Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

Several decades ago, historians of slavery debated whether the Old South's "peculiar institution" was modern or premodern, capitalist or precapitalist. Recent historians, including Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert, Caitlin Rosenthal, Joshua Rothman, and Calvin Schermerhorn have provided powerful evidence that African American slavery was decidedly capitalist in theory and execution. Murphy's meticulously researched and clearly written study examines the role of banks in what she terms the concomitant "financialization" of human property and the southwestern expansion of plantation economies in the mid-19th-century South. Murphy (history, Providence College) documents minutely how enslaved individuals became financial assets. Planters leveraged enslaved assets by borrowing against the chattel's market value, hoping to repay the debt from future profits or the appreciation of the enslaved person's assessed value. Banks played a central role in the capitalization of the human beings that slaveholders used to mortgage collateral for loans, exchanged for shares of corporate stock, or used to finance purchases of plantation lands or additional bondspeople. Murphy makes clear the economic weaknesses and human suffering that resulted from relying on human capital in credit relationships during financial panics and recessions. The lives of enslaved persons caught in the web of the capitalist marketplace haunt the pages of Murphy's excellent work.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.