Capitalism and Slavery

Capitalism and Slavery
John J. Clegg, New York University
W
as slavery capitalist? For today’s historians the question can evoke
musty, long-winded debates from the 1970s. Yet in the last year three
books by prominent scholars have reopened the question, catching the
attention of many outside the historical profession. While they differ in many
respects, these books agree that slavery was central to nineteenth-century capital-
ism and that it enabled the industrialization of Britain and the United States.
Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams graphically depicts what Johnson calls the
“full throttle capitalism” of the cotton frontier. Edward Baptist’s The Half That Has
Never Been Told tells “the making of American capitalism” from the point of view of
the slaves who made it. Finally, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton firmly situates
American slavery in the context of capitalism’s global expansion at the gunpoint of
an imperial British state.1
This new development in the historiography of slavery coincides with revived
academic interest in capitalism in the wake of the recent financial crisis. Indeed
these three authors are all associated with a burgeoning field in American history
departments—“the history of capitalism”—in which slavery has become some-
thing of a signature topic.2 It is therefore strange that none of them seem inter-
ested in asking what capitalism is. Even Beckert’s field-defining essay neglected to
Many thanks to Robin Blackburn, Vivek Chibber, Stanley Engerman, Niklas Frykman, Noam Maggor,
and Charles Post for helpful comments and criticisms. Special thanks to Robert Brenner for his exten-
sive comments and criticisms. All the above are exempted of responsibility for my errors and idiosyn-
crasies.
1. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge:
Belknap, 2013); Edward Baptist, The Half That Has Never Been Told: The Making of American Capitalism
(New York: Basic, 2014); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014).
2. The new history of American capitalism incorporates nineteenth-century histories of risk and
money (Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012]; Steven
Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009]), as well as twentieth-
century histories of credit and securities markets (Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation [Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
Critical Historical Studies (Fall 2015). © 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
2326-4462/2015/0202-0005$10.00
281
This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
282 | CRIT ICAL H IST ORI CAL ST UDI ES FALL 2015
hazard a definition, and Seth Rockman, another leading historian of capitalism,

has recently commended the field’s “disavowal of theoretical definitions.”3
I believe this is a mistake. In this article I defend a view of capitalism as wide-
spread and systematic market dependence. I argue that American slave plantations
were indeed capitalist in this sense and that recognizing this allows us to resolve
inconsistencies in this new literature, particularly with regard to the relation be-
tween violence and productivity, and between slavery and industrialization. Fi-
nally, I argue that developing a more robust conception of capitalism is essential
if historians of capitalism wish to engage scholars in other fields and contribute to
contemporary political and economic debates.
NAMING THE SYST EM

Although they are reticent to define the term, Johnson, Baptist, and Beckert fre-
quently refer to “capitalism” in their books. In spite of their reticence we can thus
piece together some implicit or operative definitions from the contexts in which
they employ the term.4 A survey of these contexts reveals that they mean several
things when they call features of antebellum slavery “capitalist.”
First and foremost, they are referring to the profit motive of slave owners.
They don’t argue that slave owners were always rational and calculating; indeed,
Johnson and Baptist stress other motives such as sadism and irrational specula-
tion. Rather, the claim is that slave owners were fundamentally out to make money
and often applied modern innovations and management techniques to this end.
Second, and as a consequence of the first, they mean that American slavery
exhibited rapid and continuous productivity growth—a unique characteristic of
capitalist societies.5 Here they draw on evidence of substantial increases in the
amount of cotton picked by slaves: roughly 2 percent per year.6 This rate of pro-
versity Press, 2012]; Julia Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2011]). Finance thus competes with slavery for prominence in the field.
3. Sven Beckert, “History of American Capitalism,” in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa
McGirred (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 314–35; Seth Rockman, “What Makes the
History of Capitalism Newsworthy?,” Journal of the Early Republic 34, no. 3 (2014): 444.
4. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, the meaning of a word is the way it is used.
5. Beckert cites Angus Maddison’s longue durée income data, which demonstrates capitalism’s unique
productivity dynamics. Baptist reproduces a graph from Guy Clark based on Maddison’s data. See Angus
Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
6. Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, “Productivity Growth and the Regional Dynamics of Antebel-
lum Southern Development,” in Economic Evolution and Revolution in Historical Time, ed. Paul W. Rhode,
Joshua L. Rosenbloom, and David F. Weiman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 203. We

Capitalism and Slavery | 283
ductivity growth is comparable to that of British textile workers over the same
period, during the height of the industrial revolution.
Third, they are referring to the commodification and collateralization of the
slaves themselves. Johnson and Baptist in particular are fascinated by the maca-
bre financial alchemy that turned slave mortgages into bonds sold in European
markets, seeing in this a parallel with the credit-driven housing bubble of the
2000s. Such an equation of capitalism with high finance is found among many
new historians of capitalism, reflecting the era of financialization in which these
authors live and write.
Last but not least, they are referring to the commercial links that tied together
the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Capitalism, according to Immanuel Waller-
stein, is a “world system,” and these authors insist that the role of slaves in produc-
ing the principle raw material of nineteenth-century commerce demonstrates “the
centrality of slavery, in the United States and elsewhere, in the emergence of
modern capitalism.”7
It should be noted at the outset that this last point is not particularly original.
Marx famously argued that “without slavery you have no cotton; without cot-
ton you have no modern industry,” and black Marxists like W. E. B. du Bois,
C. L. R. James, and Eric Williams have written extensively on this theme.8 Yet
together these points represent a new turn in the historiography: specifically a
decisive break with Eugene and Elizabeth Fox Genovese’s influential view of
slavery as “precapitalist.”9
Nominally Marxists, the Genoveses relied on a Weberian definition of capi-
talism to argue that slave owners lacked a “bourgeois mentality.” In the tradi-
will see below that Baptist disputes Olmstead and Rhode’s biotechnological explanation for this growth,
arguing that systematic torture was the real cause.
7. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1 (New York: Academic Press, 1974); Sven
Beckert, “Capitalism and Slavery,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 12, 2014.
8. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Chicago: Kerr, 1920), 121; W. E. B. du Bois, Black Recon-
struction in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1935); C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York:
Dial, 1938); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1945). Contrary to popular belief, Marx consistently referred to New World slavery as “capitalist” (Karl
Marx, Capital, vol. 1 [London: Penguin, 1974], 925, Capital, vol. 3 [London: Penguin, 1991], 940, and
Grundrisse [London: Penguin, 1993], 513). Yet many historians appear to read Genovese into Marx and
thus ignore these references. See, e.g., Walter Johnson, “The Pedestal and the Veil,” Journal of the Early
Republic 24, no. 2 (2004): 299–308; Scott Nelson, “Who Put Their Capitalism in My Slavery?,” Journal
of the Civil War Era 5, no. 2 (2015): 289–310.
9. Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery (New York: Pantheon, 1965); Eugene Geno-
vese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).

