Slavery’s Capitalism is a timely collection of essays that places slavery at the center of the development of capitalism in the Western world, addressing the dearth of scholarship on the role slave labor played in the development of the US economy. Building from and significantly expanding Eric Williams’s 1944 thesis, which asserted that the English Industrial Revolution was made possible by West Indian slave labor, the editors frame and the authors demonstrate how the institution of slavery was instrumental to the economic ascent of the United States. Furthermore, they demonstrate the necessity of understanding the rise of capitalism in the United States as global. The volume highlights advancements, innovations, and webs of investments that radiated to and from the plantation to challenge the claim that plantations were peripheral to the maturation of modern capitalism, and it illuminates how the political economy of slavery shaped national boundaries and institutions.
Part I,...
