized slaves, a capitalism without “class struggle”. For sure, this book is not about slave resistance, but about the growth of a monstrous economic system. Yet, to marginalize slave resistance is to marginalize the profound tradition of African American thought that gave rise to the slavery–capitalism debate in the first place. Slave autobiographers and abolitionists wrote at length on the financialization and expansion of slavery, and of slavery’s integration into world markets. Ex-slaves like T. Thomas Fortune and Anna Julia Cooper, as well as later intellectuals like W.E.B. Dubois and C.L.R. James, deeply influenced by traditions of slave resistance and abolitionist thought, wrote explicitly on slavery’s mutual relation with capitalism. They suggested, sometimes explained, most of the arguments the new history of capitalism lays claim to, yet such thinkers are hardly mentioned, hardly cited, in this volume. Though Slavery’s Capitalism should give more credit to the tradition of thought and action from whence it sprang, it nevertheless has done much to expand upon that tradition and bolster some of its assumptions with new research.
