Sven Beckert - Slavery and Capitalism
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... Read more:
