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In 1850, America's plantation economy reigned supreme. U.S. cotton
dominated world markets, and American rice, sugarcane, and tobacco
grew throughout a vast farming empire that stretched from Maryland
to Texas. Four million enslaved African Americans toiled the
fields, producing global commodities that enriched the most
powerful class of slaveholders the world had ever known. But fifty
years later-after emancipation demolished the plantation-labor
system, Asian competition flooded world markets with cheap raw
materials, and free trade eliminated protected markets-America's
plantations lay in ruins. Plantation Kingdom traces the rise and
fall of America's plantation economy. Written by four renowned
historians, the book demonstrates how an international capitalist
system rose out of slave labor, indentured servitude, and the mass
production of agricultural commodities for world markets. Vast
estates continued to exist after emancipation, but tenancy and
sharecropping replaced slavery's work gangs across most of the
plantation world. Poverty and forced labor haunted the region well
into the twentieth century. The book explores the importance of
slavery to the Old South, the astounding profitability of
plantation agriculture, and the legacy of emancipation. It also
examines the place of American producers in world markets and
considers the impact of globalization and international competition
150 years ago. Written for scholars and students alike, Plantation
Kingdom is an accessible and fascinating study.
In 1850, America's plantation economy reigned supreme. U.S. cotton
dominated world markets, and American rice, sugarcane, and tobacco
grew throughout a vast farming empire that stretched from Maryland
to Texas. Four million enslaved African Americans toiled the
fields, producing global commodities that enriched the most
powerful class of slaveholders the world had ever known. But fifty
years later-after emancipation demolished the plantation-labor
system, Asian competition flooded world markets with cheap raw
materials, and free trade eliminated protected markets-America's
plantations lay in ruins. Plantation Kingdom traces the rise and
fall of America's plantation economy. Written by four renowned
historians, the book demonstrates how an international capitalist
system rose out of slave labor, indentured servitude, and the mass
production of agricultural commodities for world markets. Vast
estates continued to exist after emancipation, but tenancy and
sharecropping replaced slavery's work gangs across most of the
plantation world. Poverty and forced labor haunted the region well
into the twentieth century. The book explores the importance of
slavery to the Old South, the astounding profitability of
plantation agriculture, and the legacy of emancipation. It also
examines the place of American producers in world markets and
considers the impact of globalization and international competition
150 years ago. Written for scholars and students alike, Plantation
Kingdom is an accessible and fascinating study.
WINNER OF THE 2015 BANCROFT PRIZE WINNER OF THE 2015 PHILIP TAFT
PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE 2015 PULITZER PRIZE FOR HISTORY SHORTLISTED
FOR THE 2015 CUNDHILL PRIZE IN HISTORICAL LITERATURE Economist
BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015 'Knowledgeable and stunning' Orhan Pamuk 'A
masterpiece of the historian's craft' The Nation For about 900
years, from 1000 to 1900, cotton was the world's most important
manufacturing industry. It remains a vast business - if all the
cotton bales produced in 2013 had been stacked on top of each other
they would have made a somewhat unstable tower 40,000 miles high.
Sven Beckert's superb new book is a history of the overwhelming
role played by cotton in dictating the shape of our world. It is
both a gripping narrative and a brilliant case history of how the
world works.
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.
The United States has long epitomized capitalism. From its
enterprising shopkeepers, wildcat banks, violent slave plantations,
and raucous commodities trade to its world-spanning multinationals,
its massive factories, and the centripetal power of New York in the
world of finance, America has shaped political economy for two
centuries and more. But an understanding of "capitalism" is as
elusive as it is urgent. What does it mean to make capitalism a
subject of historical inquiry? What is its potential across
multiple disciplines, alongside different methodologies, and in a
range of geographic and chronological settings? And how does a
focus on capitalism change our understanding of American history?
American Capitalism collects cutting-edge research from prominent
scholars, sampling the latest work in the field. Rather than a
monolithic perspective, these broad-minded and rigorous essays
venture new angles on finance and debt, women's rights, slavery and
political economy, labor, and regulation, among other topics.
Together, the essays suggest emerging themes in the field: a
fascination with capitalism as it is made by public authority, how
it is experienced in the detail of daily life, how it spreads
across the globe, and how it can be reconceptualized as a discrete
and quantified object. A major statement for a wide-open field,
this book demonstrates the breadth and scope of the work the
history of capitalism can provoke.
