One of the most interesting scholarly developments in historical circles over the course of the last few years has been the unanticipated rise of the field known as the “new history of American capitalism.”Footnote ¹ Although most devotees of this new field are not formally trained in economics – indeed, some demonstrate little familiarity with the standard methods informing the discipline – the rise of the field on balance has been salutary for the traditional field to which it is most closely related: economic history. For decades economic history qua field had been shrinking, particularly in history departments, but also in departments of economics, as historians jumped on the cultural bandwagon or set sail with Atlantic history, and economists moved toward theory, models, and abstraction and away from messy empirics and fussy data, especially from the deep recesses of the past (often defined as anything prior to the last quarter). And so, academic scribblers – including this one, alas – anticipating the demise of economic history, were busy penning ex ante epitaphs and memorials to the field, as the remaining practitioners became grayer and longer in the tooth.Footnote ²

Then, everything changed, mostly, but not solely, because of the Great Recession and certain movements, expressions, and careers it triggered or launched – Occupy Wall Street, anti-1% sentiment, Elizabeth Warren, whatever. To be sure, there was also a “prehistory” to the new history of American capitalism and other reasons for it. The relative decline of cultural history, for example, was not irrelevant to the new history of American capitalism's rise. With said decline, a certain amount of scholarly room became available, particularly as once-prominent historical fads such as po-mo strains of cultural history became exhausted, their energy sapped, their creativity largely played out. Indeed, by the “oughties” even diehard po-mos were becoming curious about the material world again! Scholars working in small, marginalized fields – not just economic history, but business history, labor history, the history of technology, even political history – saw an opportunity and did their best to take it. But that said, it was mainly the Great Recession and its attendants that (for a variety of reasons) got people (including historians) interested in thinking about economic history again, albeit often under the guise of capitalism.Footnote ³

Some did so because they believed (like Ben Bernancke and Barry Eichengreen) that there really were insights to be gained from studying earlier periods of profound economic stress, whether the 1930s, the 1890s, the 1870s, or even the late 1830s or 1780s. Paralleling and in some cases overlapping with this group were those who, while acknowledging that recent problems may have been precipitated by subprime mortgages, shadow banking, growing inequality, regulation, etc., believed that the fundamental problems we faced were rooted in the economic and political systems – the political economy, as it were – associated with capitalism, as it developed in the United States. Most of these folk believed that said development was gradual, uneven, and violent. Few would agree with Carl Degler, who claimed long ago in Out of Our Past that “capitalism came in the first ships,” and virtually none believed that capitalism was natural, much less inherent, to humankind, but, rather, a historically, spatially, and culturally specific approach to perceiving, organizing, and regulating/policing human economic relations.Footnote ⁴ And, truth be told, most were at best ambivalent about capitalism, conceding its dynamism and growth-generating capacity, but decrying the exploitation and inequality associated therewith and arguably inherent in any and all forms of this regime.

For reasons we shall address later, mainstream economic historians, by and large, have not taken kindly to the emergence of the “new history of American capitalism,” much less to its growing popularity as the “herd of independent minds” – to employ Harold Rosenberg's wicked construction – followed the talented first cohort down what might just as wickedly be called, with apologies to Chairman Mao, the capitalist road.Footnote ⁵ But geezers, myself included, need to be more indulgent, for the new historians of American capitalism, despite certain flaws and problems in their work and MOs, have at once raised important questions and given us fresh insights into American economic history, while at the same time energizing and bringing new audiences to the field.

In the catechism of the new history of American capitalism (hereinafter NHAC), slavery is increasingly coming to constitute Exhibit A.Footnote ⁶ Why? Different scholars will answer this question in different ways, but to me it is the question of power, or, more specifically, the power asymmetries built into every dimension of slavery that stands out. For despite differences in methods employed, and in subjects and periods studied, scholars associated with this intellectual project are vitally concerned with, if not fixated on, questions of power, economic and political – “who rides whom and how,” as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese famously put it.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, one of the principal plaints of many economic historians is that standard economic theory, formal methods, and quantitative data get short shrift in the NHAC playbook, as practitioners soft-pedal markets and market processes, and instead privilege narratives of domination and coercion, particularly when underpinned and reinforced by the capitalist state.

In other words, market forces are viewed almost as epiphenomena, resting atop and overwhelmingly dependent upon various forms and articulations of extra-economic compulsion condoned and often codified by what Marx derisively labeled “the committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” and what we would call the government of capitalist state(s). And nowhere – in the American context at least – is the relationship between capitalism and power/coercion more egregious and execrable than in the institution of slavery, which fact, NHAC-ers believe, has nonetheless been elided, even erased, in many triumphalist accounts of our economic history. That the focus on slavery has its political usages today is not coincidental to, but constitutive of, the NHAC-er agenda, which to paraphrase Marx in Theses on Feuerbach (1845), is not merely to interpret the world, but to change it.

