Slavery and Capitalism

Lawyers as Trusted Agents in Nineteenth-Century American Commerce: The Influence of Fiduciary Law and Norms on Economic Development

“…This focus on contract overshadows inquiry into other legal rules and legal norms that helped Americans overcome the obstacles to market development identified by the new historians of capitalism. For their part, historians of capitalism have recognized that wealthy commercial actors were able to overcome the impediments to trade presented by the risky nineteenth-century economy and have charted the rise of interconnected global markets for cotton, cloth, and other commodities (Beckert 2001, 2014; Rockman 2012). Some historians have recognized the importance of trust and risk management to economic development in the nineteenth century (Sunderland 2007, 1; Klaus 2014, 3).…”

“…1.They have, however, identified the exploitation that supported nineteenth-century commerce, exploitation that Eric Williams (1994) first drew attention to in the 1940s (Kilbourne 1995; Beckert 2001; Martin 2010; Rockman 2012). …”

A Vertiginous Experience: Historical Ethics and Practice in the Age of Trump

“…American historians and others were reconsidering the long predominant focus on culture and language as influential historical contexts, and rediscovering materialist approaches to history (Graeber 2011; Piketty 2014). Scholars working mainly in the antebellum period offered a “new history of capitalism,” highlighting the integrated and codependent character of enslaved and early capitalist economies and substantiating eloquent calls for a debate on the question of reparations (Rockman 2012; Coates 2014). After the election of Trump, controversies concerning the history of repression of enslaved, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color have intensified in sometimes acrimonious newspaper and academic debates that divided the field, or at least the most vocal sections of it (Hannah-Jones 2019; Lichtenstein 2020).…”

Interrogating Piracy

“…This is a significant insight because commons enclosure facilitated industrialization and the creation of a wage-dependent underclass that could no longer access the commons to subsist. It also extended to colonies, where people were enslaved to generate wealth for emerging industries and markets (Rockman 2012). During the second enclosure movement, which is the name James Boyle gives to the shift towards narrow and monopolist tendencies during the emerging information age, we see the enclosure of the information commons on the internet, which was collectively produced by hackers (Boyle 2003(Boyle , 2008.…”