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foru m The Future of Civil War Era Studies Seth Rockman, Brown University http://journalofthecivilwarera.com/forum-the-future-of- civil-war-era-studies The relationship of slavery and capitalism looms over nineteenth-cen- tury historiography. Few explanations for the coming of the Civil War are more durable than those pitting a capitalist North against a slaveholding, anti-capitalist South. However, this “clash of civilizations” framework is harder to sustain as we learn more about economic structures and cultures in both sections, as well as about their commercial interconnectedness before 1860. Slavery and capitalism were deeply entangled with one another as the United States grew into an economic power in the nineteenth century, yet we still know far too little about these entanglements. Two things become clear almost immediately. First, to understand technological innovation, entrepreneurship, speculation, sanctifi ed property rights, and market inte- gration, it is necessary to take Mississippi and South Carolina as seriously as Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Second, slavery was indispensible to national economic development, as access to slave-grown commodities and to markets in slave-agriculture regions proved essential to the lives of Americans far removed from the plantation South. By connecting the stories of New York fi nanciers, Virginia slaves, Connecticut shipbuilders, and Alabama land speculators, historians have made slavery central to the history of capitalism. In an “age of industry” predicated on the transformation of slave-grown cotton into textiles, the plantation and the factory must necessarily be discussed together. In the blur of commodities and capital that fl owed between regions, it becomes far harder to locate the boundary between a capitalist North and a slave South, with consequences for how we understand North and South as dis- crete economies—and whether we should do so in the fi rst place.
The Journal of the Civil War Era – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Feb 23, 2012
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