slave trade Archives - Not Even Past

Sven Beckert places cotton at the center of his colossal history of modern capitalism, arguing that the growth of the industry was the “launching pad for the broader Industrial Revolution.” Beckert follows cotton through a staggering spatial and chronological scope. Spanning five thousand years of cotton’s history, with a particular focus on the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, Empire of Cotton is a tale of the spread of industrialization and the rise of modern global capitalism. Through emphasizing the international nature of the cotton industry, Beckert exemplifies how history of the commodity and global history are ideally suited to each other. Produced over the course of ten years and with a transnational breadth of archive material, Empire of Cotton is a bold, ambitious work that confronts challenges that many historians could only dream of attempting. The result is a popular history that is largely successful in attaining the desirable combination of being both rigorous and entertaining.

Beckert frames his history of cotton with two intertwining terms: “war capitalism” and “industrial capitalism.” Both terms lack precise definitions but Beckert generally refers to their underlying themes. A play on the term “war communism” from the Russian Civil War, “war capitalism” was a period when European statesmen and capitalists established their dominance in global cotton networks, often through violent, imperialist means of conquest and expansion. Beckert counters the notion that Europeans controlled the cotton industry as a result of scientific innovation, arguing that, “Europeans became important to the worlds of cotton not because of new inventions or superior technologies, but because of their ability to reshape and then dominate global cotton networks.” “Industrial capitalism” evokes the more discreet ways in which states intervened to protect the interests of global capitalists through more diplomatic channels, preserving the initial gains made through “war capitalism.” Neither concept is exclusive, with “war capitalism” and “industrial capitalism” continually interacting with one another and overlapping chronologically, as Beckert underscores how “industrial capitalism’s institutional innovations facilitated war capitalism’s death.”

Enslaved African Americans pick cotton in Savannah, Georgia, sometime between 1867 and 1890 (via Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division)

Through the discussion of these two concepts, Beckert underlines the importance of forced labor, with an emphasis on slavery in particular, in the development of global capitalism. Beckert claims that “the flow of cotton from the United States to Europe and of capital in the opposite direction” was at the core of developing international trade networks. The author echoes an important and emerging argument: modern global capitalism relied upon the growth of the cotton industry, which was itself indebted to slavery, as “cotton demanded quite literally a hunt for labor.” Beckert asserts that the “physical and psychological violence of holding millions in bondage were of central importance to the expansion of cotton production in the United States and of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.” Empire of Cotton subsequently reads as a critique of long held complacencies about the centrality of the slave trade to the development of modern capitalism.

Beckert establishes a wide-ranging, holistic study that glides from country to country, focusing on the market of cotton rather than diving into the weeds of national specificities. One of the great strengths of macrohistory is that these works tend not to be restricted by the confines of the nation state, providing a means of escaping exceptionalism and promoting a more global approach to historical study. Expanding on such works as Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and more recently Elizabeth Abbott’s Sugar: A Bittersweet History Beckert outlines a vast narrative told through the lens of a singular commodity. With regard to the history of cotton specifically, Beckert largely complements Giorgio Riello’s 2013 book Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World, which traces cotton production from 1000-2000. While there is common ground between the two authors in terms of scope and a focus on the economics of the cotton industry, Beckert emphasizes the direct link between the cotton industry and the tumultuous development of modern capitalism, whereas Riello is more interested in the processes of globalization.

“The queen of industry, or the new south:” Cover illustration shows a man labeled “King Cotton” leaning against a bale of cotton and stomping on the back of a slave in 1861, textile mills spewing smoke as African Americans pick cotton in 1882, and Columbia working at a spinning machine in the middle (via Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division)

For all its impressive qualities, however, there are certain shortcomings that should be addressed. There is a lack of conceptual engagement with violence, modern capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution, each of which merit further attention. Moreover, “war capitalism” and “industrial capitalism” are rather elusive analytical frameworks, making it difficult to directly discern between the two and their distinct utility. Additionally, the unquestioned preeminence of cotton presents an overly monocausal explanation for larger trends that are arguably more multifaceted. For instance, E.A. Wrigley (2010) argues that in 1801 the British Empire’s four largest industries were cotton, wool, building, and leather – with each component being of roughly equal size. Therefore, the assumption that cotton has a direct connection to industrialization prior to 1801, and is the most important of the four largest industries, warrants more of a discussion. Furthermore, there is a curious evasion, considering Beckert’s revisionist stance, of one of the most unavoidable scholarly traditions surrounding modern global capitalism: Marxism. Perhaps this is partially due to the enormity inherent in such a study. Nevertheless, cotton’s centrality is taken as a given, and while it would be perfectly legitimate to argue that the cotton industry was vital to the Industrial Revolution, Empire of Cotton’s analytical base would be on much firmer ground with a deeper conceptual engagement with violence and capitalism.

