Slavery, Capitalism, and the Interpretations of the Antebellum United States: The Problem of Definition

Abstract

Slavery, Capitalism, and the Interpretations of the Antebellum United StatesThe Problem of Definition James L. Huston (bio) In the space of three years, from 2013 to 2016, a flurry of books crowded the reading lists of historians of pre–Civil War America, all of which emphasized the ties between Southern slavery, capitalism, and modern economic development: Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton, Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860, and Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery's Capitalism. Besides insisting that the rise of Western wealth was rooted in the enslavement of Africans who were brutally treated and, in the nineteenth-century American case, forced into mass migration to supply cotton to the new industrial powerhouses of the world, they all explicitly insist that slavery was not only a capitalist endeavor but virtually the starting point of capitalism.1 They reject the idea that in the American South plantation slavery was [End Page 119] a pre-bourgeois system that enabled its elite to voice and believe in anti-capitalist values and engage in anti-capitalist behaviors; the new historians of slavery discard, with vehemence, the interpretation that some measure of paternalism operated in the social relations between slaves and slaveowners. A few of the new historians of slavery declare themselves Marxists (the only sure way to know of such affiliation is by an author's self-identification), but the more relevant aspect of their presentations is their determination to reject the Marxist definition of capitalism as the appearance of the wage-earning proletarian. However, most of the writers who posit that slavery was a capitalist endeavor draw on certain Marxist ideas, but that raises a stark problem, because slavery and capitalism in Marxist theory are distinctly separate economic systems.2 These works have a shared oddity: they do not employ definitions. Baptist seems to equate capitalism with the rise of machines and industrialization. Beckert declares that the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries were centuries of "war capitalism" but offers no definition, thereby making it impossible to decide whether Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great were the first captains of capitalist industry.3 Schermerhorn does not explain when capitalism in the United States began. Seth Rockman even celebrates current writers' "disavowal of theoretical definitions" and "recalibrated chronologies." Rather, these authors seem to decide [End Page 120] that since slavery, market growth, and industrialism were coincident in time, they had to be part of a single process, that process being called capitalism. Only Walter Johnson openly confronts the definition problem. He explains that in Marxist theory capitalism required the commodification of labor power, the appearance of the wage-worker, and the establishment of contractual obligations—and in this sense slavery was not capitalist. In particular, the new historians of slavery throw out the old Marxist determination that the arrival of capitalism in an economic system was confirmed when the proletarian (the wage-earner, the free laborer) appeared. They frequently employ the quasi-definition of capitalism that comes from transnational studies or a world-systems approach that stresses interdependencies between a core society and peripheral ones, stitched together by international trade, and that does not rely on the experience of one country (Great Britain) to be the model for the arrival of capitalism. Johnson opts for the world-systems definition.4 Several frustrated reviewers have noted this failure to provide definitions of both capitalism and modernity.5 [End Page 121] Sometimes quarrels over definitions have few practical consequences for accurate interpretations, but such is not the case in this instance. Mathematician Daniel Solow explains how vital the role of definitions can be: "A definition in mathematics is an agreement, by all parties concerned, as to the meaning of a particular term. … Nothing says that you must accept this definition as being correct. If you choose not to, then we will be unable to communicate regarding this particular idea." Or, to quote Peter Kolchin, "Clearly, definitions matter, and the comparative historian needs to pay careful attention to how words are used."6 The stakes involved in this struggle over the definition of...