Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina

Abstract

Justene Hill Edwards's brilliant book argues that the business ventures of enslaved people from colonial times to emancipation were integrated into the broader political economy of slavery in South Carolina. African-descended South Carolinians did not just labor for enslavers. Many worked for themselves in small enterprises and networks that permitted them, in many cases, a return. The book's graceful prose and lucid argumentation will appeal to students and specialists. Unfree Markets explores changes over time, arguing that enslavers’ efforts to regulate Black business activities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave way to predatory involvement in enslaved people's dealings in the nineteenth century, partly because of the state's shift from rice to cotton as the primary economic activity. This shift prefigured predatory capitalism of later eras. From 1686 onward, the colonial legislature worked to establish a legal framework that sanctioned independent Black business activities while bringing them under the control of enslavers.As South Carolina became a majority Black plantation society, its leaders worked assiduously to exert control over African-descended people's independent economic activities while at the same time sponsoring them. The task labor system of cultivating rice was exquisite industrial psychology that left labor time for self-directed enterprises. Enslavers also permitted bondspersons to cultivate marginal lands and hire themselves out for wages. The result was a seemingly widespread practice of marketing produce, poultry, and other consumables and a Black consumer market for goods, including, notably, alcohol. That symbiosis seems to have helped diversify the colony's economy, and enslaved people sold necessities to whites despite being legal chattel property themselves.Nineteenth-century South Carolina enslavers found self-serving reasons to prey on the economic activities they insisted enslaved people do. Charles C. Pinckney (nephew of South Carolina's constitutional delegate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney) was adamant that enslaved people cultivate their own food and trade surpluses for “luxuries of life” (133). In Hill Edwards's view, enslavers like Pinckney were predatory paternalists whose self-serving rationale twisted a novel form of exploitation into a defense of race-based slavery.Both enslaved and enslavers practiced recognizable forms of capitalism, which Hill Edwards understands as economic actors investing resources in activities designed to generate returns. It was not uncommon for an enslaver to encourage enslaved people to steal cotton, which that enslaver paid for in whiskey. The resulting configuration of capitalism was expansive. And Hill Edwards's definition provides enough space for enslaved market actors to be petty capitalists based on the concept of free time rather than freedom. One of the book's interventions is “how the rise of capitalism in the early nineteenth century undermined racial solidarity among white South Carolinians, while still keeping enslaved people in bondage” (83). This is a crucial point.Racial solidarity dissolved in slavery's capitalism, which in South Carolina meant that enslavers protected and extended financial interests in slavery by sanctioning Black enterprise. “Merchants were eager to sell to and barter with enslaved people, and in the process, thumbed their noses at fellow white citizens who opposed their trade with slaves” (165). Slavery's capitalism disadvantaged poor whites and enslaved people but for reasons that divided wealthy, poor, and enslaved. That fine-grained distinction is one of the reasons labor historians will benefit from this exceptional scholarship.Traversing contexts among enslavers and enslaved, Hill Edwards deftly expands categories of capitalism and labor value. Historians like Diana Ramey Berry have successfully linked the new history of capitalism with the lived realities of enslaved people, rendering them human actors in a system carefully calibrated to commoditize or commodify their labor, bodies, sexuality, and so on. Unfree Markets builds on this insight, along with many others, integrating enslavers’ strategies and enslaved people's counterstrategies, showing that even complex and robust business activities among enslaved people were subject to predatory manipulation by enslavers and other white market actors. Here slavery by itself does not fill the conceptual spaces of capitalism or its predatory form in this period, since so many market actors who were not enslavers were taking advantage of a lack of civil rights among African-descended vendors and producers. Below-market prices paid to enslaved businesspeople appear as a Black tax in a society in which slavery was tightly woven into the social fabric of racism. And enslaved people's success in some aspects of business does not mean they were winning contests with enslavers.Unfree Markets points to the post-Emancipation landscape of capitalism that disadvantaged free South Carolinians of African descent and, more broadly, predatory inclusion of later eras.