Capitalism and Slavery

Was slavery capitalist? For today’s historians the question can evoke musty, long-winded debates from the 1970s. Yet in the last year three books by prominent scholars have reopened the question, catching the attention of many outside the historical profession. While they differ in many respects, these books agree that slavery was central to nineteenth-century capitalism and that it enabled the industrialization of Britain and the United States. Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams graphically depicts what Johnson calls the “full throttle capitalism” of the cotton frontier. Edward Baptist’s The Half That Has Never Been Told tells “the making of American capitalism” from the point of view of the slaves who made it. Finally, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton firmly situates American slavery in the context of capitalism’s global expansion at the gunpoint of an imperial British state. This new development in the historiography of slavery coincides with revived academic interest in capitalism in the wake of the recent financial crisis. Indeed these three authors are all associated with a burgeoning field in American history departments—“the history of capitalism”—in which slavery has become something of a signature topic. It is therefore strange that none of them seem interested in asking what capitalism is. Even Beckert’s field-defining essay neglected to