Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, editors. Slavery’s Capitalism

As historians consider calls to push their narratives onto wider chronological, geographical, and thematic stages, two historical systems that fit this bill quite neatly are slavery and capitalism. After all, each appears in a wide range of societies, spanning both centuries and oceans with ease. And although both slavery and capitalism have manifested themselves in quite different varieties, the presence of familiar markers—social death and coerced labor in the former and private property and market dynamics in the latter—offer historians the ability to stretch their analytical scope. Until recently, however, the vast number of studies examining these constructed systems have worked in parallel, rather than in tandem. This is in part due to the professional gaps between economic and social historians and in part the fruits of recent specialization within historical fields, reinforced by increasingly divergent questions asked by historians of race and those of capitalism. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, as the editors of Slavery’s Capitalism and conveners of an eponymous 2011 conference, offer a welcome remedy to this tendency by sampling a growing scholarly movement that seeks to trace the developments of slavery and capitalism as mutually interactive. Rather than taking parallel paths or, as past generations of Americanists have done, assuming distinct and inevitable phases in the country’s economic development, the editors claim that contingent and mutually reinforcing institution building created a pivotal moment in the history of the United States. “Slavery’s history, and thus slavery’s capitalism,” they argue, “rested on institutional arrangements, the outcome of political struggles, and bureaucratic, administrative, legal and infrastructural capacities that were defined, negotiated, and constructed within national political spaces” (12). They are hardly the first to view antebellum development from this perspective—historians from different sides of the fence such as Gavin Wright and James Oakes contributed to the question of “slavery’s capitalism” long before the publication of this volume—but the editors’ ability to join together fourteen essays that move this project forward is impressive and quite welcome for inspiring future projects. Although the chronological and geographical scope of this book appears to be limited at first glance, the rich analytical insights within will both provoke and inspire historians across many fields.

Capitalism · Economic history · Institution · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies