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 revi ew e s say

Who Put Their Capitalism in My Slavery?

scott reynolds nelson

Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the

Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013)
Jessica Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the
Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2013).
John Ashworth, The Republic in Crisis, 18481861 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2012)
L. Diane Barnes, Brian Schoen, and Frank Towers, ed., The Old Souths
Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)
Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class
Structure, Economic Development, and Political Conict, 16201877
(Boston: Brill, 2011).
William G. Thomas III, The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the
Making of Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
Aaron Marrs, Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave
Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics
and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2009)
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944; repr., Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

Recent historians of capitalism have produced a bumper crop of books that

profess to examine capitalism and slavery. This is all to the good, but in the
past few years I have been dismayed about how many of these ignore the
debates that preceded them. As a result, these books make provocative but
not always clear interventions in the eld. The danger in not understand-
ing the older historiography is that entire arguments can be built attacking
arguments that are caricatures or of repeating conceptual, theoretical, or
factual errors that historians have long ago identied.

2 89
 Eric Williams put the question most directly in his book Capitalism and
Slavery, rst published in 1944. Slavery, he argued, depended on capitalist
competition. An international capitalist market put slavery and freedom
in competition, and slavery usually won. Cheap, slave-grown staples like
cotton, sugar, and rice had economies of scale (lower costs per unit for pro-
ducing larger quantities). Thus, family farms could not compete against
the slave-plantation juggernaut. Capitalism was more than competition,
but market competition allowed slavery to succeed.
The part of Williamss thesis that scholars most remember is that slav-
ery helped nance the industrial revolution. The rise of Liverpool, the
wealth of the British Empire, the triumph of the English navy, the success
of Britains banking families, and the success of English cotton mills all
depended on the slave trade and slave-made commodities. British metal-
lurgy, along with industries that produced cotton goods, woolens, amber
necklaces, and rum all depended on both the slave trade and trade with
slave colonies. According to Williams, Britains Caribbean colonies became
less protable after the American Revolution, and British opposition to
the slave trade and slavery followed. Britons called for Free Trade, which
allowed British consumers to get their sugar from slaveowners in Brazil
and Cuba, and their cotton from slaveowners in the American South, with-
out all the fuss of protectionist imperial laws like the Navigation Acts.1
Williams was a socialist historian inuenced by the work of Karl Marx
through his Trinidadian teacher, the communist intellectual C. L. R.
James.2 Williams reserved his sharpest barbs for conservative and liberal
historians of Britain who imagined Britain as a land of free trade and anti-
slavery activism while ignoring the nations complicity in and dependence
on slavery.3 He aimed, too, at free-market economists who imagined free
trade to be on the side of freedom. Free trade, for Williams, was a bad faith
gesture that allowed Britain to take advantage of colonial impoverishment
(by buying cheap raw goods from slave-owning territories) while disavow-
ing the legacies of slavery and empire.
Of course, the empire struck back. Dozens of British political and eco-
nomic historians from David Landes to Ralph Davis responded from the
1950s through the 1980s, arguing that the colonies had never been that
important to Britains economic growth. Instead machinery, international
shipping, and liberal banking laws had been the engines of economic
growth in the mother country. By the end of the century, however, Williams
had prevailed. A later generation of social, political, and economic histori-
ans followed in the twilight of the Cold War, many underscoring Williamss
argument that Britains capitalist enterprise was inextricably bound up

290 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , vo lum e 5 , i s s u e 2
with its colonies. Some, however, still dispute his argument that antislav-
ery activists were driven by economic motivations.4
While many agree that British capitalism depended on slavery, there is
still a lingering Cold War consensus about what capitalism is. Often with-
out knowing it, scholars in the last decade have restated long-discredited
theories from the Vietnam era while ignoring the best work on capital-
isms relationship to slavery written between 1945 and 2000. This essay
will introduce terms that are often confused in the current literature: mod-
ernization theory, Marxs theory, the transition debates, merchant capital-
ism, world-systems theory, and staple theory, laying out some of the most
important books. It will then critique the current crop of work using the
insights from those theories.
The economists and historians who attacked the Williams thesisthat
slavery funded capitalisms expansionclaimed to have no theory, but this
is a classic gambit in Anglo-American thought. They may have had no
conscious theory but they did share an ideology: capitalism is the desire
to make money; it is part of human nature and has existed since before
the Roman Empire; it involves rational human actors who maximize their
advantages; it leads to economic development and economic growth when
it is not impeded by state action. This was an ideology cooked up in the
Scottish Enlightenment and strengthened into gospel during the Cold
War.5 Among many English and American readers it still passes for unvar-
nished truth. Before we consider Marxist theories of capitalism and slav-
ery we should understand the explicitly non-Marxist theory of capitalism
that many historians of capitalism and slavery unwittingly rely on, though
often without understanding its lineage.
After World War II a distinctively American approach to the history of
capitalist development emerged in what is called modernization theory,
a theory used explicitly by recent historians of capitalism and slavery like
Aaron Marrs and Brian Schoen. Walt W. Rostow made the theory famous
in his book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto,
published in 1960.6 The problem, as Rostow and others saw it, was that
while Marxists had a theory of slavery, capitalism, and imperialism that
justied anticolonial revolutions (or alignment with the Soviet Union),
Americans did not have an explicit theory that justied Americas interna-
tional investment and development aid. Rostow came to the rescue. He laid
out what he called the inner logic of economic modernization, in which
a growing society advanced toward an economic take off to industrial-
ism that could be stimulated by investment or held back by traditionalism,
state power, or wars. The model relied on a simplistic dichotomy between