284 | CRI TICAL HI STORI CAL ST UDIES FALL 2015
tion of the racist doyen of Southern history, U. B. Phillips, they emphasized the
“paternalist” structure of the plantation and the aristocratic values of slave
owners. We might cast doubt on the Genoveses’ underlying idea of capitalism,
for many modern corporations have paternalist traits (e.g., IBM, Toyota), and,
as Thomas Piketty has recently reminded us, there is no lack of aristocratic pre-
tensions among today’s capitalist elite. However, rather than contest the Gen-
oveses’ view of capitalism, the new historians reject the Genovese thesis on its
own terms. For they show that when slave owners had to decide between their
paternalist obligations and the need to make a profit, they time and again opted
for the latter—by single-mindedly exploiting slave labor, speculating on slaves via
credit, and breaking up their families through sale.
This emerging consensus among US historians is a welcome development, for
each of the four points outlined above are indeed salient features of antebellum
slavery. My concern, however, is that none of these authors provide a framework
within which to make sense of these points, leaving them often free-floating and
disconnected. The problem is not that they lack the “correct” definition of capi-
talism. The problem is that by dodging the problem of definition altogether they
fail to provide a coherent account of capitalist slavery. One doesn’t need to believe
in such a thing as “pure” capitalism in order to recognize that modern capitalist
societies have certain core features in common. Nor does one have to be a struc-
turalist to see that capitalism lends itself to systematic analysis. Yet these authors
fail to explain how the various features of the antebellum economy that they
identify form part of a coherent capitalist system.
In this essay I argue that Robert Brenner’s conception of capitalism as gener-
alized market dependence may provide the theoretical framing that is largely
missing in these works.10 Brenner points out that while markets have existed in
all known societies, only in capitalism are productive agents dependent on the
market for their survival. This is because producers in capitalist societies have
no direct (nonmarket) access to the means of production, including their own
means of subsistence, and must therefore sell to survive. Since prices will be deter-
mined by the interaction of many producers in the market, producers in capitalist
societies are compelled not only to sell but also to produce at a competitive cost.
For if some find ways to cut their costs, then output prices will fall or input prices
10. For the best summary of Brenner’s approach, see Robert Brenner, “Property and Progress:
Where Adam Smith Went Wrong,” in Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Chris
Wickham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 49–111.

will rise, such that other producers will be unable to afford the necessary means of
production (including their own means of subsistence) unless they too cut costs.
Brenner refers to this as “the competitive constraint”: market-dependent producers
are forced to minimize unit costs relative to sale price in order to retain access to
the means of production. Hence the continuous productivity increases characteris-
tic of capitalist development.
At first sight it might seem that slave owners have direct nonmarket access
to at least one means of production: the labor of their slaves. They thus seem to
have something in common with the characteristically noncapitalist productive
unit in Brenner’s schema: the peasant household. Precapitalist peasants often take
advantage of the opportunity to sell their output, but are under no compulsion to
do so, for their access to the principle means of production and subsistence (land)
is guaranteed by customary rights. As a result, peasants rarely specialize for the
market and are not compelled to produce at a competitive cost. Indeed, peasants
tend to diversify output and resist the imposition of market-determined rents in
order to avoid becoming dependent for their subsistence on volatile market prices.
However, a glance at the historical record is enough to show that there is in
fact no analogy between precapitalist peasant households and antebellum slave
plantations in terms of their relation to the market. Slave owners in the United
States could not fall back on subsistence agriculture, living off the labor their
slaves, even if they had wanted to. For they had to purchase land and slaves on mar-
kets, typically on credit, and they faced fixed monetary costs in interest, taxes, and
the wages of overseers. Therefore, antebellum slave plantations specialized for the
market much more than small yeoman farmers.11 Their dependence on competitive
markets for both inputs and outputs meant that slave owners were compelled to
minimize costs by adopting the most productive techniques. As a result, both the
productivity and price of slaves rose over time.
Seeing that US slave owners lacked nonmarket access to the means of pro-
duction allows us to understand and revise each of the four points listed above.
First, there is little doubt that slave owners wanted to make profits. But this
desire was neither a simple psychological proclivity nor the result of a protes-
tant ethic. Existing slave owners, in order to remain slave owners, were com-
pelled not only to make profits but to maximize them (by minimizing costs
relative to sale prices). To meet fixed money payments, including interest on
purchases of land and slaves, they were forced to adapt and transform the slave
11. See Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2006).

labor process in response to price movements. Thus when the price of indigo
fell after the American revolution (due to the loss of British subsidies) and the
price of cotton rose (due to another revolution in San Domingue, hitherto the
principle supplier), almost all indigo plantations quickly switched to cotton.12
However, one cannot attribute the high rates of productivity growth on plan-
tations to profit motives alone. Profit seeking is as old as trade itself, but continu-
ous and generalized productivity growth is unique to capitalist societies.13 The
latter requires not only that those who control production seek to make a profit
but that they also have the capacity to transform the production process and the
opportunity to sell the increased output. Moreover, new techniques will be cer-
tain to generalize only if those who refuse to adapt are penalized, for example, by
losing access to the means of production. As Beckert shows, Indian cotton failed
to compete with US cotton in the nineteenth century precisely because, despite the
profit motive of many landowners and merchants, these conditions were lacking.
In India, peasant producers who retained control over production and customary
rights to the land could not be persuaded to “risk abandoning their subsistence
crops [for] cotton monoculture.”14 In others words, they were not dependent on
markets for their subsistence, and had no intention of becoming so.
Of course, slaves in the United States had less ability to resist the choices of
their owners. But it was the institutional and geopolitical situation of US slave
owners that explains those choices. Planters had the incentive and ability to in-
crease productivity because of the unique opportunities and costs presented to
them by the greater Atlantic economy. These consisted not only in the elastic
demand of British manufacturers but also in the vagaries of the international slave
trade. The outlawing of this trade restricted the supply of slave labor and put
pressure on planters to economize on its use. Eli Whitney’s patented cotton gin
was one of a flurry of labor-saving gins introduced during a period of rising
slave prices.15
Finally, if product and slave markets presented planters with incentives, fi-
nance presented them with a constraint. Slave owners were typically indebted,
12. Robert Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York:
Norton, 1989), 63–64.
13. Maddison, Contours of the World Economy.
14. Beckert, “Capitalism and Slavery,” 369. On the risks of specializing for the market, see Brenner,
“Property and Progress.”
15. Whitney’s patent expired in 1807, the same year that Congress prohibited the import of slaves
(though most states imposed restrictions before then). His saw gin competed with many new versions
of the traditional roller gin, and only came to dominate upland cotton in the 1820s. One of its key
advantages was that it could be operated by children, whose labor represented a lower opportunity

and their debts imposed on them a legal obligation to raise cash to repay
creditors. As Claire Priest has shown, British colonial law was unique in facili-
tating the transfer of land and slaves from insolvent debtors to creditors via
foreclosure auctions, a measure instituted in the Debt Recovery Act of 1732.16
Widespread foreclosure acted as a selection mechanism, ensuring that planters
who were not willing to maximize profits lost their land and slaves to those
who were. In this light, the analogy that Baptist and Johnson make with the
housing bubble of the 2000s seems misdrawn. For rather than a sign of irratio-
nal exuberance, it can be shown that rising slave prices accurately capitalized
the price of cotton and the productivity of slave labor.17 Easy credit may have
had short run effects, but the secular increase in slave prices is more plausibly
attributed to the threat or reality of foreclosure leading to increased competition
and rising productivity.18
R EV E N G E O F T H E CL I O M E T R I CI A N S ?
One of the most promising features of history’s turn to capitalism is that it
seems to be pushing back against the cultural and linguistic turns of the last
decades. A new generation of historians is apparently tired of the interminable
pursuit of “agency,” as well as the pressure to keep up with the latest in conti-
nental philosophy. But while the old theory is dying, the new has yet to be
born. In the interim, many historians, relying on their intimate knowledge of
primary sources, appear to be reverting to an antitheoretical empiricism. The
danger is that in trying to do without theory they will unwittingly reproduce
cost to planters. See Angele Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2003), 74–75.
16. Claire Priest, “Creating an American Property Law,” Harvard Law Review 120, no. 2 (2006).
17. The notion of a “bubble” in slave prices is associated with U. B. Phillips and was one of the
major targets of cliometric criticism in the 1960s; see Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer, “The
Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South,” Journal of Political Economy 66, no. 2 (1958): 95–130.
The surmise of both Baptist and Johnson appears to be that expanded credit availability drove slave
prices by creating an excessive demand. Yet it is also possible that it allowed the supply of cotton to
respond more quickly to growing demand, thereby preventing cotton and slave prices from rising even
higher.
18. Baptist claims that “rising London prices for securities, statistics show, pushed up slave prices in
New Orleans” (The Half That Has Never Been Told, 256). Despite several requests to the author, I have
been unable to see the essay in which he draws this conclusion. In bivariate regressions I have been
able to replicate a positive effect of the monthly value of Louisiana state bonds on New Orleans slave
prices. However, the slave price data on which Baptist relies (from Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L.
Engerman, “New Orleans Slave Sale Sample, 1804–1862,” http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/RCMD
/studies/7423) contain fewer than ten observations for most months and are nonstationary. When more
consistent annual averages are analyzed or when the series are made stationary by first-differencing, any
significant effect disappears (results are available upon request).

