During the nineteenth century, the United States entered the ranks
of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same
time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human
bondage. This was no mere coincidence. Slavery's Capitalism argues
for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in
the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. According to
editors Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, the issue is not whether
slavery itself was or was not capitalist but, rather, the
impossibility of understanding the nation's spectacular pattern of
economic development without situating slavery front and center.
American capitalism-renowned for its celebration of market
competition, private property, and the self-made man-has its
origins in an American slavery predicated on the abhorrent notion
that human beings could be legally owned and compelled to work
under force of violence. Drawing on the expertise of sixteen
scholars who are at the forefront of rewriting the history of
American economic development, Slavery's Capitalism identifies
slavery as the primary force driving key innovations in
entrepreneurship, finance, accounting, management, and political
economy that are too often attributed to the so-called free market.
Approaching the study of slavery as the originating catalyst for
the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism casts new light on
American credit markets, practices of offshore investment, and
understandings of human capital. Rather than seeing slavery as
outside the institutional structures of capitalism, the essayists
recover slavery's importance to the American economic past and
prompt enduring questions about the relationship of market freedom
to human freedom. Contributors: Edward E. Baptist, Sven Beckert,
Daina Ramey Berry, Kathryn Boodry, Alfred L. Brophy, Stephen
Chambers, Eric Kimball, John Majewski, Bonnie Martin, Seth Rockman,
Daniel B. Rood, Caitlin Rosenthal, Joshua D. Rothman, Calvin
Schermerhorn, Andrew Shankman, Craig Steven Wilder.
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