w h o p u t t h e i r c a p i ta l i sm i n m y s l av e ry ? 2 91
traditional and modern societies, a series of stages that led to the take off,
and an ethnocentric argument that this modernity spread from Europe
to America to the rest of the world.7 Colonialism and slavery only mat-
tered as backward legacies that helped produce psychologically damaged
revolutionaries. Indeed Rostow laid the intellectual groundwork for U.S.
intervention in Vietnam, serving as a security advisor in John F. Kennedy
and Lyndon Johnsons White House. For Rostow communism in Vietnam
was a disease of the transition that could be held back with military force
so that capitalism would naturally emerge.
As Harvard and MITs biggest intellectual export in the 1960s, modern-
ization theory failed abysmally, though the ideas linger in foreign policy
circles. By the early 1970s, scholars from the left and the right pointed
out that it relied on a simplistic model of American history that ignored
slavery and colonialism while lumping together such disparate nations as
China, Poland, Ecuador, and Greece into a stew of traditional practices.
Historians today who argue that slavery is part of a modernizing society
risk repeating the errors of a discredited model from the Kennedy admin-
istration, one that imagined slavery as a bump on the tarmac in Americas
otherwise trouble-free take-off.8
Williams disagreed. For him, capitalism and slavery were distinct: capi-
talism happened in Britain, slavery happened in the Caribbean and the
American South. Before the 1830s, the two social systems were intimately
connected, indeed interdependent, but for Williams slavery was not capi-
talistic, and capitalists dispensed with it as soon as it proved unprotable.
When British capitalism depended on the West Indies, they ignored slav-
ery or defended it, Williams wrote. When British capitalism found the
West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery as
the rst step in the destruction of West Indian monopoly (169).
The distinction between slavery and capitalism was an important part
of Marxs critique of capitalism: capital was a liberatory forcethough
drowned in bloodthat would usher in its own collapse. Communism (or
something like it) would rise from the ashes of capitalism just as capitalism
emerged from the destruction of feudalism and feudalism had smashed
the last vestiges of ancient slavery. Capital was brutal and violent, but that
force could break the chains of the old order.
To understand Williamss critique of capitalism, we must understand
Marx. Marx had three central concerns when analyzing a society: the ow of
capital, the forces of production, and the relations of production. Scholars
who talk about capitalism should understand these three concepts.
For Marx, the driving force in capitalism was capital with a capital C.
Capital grew out of a concrete relationship between workers and owners but

292 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , vo lum e 5 , i s s u e 2
became an independent force that could invest in one process or another
to increase itself. Though Marx hated the abstract way economists talked
about commodities, prices, and exchange relations as independent forces,
Marx himself nonetheless personies capital as an abstraction. He bor-
rows, as Hegel did, from the geographer Carl Ritter, who personied social
forces into an abstract actor. Marxs magnum opus, Das Capital, was a
three-volume biography of that actor. Even capitalists were beholden to
the immanent power of accumulated capital that was constantly on the
lookout for more.
Where did capital ow? It had an origin story in the primitive accu-
mulation of capital, which owed from the discovery of gold and silver
in the Americas. Through investment networks, this organized capital
then dispossessed peasants in Britain, invested in handwork factories in
the English countryside, then turned west again to invest in the dispos-
session of Native peoples in the American colonies. Marx tracked the ow
of capitalist investment. He followed the money, to use a term from the
Watergate era.
Marx rarely used the word capitalism in his work, so he was not espe-
cially clear about capitalism and slavery. He favored instead two terms:
forces of production and relations of production. Forces of produc-
tion are best understood as technologies broadly dened: inclined planes,
accounting principles, ourmills, sugar reneries, boiling pans, and cot-
ton-baling machines. Relations of production are those between owner
and worker, landlord and peasant, master and slave; they can be capitalist
or not. For Marx, these relations of production were foundational. They
explained everything else in a society: how you ate, where you slept, what
you sang about, and what you thought about God. Poetry, prose, and philos-
ophy all sprang from the physical reality of daily work, and that depended
on the relationship between one person and another: who did the work
and who got the benets. Even relations between men and women were
not natural, but deeply conditioned by the relations of production. This
materialist conception of history emphasized how the material relations of
daily life formed the basis of every other aspect of society.
For Marx, the forces and relations of production are the story of the
world. In Britain, the enclosure movement of the eighteenth century drove
peasants off the land, and they crowded into cities. With nothing to sell
but their labor, these landless workersproletariansbecame available to
capitalists who put them, women, men, and children, to work making hats
or stitching wool, later pulling them into factories to work long hours for
little pay. Capitalists above all sought a high return on their investment,
leading them to overwork and underpay their workersimagine Walmart

w h o p u t t h e i r c a p i ta l i sm i n m y s l av e ry ? 2 93
with a water wheel and no child labor laws. This desire to make more
and more led capitalists to then use machinery to even further cheapen
the work. This machinery provided cheaper and cheaper goods, benet-
ing capitalists as well as consumers. By the 1850s, new factories needed
young and agile children to tend the dangerous, fast-moving machines.
Yet from these horrors the new machines (forces of production) cheap-
ened the cost of production. In the long run, Marx believed that work-
ers would recognize that the capitalist was unnecessary and take over the
fancy machines, thus keeping the benets of the capitalist forces of produc-
tion while abandoning the evils of the capitalist relations of production.
Changing the relations of production entailed revolution, from the days of
the pharaohs to the tenth-century slave revolts in Tunis, from the peasant
wars in Germany to the 1789 revolution in France. For Marx, then, capital-
ism was about these three things: capital ow, forces of production, and
relations of production. In discussing the antebellum South, scholars have
differed about how capitalistic slavery was, emphasizing one or the other
of these areas.
Though Eric Williams gave us capitalism and slavery as a topic, other
debates over Marxist theories about capitalism consumed thousands of
forests after Williams nished his book. Marxs arguments about how
ancient slavery gave way to feudalism and then capitalism evolved into
an argument historians have called the transition debates: What caused
slavery to collapse in medieval Europe? Did feudalism fall rst in Britain
or in Amsterdam, in the cities or the countryside? Did colonialism in India
impede the spread of capitalism or accelerate it? Why did agricultural pro-
ductivity remain so low in Eastern Europe and Russia through the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth century while it boomed in Western Europe?
In the 1940s, some scholars criticized Marxs framework and the argu-
ments it spawned as Eurocentric, suggesting that Marx invented a British
economic model and imposed it on other countries. This critique helped
break the Marxist argument into two camps, the orthodox and the world-
systems theorists. Each had distinctive views of capitalism and its relation-
ship to slavery. Each had its followers among students of slavery.
In 1946, Maurice Dobb and the orthodox Marxists described the power
of merchants over the economic life of the American South, Poland, the
Ukraine, and Latin America. They called this formation merchant capi-
talism, borrowing a phrase from Marx, and asserted that it relied on older
extractive labor systems that were ancient and barbaric, yet productive.
(Williams uses the phrase commercial capitalism.) Because merchants
involved in these areas lent money on short term they did not invest in
the labor process itself. Capital owed in circuits of just over ninety days.

