The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860

Schermerhorn, Calvin

doi:10.12987/yale/9780300192001.001.0001

Cited by 121 publications

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“…What is crucial about Barlow's fiction is its allowing a common conception among European settlers of North America that they are engaged in a morally responsible mission, which in turn allows them to extend their trust enough to participate in an expansive system. 17 By themselves, that is, America's new sources of energy are no guarantee of economic growth; what is needed is that "highly structured system of trade characterized by debt obligations that bound borrowers' ambitions, expectations, and imaginations to future repayment"-in other words, credit, perhaps "the most expansive resource in human history" ( [25], pp. 1, 102).…”

Section: Seeing Like a Statementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Credit dealt with the future. Financial paper...bound borrowers' ambitions, imaginations, and expectations to future repayment, perpetual accumulation, and relationships that expanded capacities seemingly without limit" ( [25], p. 102). Credit's "coercive power" may be seen in Schermerhorn's choice of metaphor of binding, but also the context in which he is speaking, which is the rise of American capitalism through the practice of slavery.…”

Section: Seeing Like a Statementioning

confidence: 99%

“…25 Yet Barlow's poem attributes another surprising power to the purposeful utilization of energy to produce commodities, one that has to do with the identity of its users. Caught between the environmental theory of race of theorists like the Comte de Buffon, who held that North America was an unhealthy place that stunted human growth, and developers of a biological explanation like Thomas Jefferson, whose Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) seeks to explain race via structural anatomy and sympathy, Barlow links race to the labor of cultivation in which both native and European may share.…”

Section: The Production Of Whitenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…205, xii). 25 In regard specifically to fossil-fuels use, Johnson refers to this trend as the "disembodiment of labor" ( [2], p. 43).…”

Section: The Production Of Whitenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Birth of Homo Colossus: Energy Consumption and Pre-Familiarization in Joel Barlow’s Vision of Columbus

Pangborn

2016

Humanities

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Although Raymond De Young points out the current response to energy descent he terms localization "is not globalization in reverse", the writers of modernity's energy ramp-up used many of the same techniques De Young proposes for adapting to the downslope of M. King Hubbert's fossil-fuels peak. Among these is pre-familiarization, the construction of mental models that "help people to feel at home in a place they have not yet inhabited." Long before William Catton's depiction of the West's outsized energy user as Homo colossus, for example, Joel Barlow provided early national Americans with a reflection of themselves as gigantic consumers of the continent's bounty in his 1787 Vision of Columbus. In the epic poem, Barlow puts in place foundational elements of the myth of progress that will develop with an increasingly extravagant energy consumption: a refutation of the classical republican model of history as cyclical; a conflation of the process of resource extraction with that of production; a characterization of this "production" as the natural trait of the knowledgeable, moral Western subject; the pairing of this characterization with a racialized discourse; and an assertion of climate melioration that anticipates by two centuries the counter-arguments of anthropogenic climate-change denialists. The poem invites its reader to inhabit the skin of a lofty and distanced observer of natural life, drawing on the earlier century's infatuation with the prospect view, to help the reader become "pre-familiarized" with an idea of him-or herself fitting an economic model of endless growth. In the work, therefore, might be found not only the blueprints for an as-yet inchoate Anthropocene, but also the design of a new humanity to go along with it.Keywords: Joel Barlow; Vision of Columbus; early American republic; energy consumption; pre-familiarization; race; climate change; economic growth; localization; historiography Flows of energy do work and also cause all kinds of activities not ordinarily thought of as work, such as the enjoyment of beauty and the feeling of love. Energy use in the fossil-fuels age is frequently figured as a mountain, one whose size has not precluded its being largely ignored by many areas of scholarship, including literary studies ([2], p. xxiii). According to this metaphor, the modernizing nations of Western Europe and the United States entered in the early nineteenth century upon an "upslope" of ever-greater energy use, depending increasingly upon the dense resources of coal, gas, and oil. In recent times, global extraction has gained a "peak", one often associated with the name of M. King Hubbert. Hubbert, a petroleum engineer who accurately predicted the maximum point of American conventional-oil extraction more than a decade before it happened, created a mathematical model that presents modernity's energy mountain in graphic terms:

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Section: Seeing Like a Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Seeing Like a Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Production Of Whitenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…205, xii). 25 In regard specifically to fossil-fuels use, Johnson refers to this trend as the "disembodiment of labor" ( [2], p. 43).…”

Section: The Production Of Whitenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Birth of Homo Colossus: Energy Consumption and Pre-Familiarization in Joel Barlow’s Vision of Columbus

Pangborn

2016

Humanities

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“…A number of well received historical monographs (Johnson ; Baptist ; Beckert ; Schermerhorn ; Rosenthal ) have helped to make slavery a signature topic of this new field.…”

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confidence: 99%

A Theory of Capitalist Slavery

Clegg¹

2020

J Historical Sociology

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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.

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2022

A Companion to American Agricultural History

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The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860

Cited by 121 publications

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The Birth of Homo Colossus: Energy Consumption and Pre-Familiarization in Joel Barlow’s Vision of Columbus

The Birth of Homo Colossus: Energy Consumption and Pre-Familiarization in Joel Barlow’s Vision of Columbus

A Theory of Capitalist Slavery

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