Further Research
The last decade has seen a surge in historical research pertaining to slavery and capitalism in the United States. The following bibliography—by no means comprehensive—is intended to highlight recent scholarship and guide interested readers to pertinent books and articles. A short collection of web resources may prove useful to those pursuing additional information or conducting research of their own.
Selected Bibliography
Ashworth, John. Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, 2 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995–2008.
Bailey, Ronald. "The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States: The Textile Industry in New England." Social Science History 14 (fall 1990): 373-414.
Baptist, Edward E. "Toxic Debt, Liar Loans, and Securitized Human Beings: The Panic of 1837 and the Fate of Slavery." Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American History 10 (April 2010).
Beckert, Sven. "Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War." American Historical Review 109 (2004): 1405-1438.
Berlin, Ira, and Harris, Leslie, eds. Slavery in New York. New York: New Press, 2005.
Blatt, Martin H. and Roediger, David, eds., The Meaning of Slavery in the North. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998.
Brazy, Martha Jane. An American Planter: Stephen Duncan of Antebellum Natchez and New York. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.
Byrne, Frank J. Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820-1865. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006.
Crothers, A. Glenn. "Quaker Merchants and Slavery in Early National Alexandria, Virginia: The Ordeal of William Hartshorne." Journal of the Early Republic 25 (spring 2005): 47-78.
Deyle, Steven. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Downey, Tom. Planting a Capitalist South: Masters, Merchants, and Manufacturers in the Southern Interior, 1790-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.
Egnal, Marc. Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009.
Esch, Elizabeth and Roediger, David R. "One Symptom of Originality: Race and the Management of Labour in the History of the United States." Historical Materialism 17 (2009): 3-43.
Fehrenbacher, Don E. The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery, ed. Ward M. McAfee . New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Gigantino, James. "Trading in Jersey Souls: New Jersey and the Interstate Slave Trade." Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 77:3 (summer 2010): 281-302.
Glickman, Lawrence B. "'Buy for the Sake of the Slave': Abolitionism and the Origins of American Consumer Activism." American Quarterly 56 (December 2004): 889-912
Graeber, David. "Turning Modes of Production Inside Out: Or, Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery." Critique of Anthropology 26 (2006): 61-85.
Einhorn, Robin L. American Taxation, American Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Eltis, David. "The U.S. Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1644-1867: An Assessment." Civil War History 54 (2008): 347-378.
Ericson, David F. "The Federal Government and Slavery: Following the Money Trail." Studies in American Political Development 19 (2005): 105-116.
Farrow, Anne, Lang, Joel, and Frank, Jennifer. Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery. New York: Ballantine Books, 2005.
Faulkner, Carol. "The Root of Evil: Free Produce and Radical Antislavery, 1820-1860." Journal of the Early Republic 27 (fall 2007): 377-405.
Gillespie, Michele. "Building Networks of Knowledge: Henry Merrell and Textile Manufacturing in the Antebellum South." In Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, eds., Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization: From the Antebellum Era to the Computer Age, 97-124. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009.
Glickstein, Jonathan A. American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002.
Gould, Philip. Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Hahn, Steven. The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Johnson, Walter, ed. The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Kaye, Anthony. "The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century and the Atlantic World." Journal of Southern History 75 (2009): 627-650.
Kilbourne, Richard Holcombe. Slave Agriculture and Financial Markets in Antebellum America: The Bank of the United States in Mississippi, 1831-1852. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006.
Larson, John Lauritz. The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Laurie, Bruce. "Workers, Abolitionists, and the Historians: A Historiographical Perspective." Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 5 (2008): 17-55.
Majewski, John. Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Manegold, C.S. Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Marler, Scott P. "'An Abiding Faith in Cotton': The Merchant Capitalist Community of New Orleans, 1860-62." Civil War History 54 (2008): 247-276.
Marrs, Aaron W. Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Martin, Bonnie. "Slavery's Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property." Journal of Southern History 76 (2010): 1-50.
McMichael, Philip. "Slavery in Capitalism: The Rise and Demise of the U.S. Ante-Bellum Cotton Culture." Theory and Society 20 (1991): 321-349.
Melish, Joanne Pope. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780–1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Murphy, Sharon, "Securing Human Property: Slavery, Life Insurance, and Industrialization in the Upper South." Journal of the Early Republic 25 (winter 2005): 615-652.
Paterson, David E. "Slavery, Slaves, and Cash in a Georgia Village, 1825-1865." Journal of Southern History 75 (2009): 879-930.
Rappleye, Charles. Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
Rockman, Seth. "The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism." In Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions, 335-361. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006.
Rothman, Joshua. "The Hazards of the Flush Times: Gambling, Mob Violence, and the Anxieties of America's Market Revolution." Journal of American History 95 (2008): 651-677.
Schoen, Brian. The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Stanley, Amy Dru. From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Tomich, Dale W. Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.
Tomlins, Christopher. Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Van Cleve, George William. A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Waldstreciher, David. Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.
Wells, Jonathan Daniel. Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Wright, Gavin. Slavery and American Economic Development. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.
Zakim, Michael. "The Dialectics of Merchant Capital: New York City Businessmen during the Secession Winter, 1860-1861." New York History 87 (2006): 67-87.
Web Resources:
The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database
Bibliography of Slavery and World Slaving at University of Virginia
Digital Library on American Slavery at UNC-Greensboro
Beyond Face Value Exhibition on Confederate Currency
Documenting Louisiana Sugar at University of Sussex
Slavery and the Making of the University at University of North Carolina
Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal
Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection at Cornell University
Slavery in New York Exhibition at the New-York Historical Society
Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North
Slavery & Justice Exhibition at the John Carter Brown Library