Slave Economies
This week I was up in Philadelphia at a wonderful conference to mark the 25th anniversary of the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia. As you can see from the program it was a fantastic gathering.
I use the conference as an opportunity to read two new books that have been on my radar for a little while. The first was Sharon Murphy’s highly acclaimed Banking on Slavery which came out last year. I very much appreciate its framing as asking why southern banks went to such extraordinary (and often financially ruinous) lengths to support slavery. It provokes some important questions about the framing of the history of capitalism. Rather than being concerned about the making of capitalist systems or the profitability of banks, it is interested in how economic life triggered a broad remaking of the history of slavery. In addition to all of the new information it uncovers, and the new story it tells, it has a lot to teach us about how we frame projects.
The second is more recent and it was Seth Rockman’s much-anticpated Plantation Goods. Some ten years ago Stephen Mihm urged us all to “Follow the Money.” Rockman instead tells us to “follow the things.” He offers, as he subtitle tells us, a material history of slavery. It is therefore focused on the objects, their production and circulation. What this does is turn the page on the histories of slavery and sectionalism of the past fifteen years or so. Many of us have shown that slavery had a long life in northern states (indeed I’d put my book on that list). But rather than build that story out further, Rockman reframes it in powerful ways. Rather than dewelling on the fact of slavery in the north, he traces the entanglements, the contingencies, and ultimately how slavery and freedom became mutually bound up together. Rather than joining the trend to say slavery was a national fact, he asks how the fact of national slavery conditioned the notions of freedom that also proliferated at the time. It is a set of questions I’ll be sitting with for some time to come.
