Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism

Slavery has deep roots in the rise of American capitalism, and two recent publications have made significant contributions toward our understanding of how human bondage shaped the growth of the United States’ economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, by Caitlin Rosenthal, and Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, each explore traditionally overlooked aspects of slavery’s connection to business innovation and American capitalism and present readers with a fuller—and perhaps more complicated—narrative of the ties between enslavement and the economy.