Capitalism and Slavery
At least since Eric Williams, how important chattel slavery was for the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution is a question that continues to excite scholarly debate and popular commentary (see Matthew Desmond's essay in the NYT's 1619 Project). Below are some readings I think are useful—either usefully wrong, or useful historiography and context, or useful empirics.
Top picks:
Baptist, Edward E. 2014. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books.
Beckert, Sven. 2015. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Fields, Barbara Jeanne. 1990. “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America.” New Left Review 181(1): 95–118.
Fogel, Robert William. 1994. Without Consent Or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery. W. W. Norton & Company.
Fogel, Robert William. 2003. The Slavery Debates, 1952-1990: A Retrospective. LSU Press.
James, Cyril Lionel Robert. 1989. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Vintage.
Olmstead, Alan L., and Paul W. Rhode. 2018. “Cotton, Slavery, and the New History of Capitalism.” Explorations in Economic History 67: 1–17.
Ransom, Roger L., and Richard Sutch. 2001. One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation. Cambridge University Press.
Williams, Eric. 2014. Capitalism and Slavery. UNC Press Books.
Wright, Gavin. 2013. Slavery and American Economic Development. LSU Press.
Also worth reading:
Adams, Sean P. 2004. Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America. JHU Press.
Bois, W. E. B. Du. 1998. Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880. Simon and Schuster.
Daudin, Guillaume. 2004. “Profitability of Slave and Long-Distance Trading in Context: The Case of Eighteenth-Century France.” The Journal of Economic History 64(1): 144–71.
Desmond, Matthew. 2019. “American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation.” The New York Times.
Eltis, David, Frank D. Lewis, and David Richardson. 2005. “Slave Prices, the African Slave Trade, and Productivity in the Caribbean, 1674–18071.” The Economic History Review 58(4): 673–700.
Engerman, Stanley L. 1986. “Slavery and Emancipation in Comparative Perspective: A Look at Some Recent Debates.” The Journal of economic history 46(2): 317–39.
Esposito, Elena. 2022. “The Side Effects of Immunity: Malaria and African Slavery in the United States.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 14(3): 290–328.
Fenske, James. 2012. “Land Abundance and Economic Institutions: Egba Land and Slavery, 1830–19141.” The Economic History Review 65(2): 527–55.
Fenske, James, and Namrata Kala. 2015. “Climate and the Slave Trade.” Journal of Development Economics 112: 19–32.
Fields, Barbara J. 2001. “‘ Origins of the New South’ and the Negro Question.” The Journal of Southern History 67(4): 811–26.
Fields, Barbara J., and Karen E. Fields. 2022. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Verso Books.
Hummel, Jeffrey. 2013. Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War. Open Court.
Johnson, Walter. 2013. River of Dark Dreams. Harvard University Press.
Majewski, John D. 2009. Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation. Univ of North Carolina Press.
Morgan, Kenneth. 2001. Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660–1800. Cambridge University Press.
Olmstead, Alan L., and Paul W. Rhode. 2008. “Biological Innovation and Productivity Growth in the Antebellum Cotton Economy.” The Journal of Economic History 68(4): 1123–71.
Otto, John. 1989. The Southern Frontiers, 1607-1860: The Agricultural Evolution of the Colonial and Antebellum South. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
Surdam, David G. 1998. “King Cotton: Monarch or Pretender? The State of the Market for Raw Cotton on the Eve of the American Civil War.” Economic History Review: 113–32.
Toman, Jane T. 2005. “The Gang System and Comparative Advantage.” Explorations in Economic History 42(2): 310–23.