294 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , vo lum e 5 , i s s u e 2
Enslaved black workers in the American South and in the Caribbean
did not own their own labor power and so did not constitute an army of
unemployed workers who drove down labor prices. While Marx and Dobb
believed slave workers resisted, they did not engage in a daily ght over the
length of the working day. Thus small-scale capitalists in these regions were
never forced to radically improve productivity in the way that wool sta-
plers, hand weavers, and wheat farmers were forced to. Eugene Genovese,
Steven Hahn, and Barbara Fields have been in that camp, whose latest
defender is the sociologist Charles Post, in his book The American Road to
Capitalism. Forces of production were antiquated, relations of production
brutal, but this was not wage labor. The South was not capitalist.
In the 1960s, another group of neo-Marxistsincluding sociologists
and geographers Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, and David
Harveybegan to argue that the whole integrated system of slave and free
production were created together in the fteenth and sixteenth centuries
as a capitalist world system. The European core saw some important
political freedoms, representative government, and capital investment.
Investment and empire were organized inside a succession of organized
capital cities that moved from Genoa to Amsterdam to London. The
periphery around this core (in places like the American South, Eastern
Europe, and Latin America) saw political repression, slavery, weak states,
and widespread impoverishment. Core and periphery depended on one
another. Walter Johnson, Shearer Davis Bowman, and other historians
draw from this tradition.
Many current historians of capitalism and slavery echo world-systems
theory, though they dont appear to understand that it is a theory about
how regions become underdeveloped, that is, prone to erce nancial
calamities and stied in their drive to industrialize. For world-systems
theorists, capitalism was and is a global system of exchange that continu-
ally reproduces conditions of domination and inequality on the periph-
ery. World-systems historians emphasize how commoditiesgold, sugar,
slaves, cotton, coffee, and woolensmade that system operate. Theirs
is a Marxist-inuenced history of imperialism, one that is arguably less
Eurocentric. Most historians of Latin America, Africa, and China have
been inuenced by this school of history. To put their theory into Marxs
schema, the relations of production (relations between worker and owner)
were less signicant than the forces of production (technologies).9 To the
extent that world-systems theorists followed the money, they emphasized
the substantial investment in the global supply chain and the relative
impoverishment of everything else. Slavery was in a capitalist world-sys-
temat its value-making peripherybut its workers lacked the proximity

w h o p u t t h e i r c a p i ta l i sm i n m y s l av e ry ? 2 95
to capital and the tools to claim the advantages capitalism provided to the
European or North American core.
World-systems theory has an uneasy relationship with a distinctively
Canadian theory of capitalist development that emerged after World
War II, called staple theory, which came to see slavery as the result of a
particular kind of capitalist agricultural market. Derived from works in
Canadian history stretching back to the 1920s, the theory received its con-
crete articulation in 1963 with Melville Watkinss article A Staple Theory
of Economic Growth. Watkins argued that staple regions like the United
States, Canada, Australia, and possibly Argentina had common character-
istics: empty western land, a favorable man/land ratio, and an absence
of inhibiting traditions.10 (As in modernization theory, economists and
historians in the rst generation of staple theory imagined a world with-
out Native Americans, creoles, slaves, or even women. The tiny proportion
of white male settlers in the Americas presumably reproduced themselves
asexually.)
The staple theory of the economy emphasized the production of raw
materialsstaples like timber, sh, or wheatthat gave a particular region
a comparative advantage in international markets. With a limited local
market, these raw materials required outlets in Europe. These staples put
a peculiar imprint on the society and set the pace of economic growth.
Economic development, then, was conditioned by the spread effects of
these staples through linkages. They called backward linkages those
activities that contributed to the delivery of the staple, including agricul-
tural machinery and transport services. They called forward linkages
those opportunities for processing staples into further commodities like
furniture (for timber), our (for wheat), or textiles (for cotton).
Staple theory had important policy implications for less-developed
countries, like Canada in the 1960s. These nations should not erect tariffs
on steel and build auto plants in a vain hope of creating jobs in high-paying
industries. This policy of import substitution was a mistake. Rather, they
should focus on improving the spread effects of the staple and minimizing
the leakage, that is, having benets leak out to be absorbed by buyers.
(One might also call this the diaper theory of economic development.)
How does staple theory relate to capitalism and slavery? In staple
theory slavery is one of the peculiar imprints of certain tropical staples.
Economic historians argued that plantation staples like cotton and sugar
necessitated plantations and that plantations were associated with an
unequal distribution of income and thus created a limited market and thus
smaller cities. By comparison, wheat and rye, produced mostly on family
farms, had a more equal distribution, a broader home market, and more

296 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , vo lum e 5 , i s s u e 2
opportunities for backward linkages. They thus created larger cities. In off
seasons, too, family farm laborers were available to work in factories, mak-
ing industrialization possible. Historians in this tradition include Morton
Rothstein, the economist Douglass North, colonialists John McCusker and
Russell Menard, and nineteenth-century historians Peter Coclanis and
Marc Egnal.
Staple theory is a more interesting and supple non-Marxist theory
than modernization theory. For one thing, it lacks the binary divisions of
backward-looking and forward-looking, and it has no predened model
of growth based on an imagined American schema. For another thing, it
calls our attention to how different slavery was in each of the areas where
cotton, sugar, rice, or indigo was produced. Philip Morgans book, Slave
Counterpoint, for example, suggests how the differences in slavery in South
Carolina and Virginia grew out of differences in the agricultural regimes
there.11 Everything from Gullah to gumbo, abroad marriages to the task
system can be said to have derived from the very different labor regimes
that tobacco and rice required. From the Marxist perspective, what makes
staple theory interesting is its emphasis on the forces of production (what
staple theorists call the forward and backward linkages) as well as its close
attention to the kind of society that forms around the staple (what Marxists
would call the relations of production). There is a chicken-and-egg prob-
lem of course: was it plantation slavery that made the export of tropical
staples possible (as Marxists would have it), or did practices of sugar or
cotton farming push would-be producers into buying slaves and making
plantations (as staple theorists would have it)? Which came rst, the plan-
tation or the staple?
World-systems theory has borrowed entire pages from staple theory,
often on the sly. Whereas in the 1970s world-systems theorists treated cores
and peripheries as abstractions, by the 1990s they devoted more attention
to the staple production complex, global supply chains, and virtuous cir-
cles in which the benets of the commodity can spread and not leak. While
a staple theorist might emphasize the role of markets and commodities
in shaping daily life, world-systems theorists lately have emphasized the
labor process and lost opportunities to benet workers. Both are interested
in history, but some suggest contemporary policy changes. Staple theorists
emphasize sustaining economic development; world-systems theorists
emphasize modifying coffee plantations or factories to improve the lives
of workers. Other world systems theorists, like Harvey, emphasize revolu-
tion. Historians interested in capitalism and slavery should read a little
world systems theory and staple theory to understand how these argu-
ments work.

w h o p u t t h e i r c a p i ta l i sm i n m y s l av e ry ? 2 97
 In the last dozen years, many works on capitalism and slavery have
waded into this debate while largely ignoring it. For example, Brian D.
Schoen, in The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics and the
Global Origins of the Civil War, uses Rostows problematic binary of
backward-looking traditionalist versus forward-looking entrepreneur. In
what he labels a political economy of the cotton plantation South, Schoen
quickly dispenses with deterministic models like merchant capitalism
and world systems. Clear-eyed cotton entrepreneurs saw a rise to eco-
nomic glory that was ultimately shut down by a Civil War (5). For Schoen,
planters were capitalistic (that is, they wanted to make a prot), so their
society was capitalist.
Schoen nonetheless does a respectable job of placing American politi-
cal history in an international context. He argues that most planters were
neomercantilist in the years before the War of 1812, supporting tariffs
and endorsing Jeffersons 1807 embargo against Great Britain. When tar-
iffs proved a failure in the War of 1812, he argues, cotton planters turned
away from Jefferson and toward free trade and states rights.
It is ironic that orthodox Marxists, who argue that ruling classes are
riven by conicts, would most disagree with this teleological model. They
saw intense arguments between comprador elites wedded to merchant
capital and a revolutionary bourgeoisie who want capital to accumulate
at home. Indeed Schoens model breaks down on close inspection. It was
in 1790 that Jefferson rst articulated states rights doctrine, when he
opposed the First Bank of the United States. Nor does Schoen discuss the
thousands of South Carolina planters who clung to the Federalist Party
(and British capital) through the early nineteenth century, against what he
believes were their natural economic interests. As Manisha Sinha shows in
The Counterrevolution of Slavery, radical secessionist ideology may have
had more roots in Federalist ideology than in the ideology of Democrats.12
Orthodox Marxists would emphasize that parties do not map onto classes
and that each party would comprise capitalists, some wedded to British
interests and some wedded to plans to accumulate capital at home.
According to Schoen, planters embraced states rights by the 1820s as
they increasingly regarded tariffs as a tax on their trade with Great Britain.
This is almost certainly true. But what about the nationalist planters who
supported Jackson against Calhoun or the many silk-hat planters in South
Carolina and along the Mississippi River who were Whigs? Until the 1850s,
southern cotton planters were politically divided about economic matters.
Many of the thousand-acre planters supported the Second Bank of the
United States against Jackson because the national bank provided them
with the foreign credit they needed for expansion. These cotton Whigs

298 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , vo lum e 5 , i s s u e 2
stood behind John Tyler as Harrisons vice president. Given that Schoen
is persuaded they should have been Democrats, were these men liars or
fools in demanding a national bank? If we follow the money, surely we
should expect that many capitalists would be on the side of the Whigs, the
party formed in part by Nicholas Biddle, president of the Second Bank of
the United States. But for Schoen the opposite is true, and rich southern
Democrats were capitalist to the core.
Capitalists ght capitalists all the time, often over where capital will
accumulate. Democrats like Thomas Skidmore, Robert Owen, and even
Andrew Jackson vociferously opposed the power of foreign capitalists to
control the destiny of the country. Can we call them capitalists without
confronting the contradiction? The seeming anticapitalist language of
Democrats is no small matter. Historians who have debated this contradic-
tion in Democratic ideology have included William Barney, Michael Holt,
Daniel Walker Howe, Reeve Huston, and Sean Wilentz.
If the new books on the history of capitalism are less interested in
national politics, they spend much more time examining what Marx called
the forces of production, especially railroads. Schoens book gives it a great
deal of time, as do the essays in The Old Souths Modern Worlds, William
Thomass The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of
Modern America, and Aaron Marrss Railroads in the Old South, though
none use Marxs term. But by not examining the economic theories about
railroads, these authors make some embarrassing gaffes, often slapping
the label capitalist, for example, on instruments of credit, debt, and
nance that are older than capitalism.13 Schoen, for example, has plant-
ers opposing internal improvements in chapter 3 and then suddenly sup-
porting them in chapters 4 and 5. In fact, on the one hand, Democrats
like John C. Calhoun opposed national railroads and embraced regional
ones, like the Louisville, Cincinnati & Charleston. Jefferson Davis, on the
other hand, supported state railroads until he became secretary of war,
when he supported a nationally funded southern route to the Pacic, using
military justication.14 Staple theorists examining any proposed railroad
would ask rst, Does it extend existing export routes? say uplands cotton
to the ocean? Indeed staple-supporting routes in Georgia, North Carolina,
Virginia, and Mississippi succeeded while the developmental routes
Calhoun and Davis promoted never left the drafting table.
Who invested in the railroads, one of the key forces of production that
allows settlement of the upland cotton areas? Schoen and Thomas argue
that planters were entrepreneurs in investing in railroads, but, as Marrss
work shows, they did not invest very much at all. Compared to northern
states, where eastern merchants provided three-fourths of the capital

