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Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism

Review products

RosenthalCaitlin. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. 320 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-97209-4, $35.00 (cloth).

BeckertSven and RockmanSeth, eds. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 416 pp. ISBN 978-0-812-24841-8, $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-812-22417-7, $27.50 (paper).

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2020

Alex Allison*
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University

Extract

Slavery has deep roots in the rise of American capitalism, and two recent publications have made significant contributions toward our understanding of how human bondage shaped the growth of the United States’ economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, by Caitlin Rosenthal, and Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, each explore traditionally overlooked aspects of slavery’s connection to business innovation and American capitalism and present readers with a fuller—and perhaps more complicated—narrative of the ties between enslavement and the economy.

Type
Review Essay
Copyright
© The Author 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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