Thread by @sethrockman

There is a simpler explanation to why the current slavery/capitalism historiography looks the way it does in terms of the focus on the post-Revolutionary US.

https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1165744354385891329

If you started grad school in the early 1990s, you had to read Gordon Wood's Radicalism of the American Revolution, Joyce Appleby's Capitalism and the New Social Order... books that said post-Rev US economy maximized freedom for pretty much everyone.

You read Eric Williams and Sidney Mintz and you knew there was a compelling story regarding slavery/capitalism in British economic development-- you wondered where there seemed to be so little compelling work on these entanglements for the US.

Really, there were great books conceptualizing the relationship of slavery and capitalism largely in global/Atlantic terms, but very little that got into the nitty-gritty for the post-Rev US (when as you recall from several tweets above, the US economy maximized freedom).

Then you went into the economic history, especially Fogel, Without Consent or Contract and yeah, wow, some pretty compelling evidence about how in certain times and places, carrots proved more effective-- not more ethical, but more effective-- than sticks in extracting labor.

But still, was any of this being incorporated into the mainstream narratives of US history in the wake of Wood's Radicalism of the American Rev? Not really. The only hope was an emerging discussion in the early 1990s about the "Market Revolution."

Charles Sellers' book by that title was a devastating critique of capitalism as an anti-democratic social formation. But the hero, fighting on behalf of democracy, was an Indian-killing slaveholder named Andrew Jackson... so that was ind of confusing.

(kind of confusing, in previous tweet). And then "market revolution" got picked up as a generic term for early-US economic development, minus the politics. But slavery was largely excluded from that literature. The south, we were told, didn't have a market revolution.

So scholars developing their work in the late 1990s and early 2000s tried to resolve all issues by looking for evidence about what actually happened on the ground in the US regarding slavery and capitalism in the post-Rev era.

Because, remember, Eric Williams didn't answer this, Sidney Mintz didn't answer this, Gordon Wood didn't answer this, Robert Fogel only took it so far, Charles Sellers didn't answer this. A big empirical hole in the scholarship on the spillovers and entanglements of slavery/cap.

There was, of course, compelling cultural history, like Roediger's Wages of Whiteness (in debt to Du Bois) that pointed the way, indicating slavery's "value" to the national economy was in the "unmaking" of white labor radicalism (which had Econ value to capitalism certainly).

So then in the early 2000s, something amorphous called "history of capitalism" provides a space for lots of different kinds of scholars to just look and try to describe what they see on the ground happening in economic life.

And those of us focusing on the post-rev US saw wage-earning slaves in Baltimore, Philadelphia banks owning Louisiana plantations, advanced bookkeeping in plantation spaces, southern judges promoting instrumental jurisprudence, remote communities of interest invested in slavery.

New England colleges dependent on slavery for endowments, New York insurance companies issuing policies on slaves' lives, Rhode Island companies making clothing for slaves, a Massachusetts cotton industry using slave-grown cotton to employ 10000s of people in factories.

So what you have is a scholarship in 2019 that yes, is focused on US 1790-1860 largely as an artifact of the historiography that we inherited from the 1990s.

It doesn't mean that 1790-1860 US is the only story for the making of modern capitalism. But it does attest to the fact that most of the established stories of how national independence and political democracy made for a booming national economy had excluded slavery.

And so you've had a bunch of scholars thinking about how to write slavery into the story and what happens if you *don't* take it as a prima facia assumption that slavery had nothing to do with capitalism.

That's where the scholarship is today. It has made an argument about US economic development specifically because of the arguments that the US has made (enabled by generations of historians) about itself and its unrivaled economic freedom. /end

Whoops-- I messed this up: how sticks in certain times and places proved more effective (but not more ethical) than carrots in extracting labor.

I wrote an essay called "The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism"-- originally a 2001 conf paper, published in 2006-- that does a more articulate job of walking through this historiography. /end+1

books.google.de/books?id=K1ztB…