Schedule
Thursday, April 7
Salomon Hall, Brown University
3:00-4:00
Undergraduate Research Poster Session
Salomon Hall lobby
4:00-5:30
Keynote Address, President Ruth Simmons
Salomon 101
Friday, April 8
All sessions in Crystal Room, Alumnae Hall, Brown University
8:30-8:55
Coffee and Registration
9:00-11:00
Finance
- Chair: Michael Vorenberg, Brown University
- The Contours of Cotton Capitalism: Speculation, Slavery, and Economic Panic in Mississippi, 1832-1841
Joshua D. Rothman, University of Alabama - Neighbor to Neighbor: Local Lending Networks Building Economies by Mortgaging Slaves
Bonnie Martin, Southern Methodist University - The Common Thread: Cotton, Slavery and the Development of Merchant Banking
Kathryn Boodry, Harvard University - Comment: Elizabeth Blackmar, Columbia University
11:00-11:25
Coffee Break
11:30-1:00
Development
- Chair: Ted Widmer, John Carter Brown Library
- Defining the National Mainstream: Slavery, Capitalism, and the Limestone South
John Majewski, University of California–Santa Barbara - Did Slavery Need Capitalism, or did Capitalism Need Slavery?
Stanley Engerman, University of Rochester - Comment: Kaivan Munshi, Brown University
1:00-1:55
Lunch
2:00-4:00
Commerce
- Chair: Cécile Vidal, L'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
- Quantifying Complicity: New Englanders and the Slave Economies of the West Indies
Eric Kimball, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg - The Coastwise Slave Trade and a Mercantile Community of Interest
Calvin Schermerhorn, Arizona State University - Slavery, Technology and the Richmond-Rio Circuit
Daniel Rood, American Antiquarian Society - Comment: Ronald Bailey, Savannah State University
Saturday, April 9
All Sessions in Thompson Room, Barker Center, Harvard University
8:30-9:00
Coffee and Registration
9:00-11:00
Plantation Practices
- Chair: Joyce Chaplin, Harvard University
- The Whipping Machine
Edward Baptist, Cornell University - Improving the South: Plantation Slavery and American Industrialization
Ian Beamish, Johns Hopkins University - From Slavery to Scientific Management: Accounting for Mastery
Caitlin Rosenthal, Harvard University - Comment: Lorena Walsh, Colonial Williamsburg (retired)
11:00-11:25
Coffee Break
11:30- 1:00
Human Capital
- Chair: Richard Rabinowitz, American History Workshop
- “Broad is de Road dat Leads ter Death”: Human Capital & Enslaved Mortality
Daina Ramey Berry, University of Texas - Slave Breeding: An Antebellum Argument over Commodity Relations, Love, and Personhood
Amy Dru Stanley, University of Chicago - Comment: Walter Johnson, Harvard University
1:00-1:55
Lunch and Undergraduate Poster Session on "Harvard and Slavery"
2:00-4:00
Institutions and Ideas
- Chair: John Stauffer, Harvard University
- “The Very Name of a West Indian”: Atlantic Wealth and the Rise of the American College
Craig Wilder, Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Capitalism, Slavery, and Mathew Carey’s 1819
Andrew Shankman, Rutgers University–Camden - “No God But Gain”: The Business of Cuba and U.S. Foreign Policy
Stephen Chambers, Brown University - Utility, Slavery, and Market in American Legal Thought
Alfred Brophy, University of North Carolina School of Law - Comment: James T. Campbell, Stanford University
4:00-5:00
Concluding Roundtable
- Sven Beckert, Seth Rockman, and the Audience