Content area
Full text
Walter Johnson , River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom . Cambridge : Harvard University Press , 2013. 561 pp. $35.00.
Edward E. Baptist , The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism . New York : Basic Books , 2014. 528 pp. $35.00.
Sven Beckert , Empire of Cotton: A Global History . New York : Alfred A. Knopf , 2014. 640 pp. $35.00.
Calvin Schermerhorn , The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 . New Haven : Yale University Press , 2015. 352 pp. $65.00.
Review Essays
They push in different directions, these two great debates. The first, on the relationship between capitalism and slavery, invites us to consider how closely the two systems were connected, to the point where more and more scholars argue that slavery itself was a form of capitalism. The second, on the origins of the American Civil War, highlights the fundamental difference and growing divergence between the free labor system of the North and the slave society of the South, to the point where some scholars see an irreconcilable conflict between the two. Can these competing tendencies be reconciled? Is it possible to define southern slavery as essentially "capitalist" without losing sight of the crucial distinctions between free and enslaved labor? A number of recent books suggest that scholars have begun to recognize the problem but have not quite figured out how to solve it.
There are actually two distinct debates about capitalism and slavery, one over whether the slave trade and the profits of plantation slavery played a significant role in the Industrial Revolution, and the other about whether plantation slavery itself was or was not capitalist.
Most scholars agree that slavery played at least some role in spurring the Industrial Revolution, especially in Great Britain, particularly in the critical early decades of its development. The slave trade was a massive, highly sophisticated commercial enterprise that required, among other things, a secure financial system that could extend credit and insurance to shippers and a physical infrastructure of docks, port facilities, a shipbuilding industry, and a transportation network within Britain--all of which contributed to the Industrial Revolution. Nor is there much dispute that at crucial...