Medievalist checking in.

The article is called "Slavery and Capitalism," but Beckert is actually playing a game one step more complicated--Slavery, Cotton, and Capitalism, if "capitalism" serves as a proxy for "the modern economy." (I'll sort of allow that substitution, since this is a short piece in CHE). He says on one hand how slavery became tied in with cotton, and on the other how cotton is tied in with imperializing capitalism.

Historiographically, he situates himself in the "discovery of global history"--but he's still limited to considering only modern history. When he points to a revival of scholarly interest in the prominence of slavery at all levels of the modern economy, he's (or at least this article is) omitting that developments in one historical subfield rarely occur in isolation from others. Slavery is also making a massive comeback in prominence within medieval history.

And yes, the dawn of the "global Middle Ages" (remember what I said about historiographical developments not being exclusive) plays into this renewal in a couple of ways. On one hand, older work on localized systems of slavery, particularly in Spain, is newly accessible to a wider scholarly audience as it gets published in English or absorbed into comparative "Mediterranean" histories. On the other, the trafficking of humans across kingdom, linguistic, "civilizational" boundaries has been posited as a crucial component of the late antique/early medieval economy. Michael McCormick, most in/famously, pretty much argues that the slave trade IS the early medieval economy: no slavery, no Charlemagne.

To recognize the long-burning (not just "feudal") importance of slavery to 'global' economy, and to incorporate that background into his argument, would add a lot to what Beckert is saying. I think it would help him draw out what he wants to be a connection between slavery and "capitalism" (the modern economy), but he can only do indirectly through cotton. It's poking out through his article--it's there--he wants it, and he's almost got it--but he doesn't quite get there.

I have no problem breaking the ice, as the upvotes to the post suggest there is genuine interest.

There are a couple of interesting issues which I noticed are present in this article in addition to his other work that I've read.

First, the failure to define Capitalism. Beckert takes great pains to define 'War Capitalism' and 'Industrial Capitalism', but doesn't really define the key concept which underpins the whole problem.

The reasons for this are obvious. There are tons of definitions, many are unwieldy, and the more definitive definitions (like the one Marx espoused) tend to be so limited it applies only in a handful of places and times or so broad as to encompass most of recorded history.

However, the methodological problems in having a discussion about whether slavery was an organic part Capitalism when you don't define the latter is even worse than offering a poor definition. Beckert tries to avoid this by focusing on defining sub-types of Capitalism ('War' and 'Industrial'). But if you can't agree on the concept itself it is hard to have an honest, rigorous debate about whether or not slavery counts as a part of the overall system.

The reason that many Marxist historians have typically rejected the idea of slavery as synonymous with Capitalism is that the Marxist definition of Capitalism as a 'mode of production' is deeply tied into wage labor. Slaves could receive bonuses or be allowed to sell produce they cultivated on plots alloted to them on the market, but this was not as a rule the defining characteristic of modern slavery.

Whatever Beckert's definition of Capitalism, he seems to coincide with the predominant tradition which (explicitly or implicitly) sees Capitalism as coinciding with Modernity. That's why both tend to be counted as having existed for 'around 500 years'.

One of the reasons that more recent historians, like Beckert and Edward Baptist, push so hard against seeing slavery as inconsistent with Capitalism is part of a bigger historical debate. After the Civil War, two important popular misconceptions began to form. First, that the Antebellum South had been an agrarian society, slightly backwards and disconnected with modernity, ruled over by romanticized elites who treated their slaves paternalistically. Second, the tendency to stay quiet on the links between North and South, since that makes the North an active participant rather than a passive witness that was just off doing its own thing.

Regarding the first point, this is a part of an attempt to re-imagine the Antebellum South (present in films like Gone with the Wind) in such a way that their defeat is painted as a tragic inevitability (a romantic but bygone system) in which the slaver class is painted as the tragic heroes of the tale, their sins against African Americans swept under the rug or painted over.

On the second point, this was an attempt by Northerners to do some spring cleaning of their own, glossing over the fact that Northern Capital (bankers, financiers), Northern Industry (textiles), Northern farmers (flour, meat, etc.) and even Northerns personally traveling South to become planters, all happened and were key to the survival and prosperity of slavery. Slaves were an investment; like machinery. Planters often lacked sufficient capital to make those purchases. So, what did they do? They got credit from London and the North East US to buy slaves. When a planter went bankrupt, Northern creditors would then suddenly come into owning slaves; sometimes they'd sell them off, sometimes they'd become planters themselves.

Note: My perspective on this article is probably biased since I came across it (and others) through the lense of several economists.

Capitalism: In this article, it seems to be mostly about private ownership and the profit motive. In reconciling capitalism and slavery, it is necessary that private ownership is not afforded to all people while nonetheless profit maximization might be obtained by capital owners. These features naturally lead to the dynamism and financial sophistication that is usually conceived of as being inimical to the institution of slavery in the United States. As it turns out, slavery can co-opt (or be co-opted) by such institutions while reaping large profits and being generally competitive in a thriving capitalist economy.

The economic integration did not really surprise me since I came to this article through some economists' takes on the issue. It might be less significant than what Beckert makes of it since it doesn't evaluate other possible paths (i.e. an opportunity cost approach) which is necessary to understand whether slavery was [economically profitable](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Profit_(economics)). Some of the economists' (and economic historians') takes on it are that there is no doubt that slavery fed into the various aspects of capitalism (finance, innovation, property rights, etc.), but it is unclear that it was a necessary or critical part of the development of global capitalism unless one is willing to run a counterfactual on it. As Eric Hilt put it in this article contrasting the old field of economic history and the new "history of capitalism":

• On capitalism and slavery:

Consider the topic of slavery. In a series of highly influential works, Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff (2000, 2005, 2015) have argued that slavery has been associated with high levels of inequality, and with institutions designed to perpetuate that inequality. Focusing on comparisons among former colonies in the Western Hemisphere, they note that slave societies tend not to provide broad access to the franchise, have poorer educational systems, more restrictive immigration and land policies, and, in general, tend to offer low levels of economic opportunity or mobility for ordinary people. As a result, they experience less economic dynamism and lower rates of economic growth over the long run. The books on slavery discussed here observe the lack of industrialization, urbanization, and economic mobility in the cotton south. But they fail to appreciate the implications of these characteristics for economic development. The preoccupation of Beckert, Baptist, and Johnson with demonstrating the productivity of slave agriculture and the compatibility of slavery with capitalism causes them to overlook the harmful effects of slavery on institutions. Slavery is compatible with capitalism in general but incompatible with what Majewski (2015) calls Schumpeterian (or dynamic) capitalism, and the institutions needed to support it.

• On counterfactuals:

Many historians apparently have a strong distaste for counterfactual histories. Yet the reason economic historians think about counterfactuals is not due to an interest in specifying and analyzing such histories, but because all statements about causal relationships contain implicit counterfactuals. To say that the gold standard caused the Great Depression, for example, is to say that absent the gold standard, the Great Depression would not have happened; the two statements are equivalent. There is of course no way to know exactly what the international monetary system of the late 1920s would have looked like in the absence of the gold standard without making a lot of strong and potentially contradictory assumptions, but thinking about that world helps identify forces unrelated to the gold standard that may have contributed to the Great Depression.

Ooooh nice! We read Empire of Cotton in my seminar this past semester that was on the history US Capitalism and Culture in the 19th century. I'll have to find my notes on it!