w h o p u t t h e i r c a p i ta l i sm i n m y s l av e ry ? 2 99
for railroads, private investors in the South provided less than half (and
possibly only one-quarter) of the investment in southern railroads. State
governments and foreign investors heavily subsidized southern railroads
through an indirect process called hypothecation, in which southern states
sold bonds in Europe and used the proceeds to buy railroad stock.15 This
is precisely what merchant capital theorists would suggest, that merchant
capitalists in Britain would invest in railroads as a way of extracting cotton
yet would demand steep prot guarantees from states that would make
antiquated forms of labor extraction even more intense.
Can planters have wholeheartedly invested in southern railroads,
as Thomas and Schoen suggest? A few planterslike the Camerons of
North Carolina and the Davises of Mississippibought stock. But most
were bondholders, and bondholders are actually creditors, not investors.
For example, as Marrs shows, cash-poor railroads rented slaves, paying
slave owners with hand-hire bonds, effectively long-term IOUs. Without
a secondary market at which to sell these bonds, planters were forced to
hold them until their redemption date. (It was only when railroads failed
that outside trustees converted bondholders into stockholders.) Here,
merchant capital and world systems theorists would agree: the American
South was starved for investment capital and relied on foreign capital that
wanted one thing: cotton.
Of course, its a little more complicated than that. These southern rail-
road enterprises with mostly state funding are better understood as what
we now call state-owned enterprises. Nineteenth-century examples include
the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, chartered by the British Parliament.
Modern examples include Russian and Chinese banks and Mexican, Saudi
and Venezuelan oil companies. Private capital exists in these ventures, but
it is dwarfed by state investment. In the nineteenth century these state-
owned enterprises often failed. Schoen and Thomas recognize that many
infrastructure investments in the South failed, but the failure is a capstone
to the argument of both merchant capital and world-systems theorists,
who argue that infrastructure investments in the periphery of capitalism
often fail, leaving perilous debts behind. Even Marrs, whose close analysis
of the interaction of capitalism and slavery on railroads is the best we have,
does not discuss southern states crippling postwar debts for the antebel-
lum railroads they supported.
If we are to follow the money in slavery and capitalism, we also need
to follow the debt. And southern states debts for their railroads haunted
the South for decades. After the Civil War, the Readjustors and Populists
made their strongest case against corporations by attacking those onerous
debts. Finally, massive investments like railroads can force an economy

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into a direction that is hard to deviate from. World-systems scholars would
emphasize that even successful transportation institutions were problem-
atic in that they further entrenched staple commodities and thus doomed
peripheral economies to boom and bust cycles.16 The Souths postwar
lock in the staples of cotton and tobacco, broken only by the New Deal
and federally supported interstate highways, demonstrates this problem
quite clearly.
Financial instruments like bonds and dollars were another aspect of
the forces of production. Schoen, Thomas, and Marrs discuss the panic
of 1837 but, like many historians in the last decade, see the panic as an
external actor rather than either the peculiar imprint of cotton or as one
of the fruits of merchant capital. Jessica Leplers The Many Panics of 1837,
by comparison, clearly demonstrates how short-term credit in the South
contributed to the panic. For example Lepler shows us how a bank note
which we twenty-rst-century Americans view as cashwas actually a
gamble, one that depended on the reputation of a bank and its directors
(16). This instability was accentuated, she points out, by the ourishing of
small banks when Congress removed deposits from the Bank of the United
States. These banks main source of capital was short-term English bills of
exchange issued for cotton in shipment. Fragile banks and the short-term
cotton notes they rested on made the American South an unstable market.
When cotton prices fell from fourteen cents to ve cents a pound in March
1837, the rapid drop in multimillion-dollar international cotton contracts
caused notes to fail, leaving thousands of regular people with valueless
banknotes. For this reason, the panic hit rst in the American South, then
in New York, and nally in Great Britain.
Marx and Dobb would have been inclined to highlight the inher-
ent instability of a southern slave-based nancial system built on top of
merchant notes. They argued that as peripheral regions (like eighteenth-
century Poland and Ukraine) became more integrated into international
markets, agricultural markets pushed landowners to become more vio-
lent and rapacious, not more advanced. Thus, from the seventeenth to
the eighteenth century free peasants in Poland and Ukraine became serfs
and then slaves. Technical advances in international trade turned Eastern
European farms into backward and brutal labor regimes, according to
Marx and Dobb. This was central to their argument about the vampir-
ism of merchant capital.17 To say that a region has improved railroads and
commercial ties does not tell anything about how farming is organized
(forces of production) or how workers and owners experience them (rela-
tions of production). A work of political economy should confront these
questions.

w h o p u t t h e i r c a p i ta l i sm i n m y s l av e ry ? 30 1
 Finally, Schoen, Marrs, and others argue that the proliferation of country
stores along railroad lines, stores that offered goods for future cotton, was
benecial in that itin Schoens wordspartly altered the nature as well
as the quantity of trade within the region (205). Thomas and Marrs paint
similarly positive portraits of railroad inuence. This story of the Souths
economic takeoff through railroads would come as a surprise to contem-
poraries during and after the war, who regarded the railroad, the coun-
try store, and the crop lien as related tools for impoverishing the South.
Some commentators, such as Duff Green and Josephus Daniels, regarded
these railroads as tools of merchant capitalists and sought to nationalize
them. Others (like Henry W. Grady) faulted railroads overinvestment in
cotton facilities for trapping the South in economic dependency. Indeed
Schoen views planters as perfectly understanding capitalism except when
they complain about the exploitative nature of interstate trade or when
they demand Cuban annexation (2069). Then they are less than savvy
because they help usher in a conict that will end in war (232).
Above all, Schoens argument is that planters were not dragged into cot-
ton but that they went willingly as entrepreneurs. Schoen and others assert
that capital investment came from within, not from without. But they miss
the extensive external investment in the South, particularly as funneled
through states and railroads. Their argument mirrors the world-systems
position that views the embrace of staple commodity production as eco-
nomically rational. The historians just miss the part where it is doomed
to failure.
In eschewing economic theory in writing about capitalism and slavery,
Schoen, Thomas, and even Marrs end up unknowingly embracing Rostows
modernization theory, where rational actors invest in a technology to bring
about economic takeoff. In dismissing the previous accounts as determin-
istic, they do not ask the central questions: what is capitalism, and how
does it relate to slavery?
If some historians have eschewed economic theory about capital-
ism, others have embraced it. John Ashworths The Republic in Crisis,
18481861 is a short version of his two-volume series entitled Slavery,
Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic.18
One would expect a book with a title like Slavery, Capitalism, and
Politics to tell a great deal about capitalism and slavery. In fact, Ashworth
makes rather grand pronouncements about all three, but his research is
only about politics. As a congressional- and presidential-level political his-
tory of the antebellum South and its relation to the United States, this is
a solid pair of books. Although he is much more subtle about the differ-
ences among Democrats, Whigs, and Republicans than many scholars in