whichever theory has achieved the status of “common sense.” In the study of
capitalism that theory is neoclassical economics.
Indeed, to anyone familiar with the historiography of slavery, there is some-
thing of an irony to this “new” direction. In the 1960s and 1970s, the principle
opponents of the Genovese thesis were neoclassical economists who had ven-
tured onto historical terrain. These “cliometricians” (as they called themselves)
used quantitative methods with which traditional historians were unfamiliar and
came to conclusions they found controversial. Thus Alfred Conrad and John
Meyer employed modern asset-price theory to show that slave ownership
remained profitable in most states in the run up to the Civil War, and Douglass
North analyzed trade flows to argue that cotton exports drove Western expansion
and Northern industrialization.19 Most controversially, Robert Fogel and Stanley
Engerman’s Time on the Cross launched a barrage of statistics against the tradi-
tional view, defended by both Phillips and Genovese, that slaves were less effi-
cient than free laborers.20
Eugene Genovese had initially played a key role in the rear-guard battle fought
by traditional historians against these “barbarian invaders.”21 On the substantive
issues this battle was largely lost. But rather that concede defeat, partisans of the
traditional view simply ceded the field. Thus in the 1970s and 1980s, as most
historians shifted their attention to culture, economic history gravitated to eco-
nomics departments.22 However, the wounds of this old Methodenstreit have not
all healed, and the names Fogel and Engerman still conjure up sour feelings among
some historians. We can see evidence of this in these new works, none of which
even mention Time on the Cross, despite its centrality to the economic history of
slavery. Yet one of the central claims of these works—that slavery was modern,
profitable, and capitalist—was also the central claim of Time on the Cross.23
19. Conrad and Meyer, “Economics of Slavery”; Douglass North, The Economic Growth of the United
States (New York: Norton, 1966). For more on North, see below.
20. Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross (New York: Little, Brown, 1974). Fogel
and North would go on to win a joint Nobel Prize in 1993, in part for their work on slavery and US
economic history.
21. Genovese quipped, “if the cliometricians were asked to write a history of the crucifixion they
would begin by counting the nails.” Quoted in Robert Fogel, The Slavery Debates (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 22.
22. Ibid. Today most economic historians in the United States are housed in economics depart-
ment, whereas only 2 percent of those in history departments list economic history as their specialty,
down from 5 percent in 1975; see Peter A. Coclanis, “The Audacity of Hope: Economic History Today,”
Perspectives on History (January 2010).
23. Fogel and Engerman (Time on the Cross, 129) argue that slave owners practiced a “highly
capitalistic form of agriculture.”

This ironic victory of cliometrics is rendered all the more ironic by Baptist’s
attack on the economic historians Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode. The latter
claim that high rates of productivity growth in cotton picking were due to two
main factors: more fertile Western soil led to higher yields per acre, and newly
developed hybrid seed varieties were easier to pick.24 Both factors enabled slaves
to pick more in the same amount of time. Baptist disputes the latter claim, which
he attributes to “the commitment of agricultural historians to credit science for
increased yields.”25 His own argument, apparently more attuned to the social
historian’s commitment to “agency,” is that slaves picked more cotton every year
because they learned to move their hands faster and faster in response to tor-
ture.26 Baptist mocks Olmstead and Rhode for missing this point: “Economics
teachers don’t put [torture] on the chalkboard as a variable in a graph.”27
Whatever we make of these respective claims (and I will try to asses them
below), it is striking that in his revival of the grand old battle between historians
and economists—with its trope of “sensitive interpretation of sources” versus
“decontextualized data”—Baptist omits to mention that he is defending precisely
the view of productivity put forward by the old enemy: Fogel and Engerman. For
Olmstead and Rhode’s account of biotechnical innovation is framed as a criti-
cism of Fogel and Engerman’s view of the relative efficiency of gang labor, which
they, like Baptist, attribute to competition, the whip, and the “agency” of slaves.28
T H E Q U E S T I O N O F VI O L E N C E
The new historians would no doubt be repelled by this comparison, for Fogel
and Engerman are notorious among historians for another reason: downplaying
the brutality of slave owners. It seemed to many of their critics that when Fogel
and Engerman called slavery “capitalist” and “efficient” the effect was to sani-
24. Olmstead and Rhode, “Productivity Growth and Regional Dynamics,” 205.
25. Baptist, The Half That Has Never Been Told, 445.
26. In what Baptist describes as “the pushing system” overseers continually escalated individualized
daily picking quotas and brutally whipped those who fell behind.
27. It should be noted that many economists have indeed included torture as a variable in their
models, including Fogel and Engerman themselves (Time on the Cross, 2:155–56). Baptist has further
claimed that economists are incapable of grasping the “true story of slavery” because it “cannot fit on a
chalkboard” (Edward Baptist, presentation at Histories of American Capitalism Conference, Cornell
University, Ithaca, NY, November 7, 2014).
28. Olmstead and Rhode, “Productivity Growth and Regional Dynamics,” 184–88; Fogel and
Engerman, Time on the Cross, 237–40; Fogel, Without Consent and Contract, 79. Fogel and Engerman have
less to say about productivity changes over time, but they are clear that it grew: “The basic cause of
this long-term decline [in cotton prices] was the steady increase in productivity” (Fogel, Without Consent
and Contract, 95, and Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 93).