Slavery's Capitalism can be read – at least on one level – as an attempt to do just that. It is, let me hasten to add, much more than that, however. Indeed, the volume's subtitle signals one of the main goals its editors and almost all of its authors have in mind, namely to offer nothing less than a “New History of American Economic Development.” In this new history, slavery is central not only to said development in both the South and the North, but also more broadly to the rough, violent – and in the view of the editors and most of the contributors – scabrous emergence of capitalism more broadly in the early modern Atlantic world. Without slavery, in other words, the entire history of the western hemisphere, indeed, the Western world, would look much different, nowhere more so than in the United States, wherein, contrary to conventional notions, a great deal of “enterprise” early on was hardly “free,” and virtually no aspect of the economy – neither entrepreneurship, nor finance, nor technological change, nor even management and accounting practices as they evolved in the US – is explicable without slavery. To these points, too, editors Sven Beckert and Seth Rothman and the fourteen talented authors of individual essays in Slavery's Capitalism adhere, albeit to varying degrees.

Beckert and Rothman set things up nicely with a lengthy, contextualizing introduction. In this clear, brisk, and assertive piece, the context for the volume as well as the principal articles of faith and truth claims informing the NHAC are laid out, and the fourteen individual essays summarized and positioned in the NHAC narrative. Some will find that the editors’ clarity, briskness, and assertiveness bleed over into immodesty – even a bit of bluster at times – but I for one appreciate the boldness of their prose, which renders the validation/falsification process easier. Regarding these points about style and tone, here, for example, is how the volume begins:

There is a lot to unpack here, as they say, for there is considerable disagreement regarding a number of the above points, particularly among my brethren in economic history. That the first subheading in the introduction is entitled “The Rediscovery of Slavery” is worth noting as well, for many scholars who have been studying slavery for years might find themselves asking, “Rediscovery by whom?” About these matters, more anon. First, the contents of the book.

Slavery's Capitalism is divided into four parts of three or four chapters each. Part I, entitled “Plantation Technologies,” comprises an essay on the “political economy” of slave labor by Edward E. Baptist, author of the high-profile (and controversial) 2014 study The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism; a second essay by Caitlin Rosenthal on planters’ managerial and accounting practices and what such practices can tell us about both slavery and planters’ mentalités; and a third by Daniel B. Rood on the intricate – and in his view hitherto little-known – connections between the slave economies of Virginia and Brazil and the early evolution of the McCormick reaper.

The four essays in Part II all deal in one way or another with slavery and finance. Three are close complements: Bonnie Martin's on the broad, even pervasive, role played by the mortgaging of slaves in local credit networks throughout the South; Joshua D. Rothman's on the highly speculatory economic environment on the Mississippi cotton frontier during the 1830s and the central role of speculation and speculators in the region in precipitating the Panic of 1837; and Kathryn Boodry's case of famed financier August Belmont, which is designed both to illustrate the transatlantic financial ties that “wove together an Atlantic cotton kingdom” (165) and to point out that transatlantic investments in slaves and the plantation economy often proved stepping-stones for financial houses in their moves into other lucrative investment opportunities.

The other piece in this section, by Daina Ramey Berry, stands apart. In this exceptional essay Ramey sensitively and soberly explores both the process by which slaves were commodified – not only during their natural lives, but also prior to conception and after their deaths – and the brave and often heartrending ways in which the enslaved adjusted to such commodification. New history of American capitalism, old history of American capitalism – Berry's piece stands out.

The three essays in Part III (“Networks of Interest and the North”) fit together well, and serve to underscore one of the major points stressed throughout Slavery's Capitalism, viz. that, despite its geographic concentration in the southern part of the United States, slavery should not be construed as a “southern” phenomenon, nor even in national terms, but rather as an expression – a pernicious one at that – of transatlantic capitalism. Although each author in Part III – Eric Kimball, Stephen Chambers, and Calvin Schermerhorn – focusses on a different dimension of the slavery/slave trade nexus, taken together their essays demonstrate that no aspect of said nexus – neither the origins nor the operations, financing, and effects – can be interpreted, much less understood, unless embedded in a transatlantic context.

Part IV, organized under the capacious heading “National Institutions and Natural Boundaries,” is rather more a miscellany than a tightly focussed unit, but an interesting section nonetheless. In the first essay in this section, Craig Steven Wilder, author of a well-received 2013 book on the links between slavery and America's early universities, zeroes in on the place of slavery in Catholic colleges in the Revolutionary era. This essay is followed by a very different kind of piece by Andrew Shankman, wherein the author looks closely at the evolving ideas regarding political economy held by Mathew Carey (1760–1839), the famous Irish-born, Philadelphia-based publisher. Focussing mainly on the period between about 1814 and the early 1820s, Shankman argues that it was during this period that Carey developed and promoted ideas that later came to form the core of the Whig agenda – protective tariffs, support for both the Second Bank of the US and internal improvements – while at the same time laying out relatively systematic arguments linking this developmentalist program with slavery. Indeed, according to Shankman, Carey believed that capitalist expansion in the US – increased commerce, the rise of manufacturing, and the like – was unlikely, if not impossible, without “a dynamic and expanding American slavery” (244).