302 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , vo lum e 5 , i s s u e 2
the history of capitalism school, there is very little economic history in his
work, despite his promising title.
Ashworth argues that a fundamental divide over labor systems separated
the parties and brought a Civil War. He borrows from Antonio Gramsci
the framework of a hegemonic ideology: a wide-ranging interpretation
of the world that seems natural but disguises brutal class power.19 Thus
Democrats supported slaveholders but envisioned themselves as agrarians
pitted in a war against nonagricultural aristocrats (rst Federalists, then
Whigs, then Republicans). By the 1850s, however, the new Republican
Party swiped the Democratic Partys key principle of free land in the West.
If Democrats imagined agrarians versus aristocrats, Republicans envi-
sioned the world as a war of free versus slave labor. Democrats disguised
the power of slaveholders in a declining world; Republicans disguised the
power of capitalists in a rapidly expanding wage-labor system. Somewhat
indirectly, and seldom explicitly, the Democratic and Republican contest
in 1860 was a deeper conict between enslaved labor and a newly domi-
nant wage labor system. To put it more schematically than Ashworth does,
the 1860 election was a war of capitalism (Republicans) against slavery
(Democrats).
The American Civil War, then, grew out of a conict between labor
systems, although each party expressed the aim of a tiny fraction of the
American population: slave-owning planters and industrial capitalists. As
an argument about the coming of the war, it has the advantage of being
succinct. As a story about capitalism and slavery, there is very little of the
capitalism Marx writes about: forces of production, relations of produc-
tion, or where investment ows. Certainly Marx cared a great deal about
party politics in France and in America, and sussing out the fundamental
principles of a man like Abraham Lincoln, Louis Napoleon, or Andrew
Johnson occupied much of Marxs time as a journalist and intellectual. But
this is a work that professes to be concerned with capitalism and slavery,
without showing evidence of research into either. Ashworth does believe
that slavery is an institution that was falling behind economically in the
1850s, and this is a statement that most of the history of capitalism schol-
ars would sharply disagree with, but Ashworth seems not to know their
work, nor do they know Ashworths. As an account of where the parties
stood and what their concerns were, Ashworths is stronger than much of
the work in the history of capitalism. As an account of what slavery was
and whether it t or did not t into capitalism as a framework, there is
little to embrace.
A very different model for the political economy of cotton is Walter
Johnsons River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton

w h o p u t t h e i r c a p i ta l i sm i n m y s l av e ry ? 30 3
Kingdom, a beautifully written and wide-ranging international history of
the Mississippi Rivers cotton trade, one located much more directly in the
debates over capitalism and slavery, though one must scour the footnotes
to nd these traces. He seeks to replace two books that have dominated
antebellum southern history, Genoveses Roll, Jordan, Roll and David
Potters The Impending Crisis.20
Chapters 1 through 9 (what I would call the Roll, Mississippi, Roll chap-
ters) are about cotton and the river. Johnson starts at the river, connecting
the failure of Thomas Jeffersons plan to plant non-slaveholding farmers
along its shores; the perilous, boom-to-bust technology of the steamboat;
and the brutal use of the federal government to remove Creeks, Cherokees,
and the Red Sticks. We are then ushered into the elds where row height,
the terracing of cotton on land, the grime in the cotton bale, and the weight
of the bale itself were issues that dominated the waking hours of planters,
overseers, and slaves. Where Marx emphasized the battle over the length
of the workday, Johnson shows us that the weight of the sack and the size
of the bale were at the core of struggles between planters and slaves. Using
abolitionist slave narratives and planters articles in southern agricultural
periodicals, he shows us how deeply skilled this labor was and how tenuous
was planters control over it. This section extends analysis of the cultural
geography of the plantation that we associate with the work of Stephanie
Camp and Anthony Kaye. In focusing on daily life and using disciplined
imagination to create a history from the bottom up, it recalls the evocative
and careful work of Seth Rockman in Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery,
and Survival in Early Baltimore.21 Johnsons is a proper refutation of
Genoveses argument that slaves resistance prevented them from forming
solidarities with one another. It is at once more careful, subtle, and fun to
read. That said, Johnsons unwillingness to use the WPA ex-slave narra-
tives does render his depiction of slave life somewhat at. We learn little
about the burial practices, musical traditions, and ctive kinship networks
that were and are an important legacy of slavery.
Chapters 10 through 14 (what I would call the Slave Soil, Slave Labor,
Slave Men chapters) are an attempt to renarrate the coming of the Civil
War, but on a global scale. Though Johnson explicitly criticizes Wallersteins
world-systems approach, he nonetheless uses world-systems categories, in
particular the idea of the spatial x rst laid out in David Harveys book,
The Limits to Capital.22 For Harvey, the spatial x is a frontier region that
the capitalist core uses to resolve its problems when it has too much capital
and too few protable investments. Near a revolutionary breaking point,
the core seeks a x by investing excess capital in peripheral regions, loot-
ing them, or both. Harvey does not fully credit his intellectual ancestor, the