290 | CRI TIC AL H ISTO RICAL ST UDIE S FALL 2015
tize it. For although they saw whipping as essential to slave labor’s productive
advantage, their neoclassical tendency to see market competition as salutary led
them to emphasize instead the positive incentives offered to slaves, such as
rewards in money or goods. Hence their idealized view of a “protestant work
ethic” on plantations, and their infamous claim that the whip was “not widely
used,” a claim for which they were justly rebuked in Herbert Gutman’s Slavery
and the Numbers Game.29
The new historians of capitalism, writing in the aftermath of the financial
crisis, are more likely to identify capitalism with fraud and irrational speculation
than with “efficiency.” But in keeping with Gutman, they refuse to downplay
brutality. As Beckert points out, “we associate industrial capitalism with contracts
and markets, but early capitalism was based as often as not on violence and
bodily coercion.” Johnson and Baptist flesh this out with lurid depictions of ex-
treme cruelty, which they see as a result of the slave owner’s lust for profit.30 For
Johnson, slave labor amounted to “extended repetitive torture” governed by the
“ultimate logic” of profitability, while for Baptist torture was the “ultimate cause”
of productivity growth on cotton plantations.31 Thus for both authors the relation
between violence and capitalism is neither accidental nor a holdover from an
earlier epoch. Far from the sanitized view of neoclassical economics, they, like
Marx, see capitalism entering the world “dripping from head to foot, from every
pore, with blood and dirt.”32
29. Herbert Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975).
Gutman’s book is today sometimes read as a definitive rebuttal of Fogel and Engerman. But Gutman’s
critique concerns only one of the ten theses that Fogel and Engerman considered to be the original
contribution of Time on the Cross, many of which Gutman accepted. The critical assessments of other
cliometricians are collected in Paul A. David, Herbert G. Gutman, Richard Sutch, Peter Temin, and
Gavin Wright, Reckoning with Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
30. Johnson’s torture scenes border on the pornographic: “the slaveholders screaming execrations
or soliciting confessions from the edge of death; the slaves pleading, shrieking, moaning, crying out for
mercy; the final spastic motions and smoldering viscera” (River of Dark Dreams, 191).
31. Baptist, The Half That Has Never Been Told, 316; Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 173–74. Baptist’s
metaphor for the slave labor process, the “whipping machine,” refers to a contraption which supposedly
automated floggings.
32. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, chap. 31. Johnson accuses Marxists of imagining that these blood-stained
origins were (or would be) washed away by subsequent developments (Johnson, “The Pedestal and the
Veil,” 302–3). While this may be true of the Genoveses it is not true of Marxist historiography in
general. For Marxist accounts of capitalist history which emphasize the compatibly of capitalism with
extraeconomic violence, see Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden, eds., Free and Unfree Labour: The
Debate Continues (New York: Lang, 1997); Jarius Banaji, “The Fictions of Free Labour: Contract, Coer-
cion, and So-Called Unfree Labour,” Historical Materialism 11, no. 3 (2003): 69–95; Heidi Gerstenberger,
“The Political Economy of Capitalist Labor,” Viewpoint Magazine, no. 4 (September 2, 2014); Vivek
Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (New York: Verso, 2013).

Johnson and Baptist are right to argue that slave owners found violence to
be a cost-effective way of exploiting slave labor. However, they overstate their
case in depicting slave owners as irrational sadists with a flagrant disregard for
the lives of their slaves. Moreover, pace Baptist, it is doubtful that such violence
can explain high rates of productivity growth on cotton plantations. Here it
seems that the authors have been misled by a cultural and psychological view
of capitalist motivations.
Both Johnson and Baptist claim that slave mortality was exceptionally high
due to torture and lack of nutrition.33 Baptist claims that in the antebellum
South “white people inflicted torture more often than in almost any human
society that ever existed.”34 Johnson argues that the “starvation” of slaves was
common due to planting decisions by slave owners greedy for cotton.35 This is
of course a sensitive topic, and it is important when evaluating these claims not
to allow the paternalism thesis to reenter through the back door. Evidence of
adequate provision should not be mistaken for evidence of care, and it is un-
questionable that the threat of the whip, however often it was used, was the
major source of discipline on plantations.
Still, it must be recognized that neither demographic evidence nor slave testi-
mony support the claim that torturing or starving slaves to death was typical of
plantation life. As far as we can tell adult slaves had similar mortality rates to
Southern whites.36 They also tended to be taller than contemporary Europeans,
suggesting better nutrition.37 This is consonant with what we know about food
production in the South, where large plantations typically produced a surplus of
33. On nutrition and life expectancy, see Baptist, The Half That Has Never Been Told, 182; Johnson,
River of Dark Dreams, 179, 464. On torture and life expectancy, see Baptist, The Half That Has Never Been
Told, 361.
34. Baptist, The Half That Has Never Been Told, 448.
35. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 219–20.
36. Richard Steckel, “A Peculiar Population: The Nutrition, Health, and Mortality of American
Slaves from Childhood to Maturity,” Journal of Economic History 46, no. 3 (1986): 721–41. Steckel
estimates that while mortality for slave children was very high, adult slaves enjoyed similar mortality
rate as that of the US population as a whole. He attributes the higher infant mortality rates to poor
childhood nutrition and slave mothers working into their final trimester.
37. See Robert Margo and Richard Steckel, “The Heights of American Slaves,” Social Science His-
tory 6, no. 4 (1982): 516. Baptist (The Half That Has Never Been Told, 182) finds that the average height
of adult male South Carolina slaves sold in New Orleans in 1829–31 was 65.3 inches, which he claims
is 3 inches shorter than Southern white men. This he takes to be an indication that they were “under-
fed.” However, no age is mentioned for either group, and we are not informed as to the average height
of South Carolina whites. Coincidentally Fogel (Without Consent and Contract, 141) reports that 65.3 inches
was also the average height of educated French soldiers in 1868 (for the uneducated the average was
64.7).

292 | CRIT ICAL H IST ORIC AL STU DI ES FALL 2015
food.38 Neither demographic nor documentary evidence provides support for

Johnson’s claim that slaves were “actively reduced to a starveling penury.”39
Baptist is a sensitive reader of slave narratives, but for evidence of treatment
he relies more on narratives published by abolitionists than the ex-slave interviews
conducted by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s. Of course
the latter are not unproblematic: they do not constitute a representative sample,
and poor Southern blacks in the midst of the great depression may have had
reason to reflect positively on the material conditions of slavery, especially when
the interviewers were white. However, there are issues of bias and selectivity in
abolitionist pamphlets, also written for a white audience.40 Escott, in a comprehen-
sive survey, finds that the majority of the interviewees expressed a favorable atti-
tude toward their former masters and that this was true whether the interviewer
was black or white.41 He concludes that while evidence of terrible abuses can be
found in the interviews, “mutilation and extreme physical cruelty were not the
rule on southern plantations.”42
Johnson and Baptist may have overestimated the degree of slave owner vio-
lence because they ignore two powerful limits to its wanton use. First, they over-
look the fact that unlike employers of coerced wage labor (e.g., debt peons or
prison labor), nineteenth-century slave owners had a substantial and growing fi-
nancial interest in the lives of their slaves. A master that killed a mortgaged or
rented slave would become liable for their full market value, and one that owned a
slave outright would suffer a concomitant loss in the value of their principle as-
set.43 Second, they ignore the potential for unbridled violence to lead to slave
38. Robert E Gallman, “Self-Sufficiency in the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum South,” Agricul-
tural History 44, no. 1 (1970): 5–23; Lacy K. Ford, “Self-Sufficiency, Cotton, and Economic Develop-
ment in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860,” Journal of Economic History 45, no. 2 (1985): 261–
67.
39. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 284. For documentary evidence on nutrition, see Fogel, Without
Consent and Contract, 133.
40. For instance, Baptist (The Half That Has Never Been Told, 142) appears to acknowledge that “the
whipping machine” described in the autobiography of the ex-slave Henry Clay was probably apocry-
phal.
41. Paul D. Escott, Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1979), table 1.3. Escott also finds that the majority of interviewees
described their rations as “good” (33). He points out that a “favorable attitude” was often a relative
matter: expressed in contrast to stories of brutal owners elsewhere.
42. Ibid., 40. Only 6.5 percent of the WPA interviewees reported hearing of a slave being murdered
(ibid., 44). By way of contrast, 25 percent of Americans today know someone who has been murdered
(Rasmussen Reports, April 12, 2013).
43. Slave owners may have had greater interest in preserving their slaves than in preserving their
land, for their slave wealth was more considerable, more liquid, and more mobile (Wright, Slavery and