On the other hand, it could also be argued that Beckert is merely being conscious of his readership and aiming to make academic scholarship more accessible to a wider audience. What is lost through a certain amount of oversight in analyzing conceptual frameworks is counterbalanced by its engaging narrative. Empire of Cotton is more than deserving of its wide acclaim, demonstrating the potential of ambitious and exciting trends in historiographical inquiry. The author strikes a fine balance between effortlessly fluent prose and complex subject matter, making a significant contribution to the fields of global history and history of the commodity as well as enticing a wider audience. While Empire of Cotton is a dense, impressively researched book, Beckert manages to appeal to a broader audience and create a fluently written, academically rigorous account of cotton’s journey from a local, artisanal product to a global, mass-produced commodity.

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Review: Seeds of Empire by Andrew Torget (2015)
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Review: The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective by Robert C. Allen (2009)

By Daina Ramey Berry

The Price for their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved men, women, and children in the American domestic slave trade, from before they were born until after their death, in both public and private market transactions and appraisals. How was a slave’s price determined? How did planters and traders establish values for enslaved people with specific ages, specific skills, or specific health conditions? Studies of the domestic slave trade rarely discuss the economic meaning and social significance of the market values and appraisals assigned to enslaved people. When they do discuss slave prices, the focus has mostly been on prime male slaves. This study examines slave prices of women, men, and children during their entire “lifecycle,” including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and postmortem.

Another original component of this work is its illumination of enslaved people’s reaction to being appraised, bartered, and sold. Enslaved people remembered their values. “Men or mechanics were worth from 12 to 1300 dollars,” recalled one former slave, “and boys 8 and 9 years old, 5 and 6 hundred dollars.” The book explores slaves as commodities and as people through all phases of their lives. Did slaves know their market values and/or appraisals? Were they impacted if they commanded high prices or if their buyers considered them “bargains”? How did their monetary values shape relationships within the enslaved community and beyond? Rather than explore how traders turned “people into prices,” as historian Walter Johnson did in Soul by Soul, this book converts the prices into people. The dollar values placed on enslaved people have more meaning when one considers their humanity, how they may have felt on the auction block, and how they responded to being sold “to the highest bidder.”

Now that the book is complete and on sale, I would like to share a few other thoughts about this decade long endeavor. First, I love being in the archives and have been called an “archive rat” with pride. The experience of discovery feeds my desire to locate untold stories and share them with readers. Enslaved people drove this research just as plantation records offered foundational evidence and a starting point. I combed through thousands of records to find individual enslaved people who were often overlooked in history. I wanted to bring their buried stories to life and to highlight their thoughts. The research was difficult and many of their accounts are heartbreaking, but when I consider that people survived and lived to tell their stories I was encouraged. The voices of the enslaved motived me to write and to keep writing. Sadly, for some I only knew a name and no other details. Others offered much more fruit for me to share—testimonies, emotions, feelings, opinions, etc. This book is meant to give a voice to enslaved people, particularly about their experiences of, and responses to, the commodification of their bodies.

Dr Berry and UT graduate student Lauren Henley offer these suggestions for further reading on the economies and medical histories of enslaved people in the United States.

Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999)

In Soul by Soul, Walter Johnson imagines the moment of a slave sale from the perspective of the buyer, the seller, and the enslaved individual. Drawing from slave narratives, enslavers’ letters, docket records, and nineteenth-century economic descriptions of the enslaved, Johnson highlights the processes by which labor, humanness, capital, race, and power were negotiated in physical and metaphorical spaces throughout the American South, showcasing the brazenly economic and political motivations that built the institution one sale at time.

Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (2002)

Exploring the academic and popular histories of anatomy in American society, Michael Sappol considers the role corpses played in shaping American identity and subjectivity. His examination of nineteenth-century medical education and professionalization reveals a network of professors, students, grave robbers, state officials, and law enforcement officers directly benefiting from the death of others. The corpses that were often literally dragged into this operation were those of the poor and dispossessed, overwhelmingly represented by black men and women, in slavery as well as in freedom. Cadavers provided hands-on training for medical students, but they also reinforced notions of identity, class, culture, and hierarchy for all parties involved in their trafficking.

Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 (2015)

The Business of Slavery examines the buying, selling, and moving human of chattel in the nineteenth-century interstate slave trade, focusing on the forced movement of enslaved men, women, and children from the mid-Atlantic region to the Deep South.

Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (2006)

Medical Apartheid charges the American medical profession with conducting extensive involuntary research on black bodies since at least the eighteenth century. From abusive and painful gynecological experiments on enslaved women to the now-infamous Tuskegee syphilis trials, Washington inverts the dominant narrative by showing that medical histories have always been written from the perspective of the field’s professionals, which has hidden the fact that advances of American medicine have been literally inscribed onto the bodies of society’s least fortunate—blacks, the poor, women, the infirm, and children. For centuries blacks’ mistrust of medical institutions has not been the manifestation of irrational fear, but a response to the failure of medical professionals to do no harm.

Craig Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (2013)

Directly linking elite universities in New England to Southern slavery and the eradication of Native Americans, Ebony and Ivy highlights both the all-encompassing influence of slavery on American society as well as the extent to which elite universities informed popular perceptions of race, slavery, and Americanness. This entangled history of education, slavery, exploitation, and capitalism challenges longstanding notions of ivory tower benevolence.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert (2015)

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh

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