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.
The United States has long epitomized capitalism. From its
enterprising shopkeepers, wildcat banks, violent slave plantations,
huge industrial working class, and raucous commodities trade to its
world-spanning multinationals, its massive factories, and the
centripetal power of New York in the world of finance, America has
come to symbolize capitalism for two centuries and more. But an
understanding of the history of American capitalism is as elusive
as it is urgent. What does it mean to make capitalism a subject of
historical inquiry? What is its potential across multiple
disciplines, alongside different methodologies, and in a range of
geographic and chronological settings? And how does a focus on
capitalism change our understanding of American history? American
Capitalism presents a sampling of cutting-edge research from
prominent scholars. These broad-minded and rigorous essays venture
new angles on finance, debt, and credit; women's rights; slavery
and political economy; the racialization of capitalism; labor
beyond industrial wage workers; and the production of knowledge,
including the idea of the economy, among other topics. Together,
the essays suggest emerging themes in the field: a fascination with
capitalism as it is made by political authority, how it is claimed
and contested by participants, how it spreads across the globe, and
how it can be reconceptualized without being universalized. A major
statement for a wide-open field, this book demonstrates the breadth
and scope of the work that the history of capitalism can provoke.
Slavery and the University is the first edited collection of
scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of
this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic
contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars,
activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies
of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the
presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of
the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use
of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies
of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the
post-Civil War era to the present day. The collection features
broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the
regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case
studies of slavery's influence on specific institutions, such as
Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory
University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of
Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory
University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent
findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting
developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of
thinking about racial diversity in the history and current
practices of higher education.
In recent years historians in many different parts of the world
have sought to transnationalize and globalize their perspectives on
the past. Despite all these efforts to gain new global historical
visions, however, the debates surrounding this movement have
remained rather provincial in scope. Global History, Globally
addresses this lacuna by surveying the state of global history in
different world regions. Divided into three distinct but tightly
interweaved sections, the book's chapters provide regional surveys
of the practice of global history on all continents, review some of
the research in four core fields of global history and consider a
number of problems that global historians have contended with in
their work. The authors hail from various world regions and are
themselves leading global historians. Collectively, they provide an
unprecedented survey of what today is the most dynamic field in the
discipline of history. As one of the first books to systematically
discuss the international dimensions of global historical
scholarship and address a wealth of questions emanating from them,
Global History, Globally is a must-read book for all students and
scholars of global history.
Seeking to historicize the 2007-2009 Great Recession, this volume
of essays situates the current economic crisis and its impact on
workers in the context of previous abrupt shifts in the modern-day
capitalist marketplace. Contributors use examples from
industrialized North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and
Australia to demonstrate how workers and states have responded to
those shifts and to their disempowering effects on labor. Since the
Industrial Revolution, contributors argue, factors such as race,
sex, and state intervention have mediated both the effect of
economic depressions on workers' lives and workers' responses to
those depressions. Contributors also posit a varying dynamic
between political upheaval and economic crises, and between workers
and the welfare state. The volume ends with an examination of
today's "Great Recession": its historical distinctiveness, its
connection to neoliberalism, and its attendant expressions of
worker status and agency around the world. A sobering conclusion
lays out a likely future for workers--one not far removed from the
instability and privation of the nineteenth century. The essays in
this volume offer up no easy solutions to the challenges facing
today's workers. Nevertheless, they make clear that cogent
historical thinking is crucial to understanding those challenges,
and they push us toward a rethinking of the relationship between
capital and labor, the waged and unwaged, and the employed and
jobless. Contributors are Sven Beckert, Sean Cadigan, Leon Fink,
Alvin Finkel, Wendy Goldman, Gaetan Heroux, Joseph A. McCartin,
David Montgomery, Edward Montgomery, Scott Reynolds Nelson, Melanie
Nolan, Bryan D. Palmer, Joan Sangster, Judith Stein, Hilary
Wainright, and Lu Zhang.
Slavery and the University is the first edited collection of
scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of
this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic
contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars,
activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies
of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the
presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of
the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use
of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies
of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the
post-Civil War era to the present day. The collection features
broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the
regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case
studies of slavery's influence on specific institutions, such as
Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory
University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of
Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory
University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent
findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting
developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of
thinking about racial diversity in the history and current
practices of higher education.
Tracing the shifting fortunes and changing character of New York City's economic elite over half a century, Sven Beckert brings to light a neglected--and critical--chapter in the social history of the U.S.: the rise of an American bourgeoisie. The Monied Metropolis is the first comprehensive history of New York's economic elite, the most powerful group in nineteenth-century America. Beckert explains how a small and diverse group of New Yorkers came to wield unprecedented economic, social, and political power from 1850 to the turn of the twentieth century. He reveals the central role of the Civil War in realigning New York's economic elite, and how the New York bourgeoisie reoriented its ideology during Reconstruction, abandoning the free labor views of the antebellum years for laissez-faire liberalism. Sven Beckert is the Dunwalke Associate at Harvard University. He is the recipient of several honors and fellowships, including the Aby Warburg Foundation prize for academic excellence, a MacArthur Dissertation Fellowship and a Andrew W. Mellon fellowship. This is his first book.
Seeking to historicize the 2007-2009 Great Recession, this volume
of essays situates the current economic crisis and its impact on
workers in the context of previous abrupt shifts in the modern-day
capitalist marketplace. Contributors use examples from
industrialized North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and
Australia to demonstrate how workers and states have responded to
those shifts and to their disempowering effects on labor. Since the
Industrial Revolution, contributors argue, factors such as race,
sex, and state intervention have mediated both the effect of
economic depressions on workers' lives and workers' responses to
those depressions. Contributors also posit a varying dynamic
between political upheaval and economic crises, and between workers
and the welfare state. The volume ends with an examination of
today's "Great Recession": its historical distinctiveness, its
connection to neoliberalism, and its attendant expressions of
worker status and agency around the world. A sobering conclusion
lays out a likely future for workers--one not far removed from the
instability and privation of the nineteenth century. The essays in
this volume offer up no easy solutions to the challenges facing
today's workers. Nevertheless, they make clear that cogent
historical thinking is crucial to understanding those challenges,
and they push us toward a rethinking of the relationship between
capital and labor, the waged and unwaged, and the employed and
jobless. Contributors are Sven Beckert, Sean Cadigan, Leon Fink,
Alvin Finkel, Wendy Goldman, Gaetan Heroux, Joseph A. McCartin,
David Montgomery, Edward Montgomery, Scott Reynolds Nelson, Melanie
Nolan, Bryan D. Palmer, Joan Sangster, Judith Stein, Hilary
Wainright, and Lu Zhang.
In recent years historians in many different parts of the world
have sought to transnationalize and globalize their perspectives on
the past. Despite all these efforts to gain new global historical
visions, however, the debates surrounding this movement have
remained rather provincial in scope. Global History, Globally
addresses this lacuna by surveying the state of global history in
different world regions. Divided into three distinct but tightly
interweaved sections, the book's chapters provide regional surveys
of the practice of global history on all continents, review some of
the research in four core fields of global history and consider a
number of problems that global historians have contended with in
their work. The authors hail from various world regions and are
themselves leading global historians. Collectively, they provide an
unprecedented survey of what today is the most dynamic field in the
discipline of history. As one of the first books to systematically
discuss the international dimensions of global historical
scholarship and address a wealth of questions emanating from them,
Global History, Globally is a must-read book for all students and
scholars of global history.
Tracing the shifting fortunes and changing character of New York City's economic elite over half a century, Sven Beckert brings to light a neglected--and critical--chapter in the social history of the U.S.: the rise of an American bourgeoisie. The Monied Metropolis is the first comprehensive history of New York's economic elite, the most powerful group in nineteenth-century America. Beckert explains how a small and diverse group of New Yorkers came to wield unprecedented economic, social, and political power from 1850 to the turn of the twentieth century. He reveals the central role of the Civil War in realigning New York's economic elite, and how the New York bourgeoisie reoriented its ideology during Reconstruction, abandoning the free labor views of the antebellum years for laissez-faire liberalism. Sven Beckert is the Dunwalke Associate at Harvard University. He is the recipient of several honors and fellowships, including the Aby Warburg Foundation prize for academic excellence, a MacArthur Dissertation Fellowship and a Andrew W. Mellon fellowship. This is his first book.
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