Sven Beckert, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Few topics have animated today’s chattering classes more than
capitalism. In the wake of the global economic crisis, the discussion has
spanned political boundaries, with conservative newspapers in Britain and
Germany running stories on the "future of capitalism" (as if that
were in doubt) and Korean Marxists analyzing its allegedly self-destructive
tendencies. Pope Francis has made capitalism a central theme of his papacy,
while the French economist Thomas Piketty attained rock-star status with a
700-page book full of tables and statistics and the succinct but decisively
unsexy title Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press).
With such contemporary drama, historians have taken notice.
They observe, quite rightly, that the world we live in cannot be understood
without coming to terms with the long history of capitalism—a process that has
arguably unfolded over more than half a millennium. They are further encouraged
by the all-too-frequent failings of economists, who have tended to naturalize
particular economic arrangements by defining the "laws" of their
development with mathematical precision and preferring short-term over
long-term perspectives. What distinguishes today’s historians of capitalism is
that they insist on its contingent nature, tracing how it has changed over time
as it has revolutionized societies, technologies, states, and many if not all
facets of life.
Nowhere is this scholarly trend more visible than in the
United States. And no issue currently attracts more attention than the
relationship between capitalism and slavery.
If capitalism, as many believe, is about wage labor, markets,
contracts, and the rule of law, and, most important, if it is based on the idea
that markets naturally tend toward maximizing human freedom, then how do we
understand slavery’s role within it? No other national story raises that
question with quite the same urgency as the history of the United States: The
quintessential capitalist society of our time, it also looks back on long
complicity with slavery. But the topic goes well beyond one nation. The
relationship of slavery and capitalism is, in fact, one of the keys to
understanding the origins of the modern world.
For too long, many historians saw no problem in the
opposition between capitalism and slavery. They depicted the history of
American capitalism without slavery, and slavery as quintessentially
noncapitalist. Instead of analyzing it as the modern institution that it was,
they described it as premodern: cruel, but marginal to the larger history of
capitalist modernity, an unproductive system that retarded economic growth, an
artifact of an earlier world. Slavery was a Southern pathology, invested in
mastery for mastery’s sake, supported by fanatics, and finally removed from the
world stage by a costly and bloody war.
Some scholars have always disagree with such accounts. In the
1930s and 1940s, C.L.R. James and Eric Williams argued for the centrality of
slavery to capitalism, though their findings were largely ignored. Nearly half
a century later, two American economists, Stanley L. Engerman and Robert
William Fogel, observed in their controversial book Time on the Cross (Little,
Brown, 1974) the modernity and profitability of slavery in the United States.
Now a flurry of books and conferences are building on those often
unacknowledged foundations. They emphasize the dynamic nature of New World
slavery, its modernity, profitability, expansiveness, and centrality to
capitalism in general and to the economic development of the United States in
particular.
The historians Robin Blackburn in England, Rafael Marquese in
Brazil, Dale Tomich in the United States, and Michael Zeuske in Germany led the
study of slavery in the Atlantic world. They have now been joined by a group of
mostly younger American historians, like Walter Johnson, Seth Rockman, Caitlin
C. Rosenthal, and Edward E. Baptist looking at the United States.
While their works differ, often significantly, all insist
that slavery was a key part of American capitalism—especially during the 19th
century, the moment when the institution became inextricable from the expansion
of modern industry—and to the development of the United States as a whole.
For the first half of the 19th century, slavery was at the
core of the American economy. The South was an economically dynamic part of the
nation (for its white citizens); its products not only established the United
States’ position in the global economy but also created markets for
agricultural and industrial goods grown and manufactured in New England and the
mid-Atlantic states. More than half of the nation’s exports in the first six
decades of the 19th century consisted of raw cotton, almost all of it grown by
slaves. In an important book, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the
Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press, 2013), Johnson observes that steam
engines were more prevalent on the Mississippi River than in the New England
countryside, a telling detail that testifies to the modernity of slavery.
Johnson sees slavery not just as an integral part of American capitalism, but
as its very essence. To slavery, a correspondent from Savannah noted in the
publication Southern Cultivator, "does this country largely—very
largely—owe its greatness in commerce, manufactures, and its general
prosperity."
Much of the recent work confirms that 1868 observation,
taking us outside the major slaveholding areas themselves and insisting on the
national importance of slavery, all the way up to its abolition in 1865. In
these accounts, slavery was just as present in the counting houses of Lower
Manhattan, the spinning mills of New England, and the workshops of budding
manufacturers in the Blackstone Valley in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as on
the plantations in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. The slave economy of the
Southern states had ripple effects throughout the entire economy, not just
shaping but dominating it.