resistance and flight. Both limits are well documented in abolitionist slave nar-
ratives, most famously in the mortgage that saved Solomon Northup’s life and in
Frederick Douglas’s physical triumph over the “slave breaker” Covey.44
However, even if we were to accept these authors’ account of the slave labor
process as unmitigated torture, it is not clear that it could sustain Baptist’s argu-
ment that torture was the “ultimate cause” of productivity growth. Here part of
the problem lies in a common confusion about the meaning of productivity. Bap-
tist refers to “continuous increases in productivity per person—what economists
call ‘efficiency.’”45 Yet not only is “productivity per person” redundant, but Bap-
tist fails to distinguish between increased output per unit of time or effort, which
may properly be called “efficiency,” and the increased expenditure of effort or
labor time, that is, sweating labor.46 Baptist is essentially arguing, against Olm-
stead and Rhode, that the latter rather than the former is primarily responsible
for steady increases in cotton output per slave over the nineteenth century. He
thereby sets out to disprove the assumption that intensification of labor can lead
only to one-off increases in productivity. However, his evidence is anecdotal and
inconsistent.
Baptist notes that what he calls “the pushing system” was already in place at
the turn of the century and admits that “in 1861, the basic mechanics of arms,
backs, and fingers remained as they had been in 1805.”47 His claim is thus that
a one-off transformation in labor management led to fifty-five years of continu-
ous productivity growth (averaging 2 percent per annum) in cotton picking, as
slaves slowly adapted their bodies to the pressures of the whip. Specifically he
claims that, under torture, they learned to move their hands faster and faster
over this period. While it is plausible that such “learning-by-doing” could take
months or even years, it is hard to believe that it took multiple generations. To
American Economic Development). Injured slaves were also a financial burden to their owners, both in
medical expenses and in lost days of work.
44. Soloman Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997),
106; Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), 90–98.
45. Baptist, The Half That Has Never Been Told, 112. Johnson is more sympathetic to Olmstead and
Rhode’s explanation of new, easier-to-pick seed varieties, but he appears equally confused about pro-
ductivity. He repeatedly refers to the latter as “output per slave per acre,” a meaningless expression
(River of Dark Dreams, 246). See Gavin Wright’s review of River of Dark Dreams in Journal of Economic
Literature 52, no. 3 (2014): 877–79.
46. Baptist is not alone in failing to make this distinction; Fogel and Engerman (Time on the Cross)
also elide the difference between the two in their account of the productivity advantages of slave
plantations over family farms. The distinction is approximate to Marx’s distinction between relative
and absolute surplus value extraction.
47. Most of the details Baptist provides of the pushing system come from Charles Ball, who began
working on a South Carolina cotton plantation in 1805.

demonstrate this point would require repeated observations of the same plan-
tations over time, as well as evidence that other aspects of the production process
(particularly seed varieties) remained unchanged. Yet in a footnote Baptist refers
us to only one plantation, the Prudhomme plantation of Natchitoches Parish,
Louisiana, in which slaves were daily picking “100 pounds per person in the
1830s, even with new seed. But by the 1850s new methods drove the numbers
into the 200s.”48 However, Baptist cites no evidence of these new methods and
gives no reasons for taking the Prudhomme plantation to be representative.49
Baptist’s claim is also not very consistent with data from others areas and pe-
riods. As Olmstead and Rhode point out, there was almost no increase in the rate
of cotton picking on Sea Island cotton plantations over the same period.50 For
Olmstead and Rhode the explanation is simple—the new seed varieties were short
rather than long staple and could not be adapted to coastal soils—but for Baptist it
is something of a puzzle. Did they fail to adopt the pushing system? Why would
they turn down such a lucrative opportunity? Furthermore, postbellum share-
croppers were not whipped, yet the average daily picking rate in the 1920s (using
the same mechanics of arms, backs, and fingers) was 125 pounds, well above the
1860 average of 100.51 Finally, if brutal violence is enough to generate persistent
productivity growth it is puzzling that scholars have found stagnant productivity
in West Indian sugar plantations over the eighteenth century, since it is doubtful
that West Indian planters were any less brutal than American ones.52
The point is not that violence was an ineffective means of extracting surplus
labor from slaves. If the whip hadn’t worked, it wouldn’t have been so widely
used. Baptist and Johnson are right to emphasize, against the neoclassical as-
sumptions of Fogel and Engerman, that market competition most likely increased
rather than moderated slave owner violence. The point is rather that slave owners
subject to a competitive constraint can always be expected to use violence to what-
ever extent it is profitable. They will use violence to extract the maximum output
48. Baptist, The Half That Has Never Been Told, 446. Baptist mistakenly reports the location of this
plantation as Terrebonne, a sugar parish.
49. Indeed, since records survive for only one year in the 1830s, we are left wondering whether
this wasn’t simply a bad year for the Prudhommes.
50. Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, “Biological Innovation and Productivity Growth in the Ante-
bellum Cotton Economy,” Journal of Economic History 68, no. 4 (2008): 1148.
51. Warren C. Whatley, “Southern Agrarian Labor Contracts as Impediments to Cotton Mechaniza-
tion,” Journal of Economic History 47, no. 1 (1987): 70. Thanks to Pseudoerasmus for this reference.
Pseudoerasmus estimates 130 to 156 lbs. per day for the period 1909–36 in “Baptism by Blood Cotton”
(http://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/09/12/baptism-by-blood-cotton/).
52. David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and David Richardson, “Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade, and
Productivity in the Caribbean, 1674–1807,” Economic History Review 58, no. 4 (2005): 683.

when cotton yields and pickability are low, and they will continue to use violence
to extract the even larger output when yields and pickability rise due to changing
soils and seeds. Thus it is implausible that increased violence alone could account
for a fourfold increase in productivity from 1805 to 1860. For it would suggest that
market-dependent slave owners in 1805 were either too ignorant or too kind to
take advantage of a relatively simple way to make a lot of money.53
T H E PR O B L E M O F O RI G I N S
Another area where a confused conception of capitalism generates problems for
these authors is on the question of origins. In highlighting the centrality of slav-
ery to the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy these authors often speak as if
capitalism could simply be identified with the geographic interdependencies of
global trade. On this view, it is true by definition that the share of slave-produced
cotton in global export markets made slavery a key part of “capitalism.”54 Yet
when they move beyond such tautologies to claim that slavery gave rise to indus-
trial capitalism in Britain and the North, their arguments begin to unravel.
A distinguishing feature of these works is their acceptance of a revised ver-
sion of the Williams thesis. Eric Williams had argued that profits from the slave
trade and sugar plantations were a major source of investment funds for Britain’s
nascent industries. Subsequent scholarship has tended to dispute this view.55
However, Joseph Inikori and Kenneth Pomeranz have recently proposed a re-
vised Williams thesis, arguing that the necessary contribution of colonial slavery
to British growth came not through reinvestment of profits, but through an
elastic supply of raw materials and an elastic demand for British exports.56 Beck-
ert relies heavily on this claim, arguing that “slavery and land expropriation . . .
53. Moreover, as Baptist (The Half That Has Never Been Told) admits, very few articles in Southern ag-
ricultural journals discuss the management of slaves, while many discuss new seeds, techniques, and
fertilizers, as would be expected on Olmstead and Rhode’s account (“Biological Innovation and Produc-
tivity Growth”). Baptist could object that Olmstead and Rhode’s account also implies an intensification
of labor, such that his story is compatible with theirs. That may be true, but then torture is not the
“ultimate cause” of productivity growth, but rather an intermediate one.
54. For the original argument to this effect, see Immanuel Wallerstein, “American Slavery and
Capitalist World Economy,” American Journal of Sociology 81, no. 5 (1976): 1199–1213. For a critique of
Wallerstein’s idea of capitalism, see Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique
of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review, no. I/104 (July–August 1977).
55. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; Barbara Solow and Stanley Engerman, eds., British Capitalism
and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
56. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009);
Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002).