304 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , vo lum e 5, i s s u e 2
Marxist scholar Rosa Luxemburg, who laid out this claim in her book The
Accumulation of Capital.23 One example of Harveys spatial x (used in
Spaces of Capital) is nineteenth-century Britains turn to the United States,
where it sought both to invest and to offload excess cotton goods.
Johnson uses but alters Harvey. For Johnson, planter-capitalists in
the American South were committed not just to accumulation but to
something he calls slave racial capitalism. They saw three threats: the
Panic of 1837, post-1848 northern railroads which siphoned traffic off
the Mississippi River, and Hinton Rowan Helpers 1857 antislavery tract
which told poor white southerners they were held back by the institution
of slavery. Planters somehow became convinced that capturing Cuba and
Nicaragua and reopening the African slave trade would x these problems,
making the river more important and cheap slaves from Cuba more acces-
sible. Their search for this spatial x propelled them into war.
As a coming-of-the-war narrative, this has the advantage of forcing his-
torians of the American South to really confront the international issues
Congress debated in the 1850s. It aligns southern planters successful
attempts to annex Texas with the unsuccessful attempts to annex Cuba and
Nicaragua. Johnson wants us to see slaverys expansion as economically
necessary and to see the effects of such expansion as key to the coming
of the war. This is intriguing, but the circle is not quite closed. Wouldnt
expanding land under cotton cultivation lower its value? Would importing
slaves from an annexed Cuba into the Mississippi Valley lower the price of
slaves (Mississippi planters hope) or raise the price by putting more acre-
age in cotton (presumably North Carolina and Virginia planters hope)?
The consensus Johnson sees is less coherent on second glance. Annex-
ationist and premature secessionists hardly agreed with one another, and
secession in the 1850s was quite unpopular among successful planters, as
William Barney showed in his book The Secessionist Impulse.24 The duel-
ing journalist Duff Green, the aristocratic Matthew Fontaine Maury, and
the re eater Benjamin Yancy were all slaveholders, but when put in a
room together they would probably have gouged each others eyes out. The
Southern Commercial Conventions produced in the South after 1837 were
frothy and sectional but almost never endorsed anything practical, much
less a spatial x. Here Johnson asks us to forgive slaveholding intellec-
tuals overheated rhetorical style used as in the style of the slave market
and the tent revival (311). But does an overheated style absolve them of a
logical plan?
Annexations were planned, certainly, and Johnson makes them into
memorable stories but, as he admits on page 381, they were not that
popular, even in the Deep South. Indeed Mills Thornton has argued that

w h o p u t t h e i r c a p i ta l i sm i n m y s l av e ry ? 30 5
Alabamas small farmers drove the expansionist, secessionist fringe of the
Democratic Party in the 1850s while patrician planters kept their distance
until 1857, when the small farmers had already caused a crisis in Congress.
To further complicate matters, both the Cuba and Nicaragua annexation
movements drew their would-be soldiers from New York and Philadelphia
as much as New Orleans. So whose global x was it? And what does this
have to do with the problems of slave racial capitalism? Johnson hints that
annexation might have provided another safety valve for white men who
couldnt buy slaves (thus the signicance of Hinton Rowan Helpers 1857
book), but then he doesnt nish the thought. The second half of the book
veers too often into literary analysis, with pen portraits of annexationists
and their overwrought descriptions of engorged (phallic) volcanoes. These
portraits are clever, even humorous, but every time Johnson deates an
annexation gone stupid, he pulls wind out of the argument that annexation
was vital to the survival of the southern economy.
If we were to push back on the Harvey model a bit and follow the
money, we would ask where the capitalists were: in London, New York,
or Bayou Beouf? For Marx, Braudel, Raymond Williams, and David
Harvey, they were in London, and their ninety-day investments were in
cotton moving from New Orleans to New York but also to tea plantations
in India, Spice Islands in Indonesia, and gold mines in Colombia. Their
global x was the next investment, the next sure thing, not a bid to ensure
slaverys continued prosperity in North America by annexing Cuba to the
United States. Cuban annexation was a kind of investment, but the limited
funds used made it look more like a lottery ticket than a portfolio plan. Of
course, even hedge funds are imprudent, but the Democratic gambit for
Cuban annexation seems to be more on the ragged end of capital accu-
mulation strategies. Johnson tells us that there were more millionaires in
Mississippi than anywhere else, and this does suggest both world-systems
and merchant capital historians may have underestimated the capital
investment and capital accumulation that was bound up in slavery. New
Orleans, Johnson says repeatedly, was no periphery. But if New Orleans
was the core, then something in world-systems theory must be broken.
And if this was the capitalist core, why would capitalists risk a war over
slavery, when the investment in enslaved bodies was at risk? Why would
Lincoln in particular seem such a threat as to justify the risky path of seces-
sion? Those questions still linger as we reach the end of the river.
Still, there is much to love about The River of Dark Dreams. Unlike
many of the other books under review, Johnsons work shows us precisely
what the forces of production in slavery involved, and here we gain a fuller
and deeper grasp of how slavery changed in the 1850s. The technologies

306 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , vo lum e 5 , i s s u e 2
included a cotton monocrop that was tall enough to be picked quickly but
which perversely became a bountiful space for coevolved bugs and aggres-
sive fungi. It meant a carceral landscape on at cotton land that could
be monitored from a horse. It meant cotton bales and steam boats with
engines that were taxed to their limits and thus ready to explode at any
moment. It meant bloodhounds trained to be murderous to men and
women with black skin (though this particular technology goes back to the
sixteenth century, if not before). Planters owned and visually monitored
the landscape, while slaves worked the soundscape, using their ears to map
out the back roads as places of safety and places to plan revolts.
There are many more paths that follow from Johnsons analytical
framework. The investment in a cotton monocrop and a carceral landscape
required other investments and disinvestments in forces of production:
railroads that connected high, dry cotton lands to deep ports; stores that
offered country credit for a season or two while cotton grew; aggressive
opposition to schooling for the black 40 percent and zero teaching infra-
structure for 80 percent of its whites; thousand-acre plantations with huge
wharf spaces and massive border zones to prevent poor whites from set-
tling nearby; a system of private debts between planters and poor whites
settled in the patroller system and court-day elections.
This system is still with us. It lasted so long past slavery that it is visible
in a map of high school graduates today, the pay for public school teachers,
or measures of social mobility for both black and white Americans. Check
a map of public libraries or public radio stations: that old South stands
out as a huge, yawning gulf. You can inspect the class and racial landscape
of capitalism and slavery today if you sit in any courthouse or emergency
room south of the Mason-Dixon line. The wrongs are still visible, as they
always have been, when the costs are tallied on a market: who sees the
doctor, who needs bail but cant pay it, and who can afford tomorrows
groceries.
Many histories of southern capitalism have emerged in the last few
years, but too often their denition of capitalism lacks the specicity of
the debates of a generation ago. We cannot just say that slaveowners were
thinking about making money, proted by imposing an increasingly puni-
tive labor regime, and participated in an international market. Schoen,
Thomas, Marrs, and many others in the history of capitalism make this
mistake, and it leads to fuzzy analysis. By this denition, ancient slave-
holders in Greece, tenth-century Abbasid slaveholders on sugar planta-
tions in Iraq, and fourteenth-century Genoese slaveholders in Crete were
all capitalists before there was capitalism. And if that is true, then we have
found nothing new in the South but inhumanity in the name of modernity.