Merchants in New York City, Boston, and elsewhere, like the
Browns in cotton and the Taylors in sugar, organized the trade of slave-grown
agricultural commodities, accumulating vast riches in the process. Sometimes
the connections to slavery were indirect, but not always: By the 1840s, James
Brown was sitting in his counting house in Lower Manhattan hiring overseers for
the slave plantations that his defaulting creditors had left to him. Since
planters needed ever more funds to invest in land and labor, they drew on
global capital markets; without access to the resources of New York and London,
the expansion of slave agriculture in the American South would have been all
but impossible.
The profits accumulated through slave labor had a lasting
impact. Both the Browns and the Taylors eventually moved out of commodities and
into banking. The Browns created an institution that partially survives to this
day as Brown Brothers, Harriman & Co., while Moses Taylor took charge of
the precursor of Citibank. Some of the 19th century’s most important
financiers—including the Barings and Rothschilds—were deeply involved in the
"Southern trade," and the profits they accumulated were eventually
reinvested in other sectors of the global economy. As a group of freedmen in
Virginia observed in 1867, "our wives, our children, our husbands, have
been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locate upon. … And
then didn’t we clear the land, and raise the crops of corn, of tobacco, of
rice, of sugar, of every thing. And then didn’t the large cities in the North
grow up on the cotton and the sugars and the rice that we made?" Slavery,
they understood, was inscribed into the very fabric of the American economy.
Southern slavery was important to American capitalism in
other ways as well. As management scholars and historians have discovered in
recent years, innovations in tabulating the cost and productivity of labor derived
from the world of plantations. They were unusual work sites in that owners
enjoyed nearly complete control over their workers and were thus able to
reinvent the labor process and the accounting for it—a power that no
manufacturer enjoyed in the mid-19th century.
As Caitlin Rosenthal has shown, slave labor allowed the
enslavers to experiment in novel ways with labor control. Edward E. Baptist,
who has studied in great detail the work practices on plantations and
emphasized their modernity in The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the
Making of Modern Capitalism (Basic Books), has gone so far as to argue that as
new methods of labor management entered the repertoire of plantation owners,
torture became widely accepted. Slave plantations, not railroads, were in fact
America’s first "big business."
Moreover, as Seth Rockman has shown, the slave-dominated
economy of the South also constituted an important market for goods produced by
a wide variety of Northern manufacturers and artisans. Supplying plantations
clothing and brooms, plows and fine furniture, Northern businesses dominated
the large market in the South, which itself did not see significant
industrialization before the end of the 19th century.
Further, as all of us learned in school, industrialization in
the United States focused at first largely on cotton manufacturing: the
spinning of cotton thread with newfangled machines and eventually the weaving
of that thread with looms powered at first by water and then by steam. The raw
material that went into the factories was grown almost exclusively by slaves.
Indeed, the large factories emerging along the rivers of New England, with
their increasing number of wage workers, cannot be imagined without reliable,
ever-increasing supplies of ever-cheaper raw cotton. The Cabots, Lowells, and
Slaters—whatever their opinions on slavery—all profited greatly from the
availability of cheap, slave-grown cotton.
As profits accumulated in the cotton trade, in cotton
manufacturing, in cotton growing, and in supplying Southern markets, many
cultural, social, and educational institutions benefited: congregations,
hospitals, universities. Given that the United States in the first half of the
19th century was a society permeated by slavery and its earnings, it is hardly
surprising that institutions that at first glance seem far removed from the
violence of plantation life came to be implicated in slavery as well.
Craig Steven Wilder has shown in Ebony and Ivy: Race,
Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (Bloomsbury, 2013)
how Brown and Harvard Universities, among others, drew donations from merchants
involved in the slave trade, had cotton manufacturers on their boards, trained
generations of Southern elites who returned home to a life of violent mastery,
and played central roles in creating the ideological underpinnings of slavery.
By 1830, one million Americans, most of them enslaved, grew
cotton. Raw cotton was the most important export of the United States, at the
center of America’s financial flows and emerging modern business practices, and
at the core of its first modern manufacturing industry. As John Brown, a
fugitive slave, observed in 1854: "When the price [of cotton] rises in the
English market, the poor slaves immediately feel the effects, for they are
harder driven, and the whip is kept more constantly going."
