Who Put Their Capitalism in My Slavery?

Who Put Their Capitalism in My Slavery? Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013)

Jessica Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

John Ashworth, The Republic in Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012)

L. Diane Barnes, Brian Schoen, and Frank Towers, ed., The Old South's Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)

Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class Structure, Economic Development, and Political Conflict, 1620-1877 (Boston: Brill, 2011).

William G. Thomas III, The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

Aaron Marrs, Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009)

Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944; repr., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

Recent historians of capitalism have produced a bumper crop of books that profess to examine capitalism and slavery. This is all to the good, but in the past few years I have been dismayed about how many of these ignore the debates that preceded them. As a result, these books make provocative but not always clear interventions in the field. The danger in not understanding the older historiography is that entire arguments can be built attacking arguments that are caricatures or of repeating conceptual, theoretical, or factual errors that historians have long ago identified.

Eric Williams put the question most directly in his book Capitalism and Slavery, first published in 1944. Slavery, he argued, depended on capitalist competition. An international capitalist market put slavery and freedom in competition, and slavery usually won. Cheap, slave-grown staples like cotton, sugar, and rice had economies of scale (lower costs per unit for producing larger quantities). Thus, family farms could not compete against the slave-plantation juggernaut. Capitalism was more than competition, but market competition allowed slavery to succeed.

The part of Williams's thesis that scholars most remember...