ABSTRACT

The recent surge of interest in “capitalism and slavery” belongs, like other such scholarly events, to a distinct cultural moment, this one born when the long-running focus of American historians on the “problem of the color-line” was interrupted by their rediscovery of the economy after the financial emergency of 2008. 1 The result has been a dramatic proliferation of conference papers, plenary roundtables, dissertation proposals, and even review essays, all seeking to explore the inter-dynamics between one peculiarly rapacious institution and another. Have these investigations changed our understanding of racially-inscribed power, some will want to know. Have they complicated older assumptions regarding capitalism’s once-axiomatic relationship with liberal notions of personal agency? What are we to make of an ancient labor practice, others will ask, located at the heart of a system of wealth so closely identified with modernity and its creed of progress? Is the slavery-capitalism question, what’s more, to be viewed in terms of the longue durée, or as a volatile episode of world history born of crisis rather than continuity? All these questions come in response to newly ambitious claims, not only about slavery’s role in the development of capitalism in the United States, but about the essentially capitalist nature of the slave system itself, claims that have excited a new generation of scholars eager to reimagine the relationship between what are arguably the two definitive categories of the nation’s history.