created the expansive and elastic global cotton supply network necessary for the
Industrial Revolution.” Baptist and Johnson make similar arguments about the
dependence of Northern industry on Southern cotton and Southern markets.57
The literature on this issue is too large to summarize, but it should be clear
that an industry’s empirical links with slavery is insufficient evidence of “depen-
dence.” The latter claim contains implicit counterfactuals: that without slavery
industrialization would have been averted, diminished, or delayed. However,
Beckert himself shows that Britain’s cotton industry was capable of doing with-
out slave-grown cotton during and after the American Civil War. He might object
that Egypt and India couldn’t have stepped into the breach earlier, but when
Britain was briefly cut off from American cotton imports by the war of 1812,
the price of cotton rose less than it did in the 1860s, suggesting less dependence
in this earlier period.
It is also questionable whether the Northern US economy was ever “dependent”
on slave-produced cotton, either as an input to manufacturing or as a revenue-
generating export. Ironically this argument was first made by slave owners them-
selves, and it became a fateful mistake in the hands of the secessionists, who
assumed that the Northern economy could not survive without Southern cotton.
Baptist, in his “back of the envelope” calculation, uses some creative accounting
to come up with a multiplier of nine, such that cotton worth 5 percent of gross
domestic product (GDP) ends up contributing 40 percent.58 In the 1960s Douglass
North made a more serious case for Northern dependency on Southern exports.
However, North’s estimates of interregional trade flows were soon challenged by
economic historians.59 Yet none of these authors deal with these challenges or
57. Beckert, “Capitalism and Slavery,” 92, xx. Baptist makes the even stronger claim that the in-
creased productivity of slaves was “an absolutely necessary increase if the Western world was to burst out
of the 10,000-year Malthusian cycle of agriculture” (130). Beckert’s own take on Northern industry
appears to have undergone a change in recent years. In his first book, The Monied Metropolis (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), Beckert carefully distinguished merchants from manufactures, and
challenged the conventional narrative that traces the origins of the latter to the former. Yet in recent
articles he appears to revive that narrative by tracing a seamless link between Southern planters, New
York merchants, and Northern manufacturers. See, e.g., Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, “Partners in
Iniquity,” New York Times, April 2, 2011.
58. Baptist, The Half That Has Never Been Told, 321–22. Baptist’s calculation is marred by double-
counting and inclusion of transfers (which are excluded from the total GDP estimate he uses). He also
fails to recognize that all economic activities have second- and third-order effects of the kind he de-
scribes. If we added them all up we could account for 1,000 percent of GDP.
59. North, Economic Growth ; Albert Fishlow, “Antebellum Interregional Trade Reconsidered,” Amer-
ican Economic Review 54, no. 3 (1964): 352–64; Gallman, “Self-Sufficiency in the Cotton Economy”;
Diane Lindstrom, “Southern Dependence upon Interregional Grain Supplies: A Review of the Trade
Flows, 1840–1860,” Agricultural History 44, no. 1 (1970): 101–13.

even seem to be aware of this debate. They also overlook the fact that while cotton
represented a large share of US exports, exports were a small share of the ante-
bellum US economy, averaging 6 percent of GDP from 1800–1860.60
As for the textile industry, the real question is not whether Lowell or Man-
chester could have done without slave-produced cotton, but what they would
have had to pay for it. A higher price may have put pressure on less efficient
mills, but raw cotton was a small component of the final textile price, and demand
was not particularly elastic.61 Thus it is hard to believe that a modest increase in
the price of raw cotton would have held back an industry that was experienc-
ing compounded revolutions in productivity. Moreover, while we can’t know for
sure how much it would have cost the British economy to do without slave-
produced cotton, we do know it was possible, for French mills relied on cotton
from the Eastern Mediterranean well into the early nineteenth century.62
Furthermore, it is not at all clear that industrialization depended on cotton.
Since the Atlantic sugar trade preceded British industrialization, Williams could at
least plausibly attribute a causal primacy to the former. Yet cotton was a compara-
tive latecomer to the Atlantic economy. By the mid 1700s, before it began to
import slave-grown cotton on a major scale, Britain had already pulled away from
the rest of Europe in terms of population growth and urbanization. The British
woolen-textile industry was by then the largest in the world. Underlying this trans-
60. Robert E. Lipsey, “U.S. Foreign Trade and the Balance of Payments, 1800–1913,” in Cambridge
Economic History of the United States, vol. 2, The Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Stanley Engerman and
Robert Gallman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 685–732. Lipsey also shows that the
United States ran a current account deficit and capital account surplus for most of the nineteenth
century. Simply put, Americans didn’t have to sell anything to Britain in order to receive inflows of
British money.
61. Gavin Wright estimates world demand elasticity for raw cotton in the nineteenth century as
0.7 but later assumes unit elasticity, as do Fogel and Engerman (Time on the Cross); Gavin Wright,
“Cotton Competition and the Post-Bellum Recovery of the American South,” Journal of Economic His-
tory 34, no. 3 (1974): 610–35, and “World Demand for Cotton during the Nineteenth Century: Reply,”
Journal of Economic History 39, no. 4 (1979): 1023–24.
62. See McCloskey’s estimate that cutting cotton imports by half would have reduced British
productivity growth by at most 5–8 percent and national income by even less; Deirdre McCloskey,
Bourgeois Dignity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 218–21. We may also look at sugar to
estimate such counterfactuals. The abolition of the slave trade in 1808 led to no increase in British
sugar prices, and when sugar prices did rise in the 1840s after the abolition of slavery in British
colonies, this was soon corrected by removing tariffs that had been introduced as a concession to the
ex–slave owners. Obviously freed slaves could be coerced to work in other ways. The main cost of
abolition to the British was not in raw materials or profits but in the expense of maintaining naval
blockades against slave traders: Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977).

298 | CRIT ICAL HIS TORI CAL ST UDI ES FALL 2015
formation was an enormous revolution in agricultural productivity that not only