Just as cotton, and with it slavery, became key to the U.S.
economy, it also moved to the center of the world economy and its most
consequential transformations: the creation of a globally interconnected
economy, the Industrial Revolution, the rapid spread of capitalist social
relations in many parts of the world, and the Great Divergence—the moment when
a few parts of the world became quite suddenly much richer than every other part.
The humble fiber, transformed into yarn and cloth, stood at the center of the
emergence of the industrial capitalism that is so familiar to us today. Our
modern world originates in the cotton factories, cotton ports, and cotton
plantations of the 18th and 19th centuries. The United States was just one
nexus in a much larger story that connected artisans in India, European
manufacturers, and, in the Americas, African slaves and land-grabbing settlers.
It was those connections, over often vast distances, that created an empire of
cotton—and with it modern capitalism.
To understand American slavery, we need to analyze the
relative strength of social and political structures in places such as the
18th-century Ottoman Empire and 1840s western India. To understand capitalism’s
relationship to slavery, we need to see the control of cultivators in Africa
over their land and labor, as well as the transformations of the Indian
countryside, the institutional structures of capitalism in Britain, and the
state structures of Egypt.
It is at this point that the history of capitalism connects
in refreshing ways with another important emerging field, global history. As is
widely known, history as an academic discipline emerged hand-in-hand with the
modern nation-state, and indeed played an important part in its constitution.
It is for this reason that most history has been framed within the borders of
modern states. In recent years, however, some historians have tried to think
beyond such frameworks, bringing together stories of regional or even global
scope—for example, Charles S. Maier’s Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood
(Harvard University Press) and Jürgen Osterhammel’s The Transformation of the
World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press).
Within that literature, economic history has played a
particularly important role, with trailblazing works such as Kenneth Pomeranz’s
The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy
(Princeton, 2000) and Marcel van der Linden’s Workers of the World: Essays
Toward a Global Labor History (Brill, 2008). Economic history, which for so
long has been focused mostly on "national" questions—the "coming
of managerial capitalism" in the United States, "organized capitalism"
in Germany, the "sprouts of capitalism" in China—now increasingly
tackles broader questions, looking at capitalism as a global system.
When we apply a global perspective, we develop a new
appreciation for the centrality of slavery, in the United States and elsewhere,
in the emergence of modern capitalism. We can also understand how that
dependence on slavery was eventually overcome later in the 19th century. We
come to understand that the ability of European merchants to secure
ever-greater quantities of cotton cloth from South Asia in the 17th and 18th
centuries was crucial to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as cloth came to be
the core commodity exchanged for slaves on the western coast of Africa. We
grasp that the rapidly expanding markets for South Asian cloth in Europe and
elsewhere motivated Europeans to enter the cotton-manufacturing industry, which
had flourished elsewhere in the world for millennia.
And a global perspective allows us to comprehend in new ways
how slavery became central to the Industrial Revolution. As machine production
of cotton textiles expanded in Britain and continental Europe, traditional
sources of raw cotton—especially cultivators in the Ottoman Empire as well as
in Africa and India—proved insufficient. With European merchants unable to
encourage the monocultural production of cotton in these regions and to
transform peasant agriculture, they began to draw on slave-grown cotton, at
first from the West Indies and Brazil, and by the 1790s especially in the
United States.
As a result, Europe’s ability to industrialize rested at
first entirely on the control of expropriated lands and enslaved labor in the
Americas. It was able to escape the constraints on its own resources—no cotton,
after all, was grown in Europe—because of its increasing and often violent
domination of global trade networks, along with the control of huge territories
in the Americas. For the first 80 years of modern industry, the only
significant quantities of raw cotton entering European markets were produced by
slaves—and not from the vastly larger cotton harvests of China or India.
By 1800, 25 percent of the cotton that landed in Liverpool, the
world’s most important cotton port, originated in the United States; 20 years
later, that proportion had increased to 59 percent; by 1850, 72 percent of the
cotton consumed in Britain was grown in the United States, with similar
proportions for other European countries. A global perspective lets us see that
the ability to secure more and cheaper cotton gave European and North American
manufacturers the ability to increase the production of cheap yarn and cloth,
which in turn allowed them to capture ancient cotton markets in Asia, Africa,
and elsewhere, furthering a wave of deindustrialization in those parts of the
world. Innovations in long-distance trade, the investment of capital over long
distances, and the institutions in which this new form of capitalist
globalization were embedded all derived from a global trade dominated by slave
labor and colonial expansion.
