Calvin Schermerhorn's The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism is really, despite its ambitious title, about one aspect of the business of slavery: the interstate slave trade. Schermerhorn focuses on slave traders and their firms to illustrate the ways that finance and entrepreneurship contributed to the expansion of slavery in the nineteenth-century United States. By using a series of detailed case studies of slave-trading firms and their trading and credit networks, the book departs from the wide-ranging approach that characterizes much other recent work on the connections between slavery and capitalism, such as Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014). Here the focus is on explaining how specific decisions and adaptations of individual slavers to changing conditions helped create an American empire of slavery.

Schermerhorn argues that individual and firm-level entrepreneurship and the process of “creative destruction” explain more of the interstate slave trade, and the concurrent rise of American capitalism, than has previously been acknowledged. The focus of the book is very much the slave traders themselves, but the author is careful to emphasize that the actions of these traders had a terrible human cost, paid by the enslaved. The Business of Slavery forms an excellent counterpart to Damian Alan Pargas's 2014 study, Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South, which seeks to explain the domestic slave trade from the perspective of the enslaved people who tried to survive their encounters with it.

The Business of Slavery makes extensive use of existing scholarship on the domestic slave trade, imperialist expansion into the South and West, and “slavery's capitalism” in order to contextualize the activities of slave trading firms. Readers versed in this literature will encounter familiar figures and arguments, including Baptist's analysis of the sexual exploitation wrought by “one-eyed men” like Isaac Franklin and Walter Johnson's narrative of the imperialism of the U.S. government in the interests of slaveholders (Baptist, American Historical Review [Dec. 2001]; Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom [2013]). Drawing on such a large body of scholarship allows Schermerhorn to highlight how his own research into the firms and the mechanics of their internal operations and pragmatic decision-making enriches and deepens our understanding of this period. He effectively demonstrates how these firms were central to the prosperity and expansion of the slave system.

The case study and narrative approach draws the reader into the seedy world of the slave trade and helps to “personalize seemingly impersonal forces”—often a major issue with historical work on the nexus of capitalism and slavery (p. 5). Schermerhorn writes with flair, giving readers a sense of the physical spaces that slave traders occupied, though some of his rhetorical flourishes can be jarring; for example, he refers to Austin Woolfolk's fledgling slave-trading business as a “startup” (p. 37). Woolfolk's rise to become one of the largest slavers in the country is the background to Schermerhorn's excellent discussion of how aggressive traders like Woolfolk accelerated the growth of an “ongoing slave market before it existed” (p. 6). This case study approach serves the topic well when explaining the complex workings of firms and financial institutions, as in chapter 4, covering banking schemes and credit based on human capital. Schermerhorn has a talent for untangling complicated transactions in order to make their significance clear.

In his third chapter, Schermerhorn recounts the devastating migration that John Craig Marsh, a New York dry goods merchant turned sugar planter, wreaks on enslaved New Jerseyites by smuggling them out of a state in the midst of gradual emancipation into the sugar fields of Louisiana. Despite the source material and narrative grace, in this chapter the case study approach struggles to make the stakes clear and to show how this tragic narrative helps explain the rise of capitalism through slavery. Outlining the extent of smuggling and extralegal trading would have helped bring out the tension Schermerhorn finds between the rigidity of written law and the creative destruction of slave trading.

Schermerhorn's clear and vivid accounts of the complex inner workings of the business of slave trading add a dimension that has been missing from the large and growing scholarship on the connections between slavery and capitalism. By providing detailed human accounts of the financial and entrepreneurial activities within the slave trade, the book realizes the author's ambition of grounding the frequently dizzying scope and convolution of existing scholarship in comprehensible and relatable form. The Business of Slavery is an exciting contribution to a maturing scholarly exchange.