Enslaved mariners, white seamstresses, Irish dockhands, free black domestic servants, and native-born street sweepers all navigated the low-end labor market in post-Revolutionary Baltimore. Seth Rockman considers this diverse workforce, exploring how race, sex, nativity, and legal status determined the economic opportunities and vulnerabilities of working families in the early republic.
In the era of Frederick Douglass, Baltimore's distinctive economy featured many slaves who earned wages and white workers who performed backbreaking labor. By focusing his study on this boomtown,...
Enslaved mariners, white seamstresses, Irish dockhands, free black domestic servants, and native-born street sweepers all navigated the low-end lab...
During the nineteenth century, the United States entered the ranks of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage. This was no mere coincidence. Slavery's Capitalism argues for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. According to editors Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, the issue is not whether slavery itself was or was not capitalist but, rather, the impossibility of understanding the nation's spectacular pattern of...
During the nineteenth century, the United States entered the ranks of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation...
Slavery's Capitalism explores the role of slavery in the development of the U.S. economy during the first decades of the nineteenth century. It tells the history of slavery as a story of national, even global, economic importance and investigates the role of enslaved Americans in the building of the modern world.
Slavery's Capitalism explores the role of slavery in the development of the U.S. economy during the first decades of the nineteenth century. It tells ...
