Justene Hill Edwards's brilliant book argues that the business ventures of enslaved people from colonial times to emancipation were integrated into the broader political economy of slavery in South Carolina. African-descended South Carolinians did not just labor for enslavers. Many worked for themselves in small enterprises and networks that permitted them, in many cases, a return. The book's graceful prose and lucid argumentation will appeal to students and specialists. Unfree Markets explores changes over time, arguing that enslavers’ efforts to regulate Black business activities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave way to predatory involvement in enslaved people's dealings in the nineteenth century, partly because of the state's shift from rice to cotton as the primary economic activity. This shift prefigured predatory capitalism of later eras. From 1686 onward, the colonial legislature worked to establish a legal framework that sanctioned independent Black business activities while bringing them under the control...
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