The last essay in this section – by John Majewski – is somewhat of an outlier in Slavery's Capitalism. Majewski, like this reviewer, is rather more an economic historian than a historian of American capitalism per se. This point is important to keep in mind in positioning and interpreting Majewski's contribution, the only one in the collection that employs quantitative data systemically, includes tables, and utilizes linear regressions. As important, he also employs some counterfactual thinking – one hallmark of the “new” economic history – by first conjuring up, then analyzing, a hypothetical regional entity he calls the Limestone South.

Majewski constructs this entity – essentially the Bluegrass region of Kentucky, the Nashville basin of Tennessee, and the Shenandoah valley of Virginia – in his quest to answer the question “why did northerners oppose the expansion of slavery?” The Limestone South, like the most fertile parts of the North, was characterized by extremely fertile alfisols that were conducive to high-productivity agriculture, conducted on the basis of continuous cropping rather than shifting cultivation (the latter dominated in most other parts of the antebellum South). Although slaves – and large plantations – were present in the Limestone South, the area's agricultural sector was diverse, and the Limestone South was more densely settled than other parts of the South, supported more urban centers, and was home to a sizable commercial sector, and a reasonable number of manufacturing sites. In many ways, it resembled the developing Mid-west, nowhere more so than Ohio.

But, alas, not in all ways, and there's the rub. Even in this counterfactual, make-believe part of the South – an area constructed to look as much like the North as possible – differences remained. In Majewski's view – and here he follows Gavin Wright's richly suggestive work – these differences were mainly due to the fact that more than a quarter of the population of the Limestone South was enslaved, while the population in the Mid-west was free.Footnote ⁸

How so? Because the existence of slavery and the social structure it sustained imposed stark limits on public education in the region, and down the line on a range of phenomena related thereto, most notably innovation, upward mobility, long-term growth, and democracy. Such concomitants of slavery – even more apparent in the South that actually existed in the antebellum period – were sensed, intuited, and feared by northerners, most of whom had no problem with slavery where it was already ensconced. But northerners increasingly resisted its expansion because they feared it would impede the democratic development of the nation and the right to rise of “ordinary white families” (298), the heart of the Republican critique of slavery. With this fine essay, Slavery's Capitalism ends on a high note indeed.

With Majewski's high note duly noted, let us move on, as a coda of sorts, from the Republican critique of slavery to this reviewer's critique of Slavery's Capitalism. First things first: let me be clear straight away that this collection is in many ways quite good: smart, provocative, well-written essays, and nary a dud in the lot. This said, Slavery's Capitalism is marked – indeed, marred – by several problems that prevented the collection from being better still. It is to such problems that we shall now turn. Several critical strategies are possible in this regard, but here we shall focus on matters relating to rhetoric, modes of argumentation, the question of willful or unintentional misrepresentations, and scholarly comity.

Regarding matters rhetorical: if, for example, one were to take Sven Beckert and Seth Rothman at face value in their sometimes breathless introduction, one would think that the findings in Slavery's Capitalism, taken together, are revolutionary in their implications for American economic history, akin, to paraphrase Thomas Paine, to beginning the story anew. This is simply not true. Although almost all economic historians would take issue with Edward Baptist's argument regarding the causes of increasing productivity in cotton agriculture, few would be surprised, much less shocked, by most of the other empirical findings in Slavery's Capitalism.Footnote ⁹ Similarly, the linkage of slavery and capitalism is garden-variety stuff to American economic historians, most of whom have been making this link for roughly half a century now. To be sure, Slavery's Capitalism, to its credit, legitimately calls attention to the relationship between “southern” slavery and both the North and other parts of the Atlantic world, which relationship has sometimes been elided or underplayed. However, whether slavery was “indispensable to the economic development of the United States” (1), as the editors claim, or, more likely, relevant to the same, remains open to debate, which the editors themselves, backtracking a bit, rather sheepishly admit a few pages into their book, conceding that the link between “the plantation and the factory” is “more easily asserted than substantiated” (3). Indeed.

