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Slavery, Capitalism, and the Problem of Misprision

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SvenBeckert and SethRothman (eds.), Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016, $39.95). Pp. 406. isbn978 0 8122 4841 8.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2018

PETER A. COCLANIS
PETER A. COCLANIS*
Affiliation:
Global Research Institute, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. Email: coclanis@unc.edu.
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Extract

One of the most interesting scholarly developments in historical circles over the course of the last few years has been the unanticipated rise of the field known as the “new history of American capitalism.” Although most devotees of this new field are not formally trained in economics – indeed, some demonstrate little familiarity with the standard methods informing the discipline – the rise of the field on balance has been salutary for the traditional field to which it is most closely related: economic history. For decades economic history qua field had been shrinking, particularly in history departments, but also in departments of economics, as historians jumped on the cultural bandwagon or set sail with Atlantic history, and economists moved toward theory, models, and abstraction and away from messy empirics and fussy data, especially from the deep recesses of the past (often defined as anything prior to the last quarter). And so, academic scribblers – including this one, alas – anticipating the demise of economic history, were busy penning ex ante epitaphs and memorials to the field, as the remaining practitioners became grayer and longer in the tooth.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , August 2018 , E46
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2018 

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References

1 On the basic contours of the field see, for example, Sven Beckert, “History of American Capitalism,” in Foner, Eric and McGirr, Lisa, eds., American History Now (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 314–35Google Scholar; Sklansky, Jeffrey, “The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism,” Modern Intellectual History, 9 (April 2012), 233–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Louis Hyman, “Why Write the History of Capitalism?”, Symposium Magazine, 8 July 2013, at www.symposium-magazine.com/why-write-the-history-of-capitalism-louis-hyman; Rothman, Seth, “What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?”, Journal of the Early Republic, 34 (Fall 2014), 439–66Google Scholar; Nelson, Scott Reynolds, “Who Put the Capitalism in My Slavery?”, Journal of the Civil War Era, 5 (June 2015), 289–315CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clegg, John J., “Capitalism and Slavery,” Critical Historical Studies, 2 (Fall 2015), 281–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tom Cutterham, “Continuing the Debate on Slavery and Capitalism,” The Junto, 27 Oct. 2015, at https://earlyamericanists.com/2015/10/27/continuing-the-debate-on-slavery-and-capitalism; Lipartito, Kenneth, “Reassembling the Economic: New Departures in Historical Materialism,” American Historical Review, 121 (Feb. 2016) 101–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 112–34; Hilt, Eric, “Economic History, Historical Analysis, and the ‘New History of Capitalism’,” Journal of Economic History, 77 (June 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (published online 24 April 2017), at www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/E17BEA48B930F6F25F328B5A79332A6E/S002205071700016Xa.pdf/economic_history_historical_analysis_and_the_new_history_of_capitalism.pdf. Also see “Interchange: The History of Capitalism,” Journal of American History, 101 (Sept. 2014), 503–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and for a journalistic treatment, Jennifer Schuessler, “In History Departments, It's Up with Capitalism,” New York Times, 6 April 2013, at www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/education/in-history-departments-its-up-with-capitalism.html.

2 See Coclanis, Peter A., “The Puzzling State of Economic History,” Historically Speaking, 1 (March 2000), 1–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 4; Coclanis, Peter A. and Carlton, David L., “The Crisis in Economic History,” Challenge: The Magazine of Economic Affairs, 44 (Nov.–Dec. 2001), 93–103Google Scholar. For a slightly more upbeat take a few years later see Coclanis, Peter A., “The Audacity of Hope: Economic History Today,” AHA Perspectives in History, 48 (Jan. 2010), 21–25Google Scholar.

3 See Schuessler.

4 Degler, Carl N., Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 1Google Scholar. Ironically, leftist scholars such as Paul Sweezy, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein would be more sympathetic to Degler's line of reasoning.

5 Rosenberg, Harold, “The Herd of Independent Minds,” in Rosenberg, Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art, Politics, and Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973), 15–28Google Scholar.

6 Rothman anticipated this development in his 2014 assessment of this intellectual project/movement. See Rothman, “What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?”, 445.

7 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth and Genovese, Eugene D., “The Political Crisis of Social History: Class Struggle as Subject and Object,” in Fox-Genovese and Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 179–212Google Scholar, 212. An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Journal of Social History in 1976.

8 Wright, Gavin, “Slavery and American Agricultural History,” Agricultural History, 77 (Autumn 2003), 527–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Gavin Wright recently made the same basic points in his review of Slavery's Capitalism on EH. Net (March 2017). See http://eh.net/book_reviews/slaverys-capitalism-a-new-history-of-american-economic-development. I suspect most conventional economic historians would also agree.

10 Several of the authors cited in note 1 above also comment critically on the failure of the editors and authors to tackle definitional questions regarding capitalism. See especially the essays by John J. Clegg and Eric Hilt, and the short piece by Tom Cutterham.

11 Neal, Larry and Williamson, Jeffrey G., eds., The Cambridge History of Capitalism, 2 vols. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014)Google Scholar, Volume I, 2. Note that Larry Neal wrote the introduction to Volume I, wherein these criteria are laid out.

12 Nelson, “Who Put Their Capitalism in My Slavery?”.

13 Coclanis, Peter A., The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

14 Beckert, “History of American Capitalism,” 321.

15 Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press 1997Google Scholar; first published 1973); Bloom, , A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

16 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, xii–xiii.

17 Ibid., 12.