provided displaced agricultural labor to booming mill towns but also led to falling
grain prices and rising real wages.63 The resulting expanded home market (con-
sisting of wage workers with more discretionary income and farmers who were
now dependent on markets for their inputs), along with growing export markets,
contributed to industrialization, meaning that a growing share of workers were
employed in industry. What may have turned this into an industrial revolution (the
innovations of Hargreaves, Arkwright, Watt, etc.) was that British real wages had
by then become the highest in the world, generating huge rewards to labor-saving
innovation.64 Moreover, it was in woolens, not cotton, that this latter revolution
began.
It’s not that Beckert ignores seventeenth- and eighteenth-century preconditions
for industrialization; rather, it’s that he focuses only on colonies and trade, to the
exclusion of domestic factors.65 This is a mercantilist view of economic growth, one
that was popular at the time. But as many have pointed out in retrospect, there
was little that was exceptional about Britain’s trading empire. The Spanish, Portu-
guese, and French often had richer colonies, but none experienced either large
scale industrialization or an industrial revolution. What Britain had that they
didn’t was rapid productivity growth in agriculture, an expanding home market,
and rising real wages. In short, it had capitalism. The rise of capitalism cannot be
explained by an influx of slave-produced cotton for the simple reason that it
predates it.
None of this is to dispute “the centrality of slavery” to nineteenth-century capi-
talism. It is simply to point out that a center is not necessarily an origin. In recogni-
tion of this, Robin Blackburn has suggested inverting the Williams thesis.66 For
while it is questionable that British and Northern industry were dependent on
63. Robert Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” Past & Present, no. 97 (1982):
16–113; Robert Allen, “Economic Structure and Agricultural Productivity in Europe, 1300–1800,” Eu-
ropean Review of Economic History 3 (2000): 1–25.
64. Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2009), 2. Allen, like Pomeranz, also emphasizes cheap coal, but as Mokyr has pointed
out, the latter was itself largely a product of the industrial revolution, which reduced the cost of
transporting coal: Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1850 (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 270.
65. Beckert (“Capitalism and Slavery”) implicitly concedes the initial importance of the home
market by pointing out that protectionism was crucial to the development of the British cotton indus-
try, but he fails to account for the size and growth of this market.
66. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso 1988), 26. See
also Mokyr, Enlightened Economy, 162.

Southern slavery, the reverse does not hold. There would have been no African
slaves in the New World had European markets not existed for the products of
their labor, but capitalism in Europe gave a new lease of life to slavery in the
Americas. European sugar consumption was stagnating in the late eighteenth
century. The industrial revolution provided planters with a new, more elastic de-
mand for colonial products. And just as British wages began to rise, opening up
new markets for consumer goods, British manufacturers were finding ways to
produce those goods at lower and lower costs. As a result of this distinctly capital-
ist dynamic (of cheapening goods and expanding consumption), the demand for
raw materials could literally rise without limit. Before the industrial revolution,
the world’s per capita cotton production fluctuated around a constant level; since
then—for over two centuries—it has grown almost every year.
WHY W AS SLAVERY CA PIT ALIST?

The “new historians of capitalism” are right that antebellum slavery was capital-
ist. They are right that the high rates of productivity growth on cotton plantations
is a good indicator of that. And they are right that there is no incompatibility
between their being capitalist and their use of violent coercion. However, their
failure to define capitalism renders all of these insights confused. They never pro-
vide us with a clear statement as to why slavery was capitalist. Beckert correctly
identifies capitalism with “industrialization, rapid and continuous economic growth,
enormous productivity increase, and staggering social inequality.”67 But he never
asks what specifically drives these phenomena. As a result, he fails to clearly distin-
guish his own approach from that of Baptist and Johnson, who tend to identify
capitalism either with a mentality of venal self-interest or with an imperialistic ex-
pansion of world trade.
Antebellum plantations were capitalist not because slave owners had a “capi-
talist mentality” nor because slavery was part of some ineffable “capitalist world
system”: they were capitalist for the simple reason that land and slaves could
only be acquired through markets, typically on credit. Only a profitable planta-
tion could afford these inputs, and if a planter failed to produce cotton at a
competitive cost he would be threatened with foreclosure. These constraints no
doubt shaped the mentality of slave owners, but they operated independently of
it, for a planter who lacked the right mentality risked losing his land and slaves
to one who didn’t.
67. Beckert, “Capitalism and Slavery,” xiv.

300 | CRIT ICAL H IST ORICAL STUDIE S FALL 2015
What distinguishes capitalist society is not the existence of money or markets

per se, but the fact that people need to make money in order to survive. Thus
Brenner distinguishes between market involvement, a feature of all known socie-
ties, and market dependence, a unique feature of capitalist society.68 Capitalists are
dependent on capital markets: they must earn a profit on their investments or
go bankrupt. Wage laborers are dependent on labor markets: they must sell their
labor or go hungry. Farmers are dependent on land markets: if they can’t make
rent or mortgage payments they will be thrown off their land. In capitalism, not
only do producers have the opportunity to sell their product: they are compelled
to do so in order to maintain access to the means of production. They thus face a
competitive constraint: in order to afford necessary inputs, they must keep their
costs beneath market-determined prices. If prices fall because other producers
have found ways to reduce their costs, they have no option but to introduce the
same cost-cutting techniques themselves.69
In a new economics textbook, Samuel Bowles and his coauthors emphasize
this constraint: “A feudal lord who managed his estate poorly was just a shabby
lord. But the owner of a firm that could not produce goods that people would
buy, at prices that more than covered the cost, was bankrupt—and a bankrupt
owner is an ex-owner.”70 However, Bowles et al. are mistaken to further claim
that, like the lord, “the owner of a slave plantation who was not very good at
growing cotton retained his status. He was a less-than-averagely-wealthy slave
owner; but still an undisputed member of the elite.”71 In fact a slave owner in
the United States who failed to produce cotton in a cost-efficient manner be-
came an ex–slave owner: his slaves were literally taken away from him. I esti-
mate that, in South Carolina in the 1840s, more than half of all slaves sold in
upland cotton counties were sold by the courts on behalf of creditors. By con-
trast, in 2008, at the peak of the recent foreclosure crisis, only a quarter of all
home sales were foreclosures.72
68. Brenner, “Property and Progress.”

69. Ibid. Note that this is not quite the same as Polanyi’s identification of capitalism with the
emergence of markets (however “fictitious”) in land, labor, and capital. For factor markets can exist
without compelling factor owners to compete via the market. Brenner points to the French peasantry
in the nineteenth century as an example of noncapitalist subsistence production existing alongside a
modern land market.
70. Sam Bowles, Wendy Carlin, Arjun Jayadev, “The Capitalist Revolution” in CORE: The Economy
(February 2015), 21, http://www.core-econ.org/the-core-curriculum (registration required).
71. Ibid.
72. Author’s own data, available upon request. It is true that some slave owners managed to
escape their creditors by moving west, but since cotton could generally be produced more cheaply

Yet Bowles et al.’s description may well have applied to Latin American colo-
nies, many of which protected slave property from foreclosure.73 While Cuban
slave owners introduced mechanical innovations in the nineteenth century, pro-
ductivity growth in Brazil and the French Caribbean was comparatively low.74
Planters in these regions tended to grant more autonomy to their slaves (e.g., to
grow and market their own food, hire themselves out) and to manumit them
more frequently. This may be in part because slave imports remained cheap and
commodity exporters had access to captive colonial markets. Beckert argues that
slave owners elsewhere in the New World lacked the activist state found in the
United States, which supported slave owners by securing for them land and
transport. But one could equally say they were supported by a different kind of
state activism—one that exchanged political loyalty for secure incomes, often for
absentee slave owners. Limited credit and immigration meant that large planters
simply had less competitors to worry about. By contrast planters in the United
States continually faced the prospect of being displaced by an upwardly mobile
class of small farmers.75
The view of capitalism as a situation of widespread dependence on markets for
access to the means of production allows us to correct some misunderstandings in
the literature. For instance several historians have claimed that under slavery
“the market mediated the buying and selling of goods, not of labor-power.”76 It is
true that markets didn’t allocate slave labor within the plantation, but neither do
they allocate wage labor within factories. Insofar as it is capable of being either
hired or purchased slave labor is like any other capitalist commodity. The pres-
ence of a specialized class of slave traders in the antebellum South ensured that
slave markets were exceptionally liquid. Evidence of their allocative efficiency
can be found in the estimated net transfer, from 1820 to 1860, of more than half
there the result was the same, namely, the reallocation of slave labor, under competitive pressure,
from less productive to more productive uses.
73. Jacob Price, “Credit in the Slave Trade and Plantation Economies,” in Slavery and the Rise of
the Atlantic System, ed. Barbara Solow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 305; Stuart B.
Schwartz, “Early Brazilian Sugar Industry,” in Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic
World, 1450–1680, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 187.
74. Rebecca Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna, Slavery in Brazil
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Dale W. Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Mar-
tinique and the World Economy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
75. James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Vintage, 1983).
76. Steven Hahn, “Capitalists All!,” Reviews in American History (1983): 223. See also Douglas
Egerton, “Markets without a Market Revolution: Southern Planters and Capitalism,” Journal of the
Early Republic 16, no. 2 (1996): 212; Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York: Hill &
Wang, 1993), 172; and Genovese and Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital, 117.