A global perspective on the history of cotton also shows that
slave labor is as much a sign of the weakness as of the strength of Western capital
and states. The ability to subdue labor in distant locations testified to the
accumulated power of European and North American capital owners. Yet it also
showed their inability to transform peasant agriculture. It was only in the
last third of the 19th century that peasant producers in places such as Central
Asia, West Africa, India, and upcountry Georgia, in the United States, could be
integrated into the global empire of cotton, making a world possible in which
the growing of cotton for industry expanded drastically without resort to
enslaving the world’s cotton workers. Indeed, one of the weaknesses of a
perspective that focuses almost exclusively on the fabulously profitable
slave/cotton complex of the antebellum American South is its inability to explain
the emergence of an empire of cotton without slavery.
We cannot know if the cotton industry was the only possible
way into the modern industrial world, but we do know that it was the path to
global capitalism. We do not know if Europe and North America could have grown
rich without slavery, but we do know that industrial capitalism and the Great
Divergence in fact emerged from the violent caldron of slavery, colonialism,
and the expropriation of land. In the first 300 years of the expansion of capitalism,
particularly the moment after 1780 when it entered into its decisive industrial
phase, it was not the small farmers of the rough New England countryside who
established the United States’ economic position. It was the backbreaking labor
of unremunerated American slaves in places like South Carolina, Mississippi,
and Alabama.
When we marshal big arguments about the West’s superior
economic performance, and build these arguments upon an account of the West’s
allegedly superior institutions like private-property rights, lean government,
and the rule of law, we need to remember that the world Westerners forged was
equally characterized by exactly the opposite: vast confiscation of land and
labor, huge state intervention in the form of colonialism, and the rule of
violence and coercion. And we also need to qualify the fairy tale we like to
tell about capitalism and free labor. Global capitalism is characterized by a
whole variety of labor regimes, one of which, a crucial one, was slavery.
During its heyday, however, slavery was seen as essential to
the economy of the Western world. No wonder The Economist worried in September
1861, when Union General John C. Frémont emancipated slaves in Missouri, that
such a "fearful measure" might spread to other slaveholding states,
"inflict[ing] utter ruin and universal desolation on those fertile
territories"—and on the merchants of Boston and New York, "whose
prosperity … has always been derived" to a large extent from those
territories. Slavery did not die because it was unproductive or unprofitable,
as some earlier historians have argued. Slavery was not some feudal remnant on
the way to extinction. It died because of violent struggle, because enslaved
workers continually challenged the people who held them in bondage—nowhere more
successfully than in the 1790s in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now
Haiti, site of the first free nation of color in the New World), and because a
courageous group of abolitionists struggled against some of the dominant
economic interests of their time.
A contributing factor in the death of slavery was the fact
that it was a system not just of labor exploitation but of rule that drew in
particular ways on state power. Southern planters had enormous political power.
They needed it: to protect the institution of slavery itself, to expand its
reach into ever more lands, to improve infrastructures, and to position the
United States within the global economy as an exporter of agricultural
commodities.
In time, the interests of the South conflicted more and more
with those of a small but growing group of Northern industrialists, farmers,
and workers. Able to mobilize labor through wage payments, Northerners demanded
a strong state to raise tariffs, build infrastructures conducive to domestic
industrialization, and guarantee the territorial extension of free labor in the
United States. Afraid that they were losing control over essential levers of
power, slaveowners tried to strike out on their own.
After the Civil War, a new kind of capitalism arose, in the
United States and elsewhere. Yet that new capitalism—characterized first and
foremost by states with unprecedented bureaucratic, infrastructural, and
military capacities, and by wage labor—had been enabled by the profits,
institutions, networks, technologies, and innovations that emerged from
slavery, colonialism, and land expropriation.
That legacy is still with us today. The great inequalities,
both domestically and internationally, that characterize the world we live in
are at least partly the result of capitalism’s long and violent history.
There are still many open questions about slavery and
capitalism, some specific, some broad. We have not yet conclusively shown, for
example, how methods of labor control migrated from the world of the plantation
to the world of the factory. We need more-detailed research on where the
profits from slavery accumulated in Europe and the American North, and how they
mattered to other sectors of the economy. We would benefit from a better
understanding of how the tight economic connection between Northern
entrepreneurs and slavery came to be undone. And we have only begun to account
for what the rethinking of slavery does to our more general understanding of
capitalism.
