“…That same literature has tended to deny the presence of a market revolution in the South (Egerton ). Yet if the combination of cheap land, credit, and expected capital gains can explain the transition to widespread market dependence in the North, then a similar explanation has even more power for the South.…”
Section: Re‐defining Capitalismmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Genovese and Fox‐Genovese , p. 117. For almost identical formulations see Hahn (, p. 223), Egerton (, p. 212) and Kolchin (, p. 172).…”
The relationship between slavery and capitalism has become a renewed topic of debate, yet scholars have not been able to agree on a definition of capitalism. In this article I first clear up some misconceptions and situate the debate in the Marxian tradition from which it arose. I argue that while non‐Marxian accounts of capitalism fail to explain the key social transformations that have accompanied the rise of capitalism globally, Marxian accounts have failed to comprehend similar transformations that occurred on American slave plantations in the 19th century. I then present a general model of capitalism, building on earlier work by Brenner and Wood, that both incorporates and explains the distinctive dynamics of capitalist slavery in the antebellum South.
“…That same literature has tended to deny the presence of a market revolution in the South (Egerton ). Yet if the combination of cheap land, credit, and expected capital gains can explain the transition to widespread market dependence in the North, then a similar explanation has even more power for the South.…”
Section: Re‐defining Capitalismmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Genovese and Fox‐Genovese , p. 117. For almost identical formulations see Hahn (, p. 223), Egerton (, p. 212) and Kolchin (, p. 172).…”
The relationship between slavery and capitalism has become a renewed topic of debate, yet scholars have not been able to agree on a definition of capitalism. In this article I first clear up some misconceptions and situate the debate in the Marxian tradition from which it arose. I argue that while non‐Marxian accounts of capitalism fail to explain the key social transformations that have accompanied the rise of capitalism globally, Marxian accounts have failed to comprehend similar transformations that occurred on American slave plantations in the 19th century. I then present a general model of capitalism, building on earlier work by Brenner and Wood, that both incorporates and explains the distinctive dynamics of capitalist slavery in the antebellum South.
“…These authors find that both court-ordered sales and slave exports were lower in the depressed 1840s than in the booming 61. While the literature on "the market revolution" has tended to overlook the South (Egerton 1996;Stokes and Conway 1996), the effect of credit market discipline may have been magnified in that region simply because the slave owners on whom such pressures operated tended to control more resources (both economic and political), and thus have more influence over regionwide patterns of development, than the small farmers of the North.…”
Historians and economists have increasingly identified capitalist patterns of behavior among antebellum slave owners, yet no consensus has emerged about the explanation for this finding. I argue that US slave owners were driven to behave like capitalists in part because of their dependence on credit. The ability of creditors to seize the land and slaves of insolvent debtors generated selection pressures that led to both aggregate patterns of capitalist development and the adaptation of individual slave owners to the logic of capitalist competition. I refer to this process as “credit market discipline.” In a case study of South Carolina in the 1840s, I show that the threat and reality of foreclosure was capable of stimulating recognizably capitalist behaviors among even the most aristocratic and “prebourgeois” slave owners.
“…For example, because money's value is often a function of its capacity to facilitate market exchange, it is less valuable where markets play a limited role. In the US South in the 19th century, “Farmers regarded cash as they did corn, as a practical tool for exchange, but rarely as something to be acquired for itself”(Egerton, 1996, p. 218). Gudeman and Rivera (1990) quoted a modern Colombian campesino with a similar view: Money is not a useful thing [ una utilidad ] itself but serves to buy a cow or hog as savings for tomorrow.…”
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