a million slaves from the less productive plantations of the Old South to the more
productive plantations in the New South via the domestic slave trade alone.77
Another common misunderstanding is to conflate slaves with feudal serfs,
which are both then contrasted with modern wage labor. However, the labor of
slaves and wage laborers is actually distinguished from that of serfs (or subordi-
nate members of patriarchal households) in that it can be bought with money.
The existence of a money price gives the buyer of labor an incentive to econo-
mize on its use by increasing its productivity. And a competitive market for labor
ensures all buyers behave in this way, for those who adopt productivity-enhancing
innovations will retain more cash and be able to bid labor away from com-
petitors. Labor markets (whether slave or free) also allow firms to benefit from
economies of scale, for there is no necessary limit to the amount of labor which
one can acquire if one has the money. By contrast a feudal lord can typically only
expand his labor force by the violent conquest of free peasants or serfs belonging
to other lords. Thus in the latter case, competition favors the most militarily adept
rather than the most efficient producers. The same may be said of slave owners in
ancient civilizations where slaves were generally acquired through war and slave
markets were often limited.78
Indeed, there is something pristinely capitalist about the total commodifica-
tion of labor under slavery. Slaves are doubly alienated, for they lack property
in both the means of production and in themselves.79 Nineteenth-century slave
77. Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2005) 203–91. It is his failure to recognize the liquidity of slave labor markets that leads
Charles Post to argue that slaves could not be expelled from the labor process, giving planters no
incentive to introduce labor-saving technical change. This is belied not only by Deyle’s evidence of
liquid resale markets but also by Olmsted and Rhode’s evidence on productivity growth. However, Post
recognizes that planters were market dependent, and his approach is otherwise compatible with the
view presented here: Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
78. On ancient slavery, see Ellen Meiskins Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of
Athenian Democracy (London: Verso, 1988). On military competition under feudalism, see Robert
Brenner, “The Pre-history of Core-Periphery,” in Cores, Peripheries, and Globalization, ed. Peter Hanns
Reill and Balázs A. Szelényi (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011), 217–18. For an
account of the origins of capitalism based on such competition, see Alan Carling, Social Division
(London: Verso, 1991).
79. For a Marxian treatment of slave labor, see John J. Clegg and Duncan K. Foley, “A Marxian
Model of Wage and Slave Labor” (manuscript available on request). In value-theoretic terms the cost
of slave labor is variable capital that may take both a fixed (purchase) or circulating (maintenance cost,
rental) form. Where slave labor coexists with wage labor and capital is mobile (as in the nineteenth-
century United States), our model predicts the price of slaves will equal the present value of the
additional surplus value produced by slaves over and above wage laborers. This excess surplus value
arose because of the additional means of coercion and lack of exit options in the slave labor process.

markets in the United States were both more unified and more competitive
than markets for wage labor. Buyers in wage labor markets tended to have less
access to credit and frequently confronted a shortage of labor due to seasonal
fluctuations in the labor supply from farms and the ability of landless workers
to flee to the frontier. Moreover, a contract to rent, buy, or mortgage a slave
was enforceable by law, whereas the courts increasingly refused to enforce wage
contracts.80
In a capitalist order of fully specified property rights, it is wage labor rather
than slave labor that is the anomaly. Far from being a precapitalist holdover, en-
forceable labor contracts would be the dream of many an employer. Today, inden-
ture and debt peonage are legally restricted in most countries, not because em-
ployers found free labor to be in their enlightened self-interest but because workers
refused to accept a condition approximating slavery. Commenting on a French slave
code, Marx once wrote that “this subject one must study in detail to see what the
bourgeois makes of himself and of the worker when he can model the world ac-
cording to his own image without any interference.”81
C ON CL U S I O N
In a recent symposium in the Journal of American History, the economic historian
Naomi Lamoreaux pointed out that it is difficult to subject the new historians of
capitalism to critical scrutiny “because no-one is clear about what capitalism is.”82
Louis Hyman, an influential figure in the new field, responded by saying that
“simply defining capitalism is a bad idea. It is too deductive.”83 In the introduc-
tion to a reader on the history of capitalism coedited with Baptist, Hyman clarifies
his point: “the essential problem is not to primly define capitalism like a school-
marm, but to think about why it resists easy definition.”84
It is true that terminological debates can have a pedantic tone, and it is unlikely
they will be resolved anytime soon. However, if the new field is to last, it cannot
avoid the question of definition. Many scholars argue that capitalism is a mislead-
80. Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
81. Marx, Capital, 916 n. 4.
82. Sven Beckert et al., “Interchange: The History of Capitalism,” Journal of American History 101,
no. 2 (2014): 509. Lamoreaux qualifies that “I should say no one today; Karl Marx was clear.”
83. Ibid., 517.
84. Louis Hyman and Edward Baptist, eds., American Capitalism: A Reader (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2014).

304 | C RITI CAL HIST ORICAL STUDIE S FALL 2015
ing periodization, either because it is an ideal to which reality has never con-
formed, or because it has always existed, part of human nature. Lamoreaux, along
with many economic historians, appears to count herself among the latter group.85
If one is to convince such people that capitalism has a history, one must be able to
show that there is meaningful difference between a capitalist and noncapitalist
society. To put it slightly more politically: only by delineating its conceptual and
historical boundaries is it possible to denaturalize capitalism.
Examining the relation between capitalism and slavery may be particularly
helpful in this respect, for it requires specifying the boundaries of capitalism in an
area that has proven controversial. In this essay I’ve argued for tracing those
boundaries along a crucial axis: market dependence. Slave owners in the United
States behaved like capitalists because they (like all capitalists) were compelled to
compete via the market to maintain their status. Others have and will propose
alternative axes along which this boundary may be traced. Hopefully we can
have this debate without being schoolmarmish. However, it is clear that bracketing
the question of what we mean by capitalism will convince no one of the salience
or utility of the concept.
85. This view is reflected in another “new history of capitalism” that has recently been put together
by economic historians: Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson, eds., The Cambridge History of Capitalism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).


Capitalism and Slavery

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Capitalism and Slavery

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Capitalism and Slavery

John J. Clegg, New York University

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

hazard a definition, and Seth Rockman, another leading historian of capitalism,

NAMING THE SYST EM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

food.38 Neither demographic nor documentary evidence provides support for

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

formation was an enormous revolution in agricultural productivity that not only

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

WHY W AS SLAVERY CA PIT ALIST?

67. Beckert, “Capitalism and Slavery,” xiv.

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

What distinguishes capitalist society is not the existence of money or markets

68. Brenner, “Property and Progress.”

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

This content downloaded from 23.235.32.0 on Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:01 PM

Вам также может понравиться