Capitalist Discipline

In 1974, two major works appeared, and quickly rocked the world of slave studies, introducing new and challenging forms of interpretive reading and analytic technique: Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll and Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman's Time on the Cross. Genovese's notion of "paternalism," deploying notions of cultural hegemony borrowed from the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, set the stage for a deeper appreciation of forms of resistance and oppression among enslaved Africans and their American-born children—and of slavery's inner psychological violence—that built upon the troubling conclusions emerging from Stanley Elkins's Slavery (1959) and his concentration-camp analogy, while Fogel and Engerman, deftly popularizing and deepening the exploratory work of econometricians like Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer, challenged the notion that slave production in cotton, for example, was inherently inefficient and capital-wasting—and, indeed, demonstrated that plantation-made cotton, planted, chopped and picked by enslaved Africans and their descendants in the South involved an industrial regime that was as productive and profitable as the "free" agriculture of the Antebellum North.

Or so they said! Then the fights began. The works and politics of Genovese and Fogel and Engerman were decidedly different, but alike they propelled forward a fresher approach to neglected documentary sources (like the WPA slave narratives) and helped bring economic analysis to a high technical level. While it is still early in the cycle, it may be that we are now in the midst of a similar historiographical revolution, again focused on slavery, as the "new history of capitalism" school probes sources and styles of analysis, articulating again the fundamental importance of the plantation's violent compulsion of labor—together with the concerted dispossession of aboriginal lands—in the evolution of the American economy, and pointing to the ways that slavery's practices in production, marketing and finance bore a recognizably capitalist stamp. And, indeed, going further, some have argued, among them, Jacob Metzer and R. Keith Aufhauser in two neglected early articles,¹ that the slave plantation in its completeness of control and ruthless attention to the bottom line provided a template for post-Civil War industrial expansion and the disciplining of work that has come to dominate capitalist economy on the widest scale.

Contributing now to the discussion, here are two collections, bearing the rigor and characteristic argumentative force of the "history of capitalism" school. Plantation Kingdom (PK) is based on the Marcus Cunliffe lectures on the American South and its global commodities, University of Sussex, Brighton, England (2012–2013); Slavery's Capitalism (SC), on a conference of the same name, jointly sponsored by Brown University and Harvard University (2011).

Since many of the topics overlap, I treat the two volumes together, focusing specifically on the plantation's productive core (especially, the disciplining of enslaved laborers) and its financing. Other notable contributions to SC include Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman's comprehensive introduction, Daina Ramey Berry's discussion of slavery's role in inventing life insurance, Eric Kimball's and Stephen Chamber's consideration, respectively, of capitalist connections to the slave economies of the West Indies and Cuba, and in Part IV, devoted to "national institutions," a set of chapters detailing the relation of slavery to Catholic colleges (Craig Steven Wilder), Mathew Carey's 1819 exercise in political economy (Andrew Shankman), the evolution of Southern legal reasoning (Alfred L. Brophy) and education in the "limestone" South (Virginia's Shenandoah valley, Kentucky's bluegrass region, Tennessee's Nashville basin) (John Majewski).

Plantation Kingdom covers the longer time span, dealing with the beginnings, triumph and decay of commodity production in rice, tobacco, sugar and cotton. Peter A...