Calvin Schermerhorn’s provocative study views the development of modern American capitalism through the window of the nineteenth-century interstate slave trade. This eye-opening history follows money and ships as well as enslaved human beings to demonstrate how slavery was a national business supported by far-flung monetary and credit systems reaching across the Atlantic Ocean. The author details the anatomy of slave supply chains and the chains of credit and commodities that intersected with them in virtually every corner of the pre–Civil War United States, and explores how an institution that destroyed lives and families contributed greatly to the growth of the expanding republic’s capitalist economy.
This project investigates how members of enslaved families sought to protect blood kin from forced separations in markets for slave labor. In an atmosphere of commercial intensification, enslaved people sought to use the market to defend themselves from market-made separations, either through sale or hiring. They experienced slavery increasingly in terms of networks. This project therefore investigates America's oldest reproducing slave society as it integrated itself---and slavery along with it---into an emerging industrial society. Enslaved people were deeply implicated in that initial industrialization. They manufactured commodities, forged iron, constructed railroads, and performed domestic service. On the roads and on rivers, enslaved workers were at work building the antebellum Chesapeake, passing coffles of the enslaved sold off to finance that redevelopment. Faced with separation, families broadened to include anyone who could help in emergencies, and some enslaved people cultivated networks of patrons and allies who could help keep loved ones out of slave markets, even becoming wives and concubines of slave traders. Enslaved workers cemented those alliances through the property they accumulated from their work, and sometimes they bought or rented relatives to prevent forcible separations.
Calvin Schermerhorn’s provocative study views the development of modern American capitalism through the window of the nineteenth-century interstate slave trade. This eye-opening history follows money and ships as well as enslaved human beings to demonstrate how slavery was a national business supported by far-flung monetary and credit systems reaching across the Atlantic Ocean. The author details the anatomy of slave supply chains and the chains of credit and commodities that intersected with them in virtually every corner of the pre–Civil War United States, and explores how an institution that destroyed lives and families contributed greatly to the growth of the expanding republic’s capitalist economy.
Written by New York natives, this guide zeros in on Manhattan, the city's crown jewel, and its world-class museums, restaurants, clubs, and hotels, and then goes on to the rich and diverse outer boroughs, digging up the less obvious charms. 34 maps. of color maps.
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