Hottest subfield in history today may be the history of capitalism ... but The Nation wonders what happens if growth stalls (or if we're better off if it does)Historians in the News
... The search for growth’s prehistory has turned up a surprising ancestor: slavery, long regarded as an obstacle to commercial progress, now cast as a potent engine of development. An emphasis on slavery’s productivity has become accepted among scholars of the distant past, and still more so among students of comparatively recent history. Accenting the significance of slavery is not by itself novel. In the nineteenth century, Marx was only one of many who required no persuasion on this point. According to his succinct formulation, “Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry.” Yet even those convinced of slavery’s indispensable role in capitalism’s ascent could consider the system a relic of a bygone era that was fated to die out with time.
No group has done more to undermine that reassuring belief than historians of capitalism. Though built on scholarship reaching back decades, a once controversial thesis has become conventional wisdom with remarkable speed. In the last year alone, three of the most impressive works of American history in many years have bolstered this interpretation: Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told; Beckert’s Empire of Cotton; and from Beckert’s Harvard colleague Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams. Divergent in crucial respects, these books all depict slavery in the antebellum South as dynamic, thriving and thoroughly capitalist.
This shift has taken place not because historians unearthed a previously hidden industrial economy, but because the criteria used to define capitalism have changed. Foregrounding abstract categories like economic growth and productivity brings otherwise conflicting social orders into a common analytic frame, minimizing the differences that earlier scholars considered immense. When historians turn to particulars, they are far more likely than in the past to highlight the figures whose livelihoods depended on yoking together Northerners and Southerners, like the merchants who, in Beckert’s words, “made capitalism whole.” While the South lacked the hallmarks of industrialization, more capital was concentrated in its slave population—that is, in its ownership of people—than in all of the nation’s industrial investments combined, including banks, factories and railroads. Slaves commanded high prices because they supplied the labor necessary for the production of cotton, arguably the central commodity of the Industrial Revolution. It was little wonder that the South, bound to international networks of trade and holding gargantuan amounts of capital, went on to develop a financial system of extraordinary sophistication. Taken together, these features make the South an exemplary model of capitalism—different from what was developing in the North, to be sure, but a variation on a common theme.
But recent histories of slavery aim to do more than prove that the institution was growing; they want to show that it was indispensable to the emergence of modern economic growth itself. Baptist provides the crispest exposition of this argument: “the move from arithmetical to geometric economic growth,” he contends, “would have been short-circuited if embryo industries had run out of cotton fiber,” which could have occurred if not for an astonishing rise in productivity among the slaves who labored in the cotton fields of the South. Historians already know that productivity climbed during these years, but Baptist offers a novel explanation for this upswing: torture of the enslaved, a process refined over the decades by planters (or, as Baptist refers to them, “entrepreneurs”) desperate to satisfy the demands of cotton markets and keep ahead of their otherwise crippling levels of debt. This is the ultimate payoff of interweaving slavery and capitalism: a history that puts slavery not just at the center of our understanding of the South, or of the United States, but of global