Substantiating the claim of indispensability may be difficult because the claim just isn't true, or maybe because the methods employed in Slavery's Capitalism are inadequate to the task. Both of these possibilities may be true, but the methods employed, by and large, don't clarify things at all. But for Majewski's essay, none of the other pieces in Slavery's Capitalism tries to test a hypothesis relevant to this question, but proceeds in standard historical fashion, which is to say via recourse to scattered sources, anecdotes, and cherry-picked cases, and to what might be described as “new and improved,” twenty-first-century versions of authorial Verstehen, which together serve to mask – only somewhat – the confirmation biases, post hoc arguments, and spurious instances of conflation of correlation and causation that are interspersed in the collection. For the record, let me state again that there is much that is meritorious about these essays: they just don't get us very far in trying to prove the claim that slavery was indispensable to American economic development.

The validity of said claim is rendered more difficult to prove because neither the editors nor the individual authors ever tell us precisely what they mean by capitalism, much less agree on a definition. Most of the contributors seem not to like capitalism very much, but it would have been useful for readers and reviewers alike had they signaled more precisely what it was they were in fact talking about. As the book reads, essences, institutions, practices, behaviors, mindsets, and specific individuals all seem to be involved, but in unspecified ways. Granted, defining capitalism is tough and for some purposes perhaps unnecessary. But in a book entitled Slavery's Capitalism, it would be nice to know what slavery's capitalism was.Footnote ¹⁰

After all, there are counterexamples. In the two-volume Cambridge History of Capitalism, published to considerable acclaim in 2014, editors Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson at least try to lay out four “elements” common to all of the variants of capitalism covered in their massive work: (1) private property rights, (2) contracts enforceable by third parties, (3) markets with responsive prices, and (4) supportive governments.Footnote ¹¹ Such “elements” may not be to everyone's liking – clearly, Marxist writers of various stripes would privilege other considerations – but we know where the Cambridge volumes are positioned. With Slavery's Capitalism, this is not the case. One assumes that the editors and most of the authors of Slavery's Capitalism are coming from one or another critical political-economy position, but which one is difficult, if not impossible, to tell.

This would not be the case had the editors and authors engaged more directly with work written before they started scribbling, a point also made by Scott R. Nelson in an important assessment of the NHAC movement.Footnote ¹² And here I do not just mean theoretical work on the history of capitalism – the huge internal literatures in the Marxist and marxisant traditions, most notably – but the equally large empirical literatures by historians and economists writing about capitalism and slavery within the context of the United States. Since the mid-1950s, “new” economic historians have been wrestling with questions concerned with slavery and capitalism, and the relationship between slavery and capitalism became central to the entire “new” economic history project beginning in the late 1960s and remained so until the early 1990s. But this seems like ancient history – so yesterday – to many devotees of the NHAC.

And American historians, likewise, were wrestling with similar issues at the same time. Not only Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese either, but also their students, as well as dozens of other scholars, who came at such issues from a variety of points of view. Here, we can start with names such as Hal Woodman, Jim Oakes, Allan Kulikoff, Lorena Walsh, John McCusker, Russ Menard, Drew McCoy, Laurence Shore, Barbara Fields, Joseph Reidy, Steven Hahn, Rachel Klein, Joyce Chaplin, Lacy Ford, Robin Blackburn, Shearer Davis Bowman, etc. For my part, I wrote an entire book in 1989 wherein I dealt directly with the relationship between slavery and capitalism, and, in so doing, dealt explicitly with matters regarding the definition of capitalism, among other concerns.Footnote ¹³ Now Beckert for one knows all of this. He has previously acknowledged some of the scholars mentioned above – those operating in what he sees as the political-economy tradition – as “distinguished antecedents.”Footnote ¹⁴ But in Slavery's Capitalism such acknowledgment is nowhere to be found, lost perhaps in the frisson of excitement that the NHAC initiative has evoked.

All of which brings me to my final points, involving misrepresentation and scholarly comity. As the paragraphs above suggest, neither Slavery's Capitalism specifically nor the NHAC more generally accurately captures and conveys economists’ and historians’ engagement with the questions treated in Slavery's Capitalism and the issues of concern to new historians of American capitalism. The reason why is unclear, but one intriguing possibility is suggested by Harold Bloom's famous, albeit controversial, argument in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and his companion study A Map of Misreading (1975), wherein Bloom posits that succeeding generations of writers – he is referring to poets specifically – intentionally misread or neglect previous, precursor writers in order to create interpretive and imaginative space for themselves, to suggest greater originality than is warranted, to try to ensure survival over time, etc.Footnote ¹⁵

Bloom calls such “strong misreading” misprision, appropriating the term from Shakespeare's Sonnet 87.Footnote ¹⁶ Although Bloom breaks down misprision into six different categories (“revisionary ratios,” in his arcane terminology), it will suffice here to suggest that at least some of these talented new historians of American capitalism may have devised or otherwise employed strategies of misprision – “strong misreadings” and misrememberings of what and who came before – in order not to feel, even to bear, the “exhaustions of being … latecomer[s]” to the slavery and capitalism business.Footnote ¹⁷ If so, it is a pity, for it was unnecessary in a collection so strong.