w h o p u t t h e i r c a p i ta l i sm i n m y s l av e ry ? 30 7
I dont want to advocate a return to the lengthy historiographical intro-
duction, but many of the current crop of works in the history of capitalism
appear under-theorized and even half-baked. As historians, we have an
ethical obligation to locate our work in the past, and in past work. Eric
Williams, who argued against historians who imagined that capitalism
had no moral obligations in the sordid character of slavery, set the tone
we ought to follow. We must wrestle with the concepts of our predeces-
sors rather than either dismiss them as deterministic or ignore them. We
must forthrightly state our disagreements with others as we try to under-
stand the features of chattel slavery and slaverys relationship to capital-
ism, whatever that is. To dismiss the debates before our time is to risk
being dismissed ourselves in the very near future.

notes
I would like to thank Anthony Kaye and Andrew Zimmerman for their close criti-
cism of early drafts of this review essay.
1. British economic historians rejected this thesis in the 1980s, but David Beck
Rydens West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 17831807 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009) makes a convincing case that Williams had it right all along.
2. The two scholars became bitter enemies by 1961, leading Williams to distance
himself from his radical friends in his autobiography. See Tony Martin, Eric Williams:
His Radical Side in the Early 1940s, Journal of Caribbean Studies 17, nos. 1 and 2
(September 2002): 10719.
3. Indeed Williamss 1938 dissertation that was the basis for Capitalism and
Slavery (published in 2014 as The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian
Slave Trade and Slavery by Rowman & Littleeld) has a more restricted argument,
that economic factors were foremost in the English opposition to slavery.
4. The best-known critic of Williamss thesis about the economic motivations
for abolition is Seymour Drescher, most recently in Abolition: A History of Slavery
and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). A reserved defense
of Williams can be found in David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age
of Revolution, 17701823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). More spirited
defenses came from Barbara Solow, Capitalism and Slavery in the Exceedingly Long
Run, in British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams,
ed. Barbara Solow and Stanley Engerman (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1987), Joseph Inikori, Africans in the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in
International Trade and Economic Development (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2002) and Robin Blackbourn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the
Baroque to the Modern, 14921800 (New York: Verso, 1997).
5. The best sustained analysis of this approach is C. B. Macphersons The Political
Theory of Possessive Individualism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).
6. Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist
Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).

308 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , vo lum e 5 , i s s u e 2
 7. See Peter Preston, Development Theory: An Introduction (Cambridge, England:
Blackwell, 1996), chapter 9 and Henry Bernstein, Modernization Theory and the
Sociological Study of Development Journal of Development Studies 7 (January 1971):
14160.
8. Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War
America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
9. This was Robert Brenners critique of world-systems theory in The Origins of
Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism, New Left Review 104,
no. 1 (1977): 2592.
10. Melville H. Watkins, A Staple Theory of Economic Growth, Canadian Journal
of Economics and Political Science / Revue canadienne dEconomique et de Science poli-
tique 29 (May 1963): 14158.
11. Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century
Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
12. On the states rights ideology of the southern federalists see Manisha Sinha,
The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and James H. Broussard, The
Southern Federalists: 18001816 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1978).
13. On the mechanics of railroad investment, see Milton Sydney Heath, The Role
of the State in Economic Development in Georgia to 1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1954), Carter Goodrich, Government Promotion of American Canals
and Railroads, 18001900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), and Dorothy
R. Adler, British Investment in American Railways, 18341898 (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 1970).
14. Calhoun and Davis strongly endorsed spending state money on railroads.
Davis endorsed the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad to be based in Gulfport, Mississippi;
Calhoun the Louisville, Cincinnati & Charleston, to be based in Charleston. Neither
was completed before the Civil War. On John C. Calhoun, see H. Roger Grant, The
Louisville, Cincinnati & Charleston Railroad: Dreams of Linking North and South
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); I do not know of a close history of
Daviss years in Congress.
15. See, for example, Scott Reynolds Nelson, Iron Confederacies: Southern Rail-
ways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1999) and Mark Yanochik, Mark Thornton, and Bradley Ewing, Railroad
Construction and Antebellum Slave Prices, Social Science Quarterly 84 (September
2003): 72337. The higher estimate of state and foreign investment in southern rail-
roads comes from Milton Sydney Heath, North American Railroads: Public Railroad
Construction and the Development of Private Enterprise in the South before 1861,
Journal of Economic History 10 (Supplement 1950): 4053. Heath argues that his
initial estimate that southern governments provided 55 percent of investment was an
understatement.
16. Gary Gereffi and Michael Korzeniewicz, eds., Commodity Chains and Global
Capitalism (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992).

w h o p u t t h e i r c a p i ta l i sm i n m y s l av e ry ? 30 9
 17. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1946), especially chaps. 2 and 5.
18. John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, 2
vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 2007).
19. The best summary of the work on ideology is Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An
Introduction (London: Verso, 1991).
20. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York:
Pantheon, 1974); David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 18481861 (New York:
Harper & Row, 1976).
21. Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early
Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
22. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982).
23. Rosa Luxemburg, Die Akkumulation des Kapitals, ein Beitrag zur konomischen
Erklrung des Imperialismus (Berlin: P. Singer, 1913).
24. William L. Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974).

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