A Pulitzer Prize finalist in History, this eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor.
The industrializing North and the agricultural South-that's how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early nineteenth century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. We miss slavery's long reach into small New England communities, just as we fail to see the role of Northern manufacturing in shaping the terrain of human bondage in the South. Using plantation goods-the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the South-historian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americans-white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free-across an expanding nation.
By following the stories of material objects, such as shoes made by Massachusetts farm women that found their way to the feet of a Mississippi slave, Rockman reveals a national economy organized by slavery-a slavery that outsourced the production of its supplies to the North, and a North that outsourced its slavery to the South. Melding business and labor history through powerful storytelling, Plantation Goods brings northern industrialists, southern slaveholders, enslaved field hands, and paid factory laborers into the same picture. In one part of the country, entrepreneurs envisioned fortunes to be made from "planter's hoes" and rural women spent their days weaving "negro cloth" and assembling "slave brogans." In another, enslaved people actively consumed textiles and tools imported from the North to contest their bondage. In between, merchants, marketers, storekeepers, and debt collectors laid claim to the profits of a thriving interregional trade.
Examining producers and consumers linked in economic and moral relationships across great geographic and political distances, Plantation Goods explores how people in the nineteenth century thought about complicity with slavery while showing how slavery structured life nationwide and established a modern world of entrepreneurship and exploitation. Rockman brings together lines of American history that have for too long been told separately, as slavery and capitalism converge in something as deceptively ordinary as a humble pair of shoes.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
Finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History * The Pulitzer Prize * "Rather than casting the antebellum US as a region of slave interests and a region of freedom, this narrative is focused on the material interests that united them. Ideologically they opposed each other, but the project of national economic unification based on regional specialisms was a success. Together, the regions accepted that slavery provided them with a way to climb out of Britain's shadow until they were strong enough to argue that they were now enslaved to each other." * Times Literary Supplement * "Beautifully written, incredibly researched, and shows us a single, entwined economy north and south-through the lives and work of men and women in New England who produced goods like shoes and clothing and tools for people enslaved on southern plantations, and the people who were their enforced consumers. It will make you think differently about how objects take on and then promote meanings, including multifaceted racism." * Scholarly Kitchen, Best Books of 2024 * "Focusing on the production, sale, and use of material goods, Plantation Goods is an exceptional history of theinterconnectedness between the 19th-century slaveholding South and the industrialized North. . . . A very readable work, the book includes three "interludes," each focusing on a specific material object-ashoe, a cloth sample, a whip-adding realism to the story. Students seeking to learn more about the history of labor,enslavement, and material culture will welcome this addition to the historiography. Recommended." * Choice * "Thoroughly researched and impeccably cited . . . and just as well-written as it is documented, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery is a most welcome addition to the historiography of slavery and economics. Academics and lay readers will both find it contents highly informative and its prose equally impressive and approachable." * Emerging Civil War * "In his much-lauded book. . . Seth Rockman offered a compelling insight on antebellum history by exploring a little-known link between the North and South: the Northern business of making, selling and marketing clothing, tools and even whips to Southern plantations." * Brown University Magazine * "Seth Rockman is one of the most creative and original American historians writing today, as Plantation Goods richly demonstrates. He casts a brilliant new light on the deeply studied subjects of slavery and capitalism." -- Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship "By pursuing a method of 'follow the things,' adopting an innovative narrative structure, and analyzing a rich collection of archival and material evidence, Seth Rockman deftly unpacks the culture and commerce of plantation goods that perniciously shaped racial 'knowledge' while making fortunes and channeling labor. This stunning study overflows with penetrating yet sensitive insights, capturing the nuanced experiences and interlocking relationships that formed a tainted yet consequential trans-regional enterprise."
-- Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: the Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake "Rockman has given us a brilliant book that shows how slavery permeated the American landscape. Clearly written and deeply researched, Plantation Goods is a much-needed contribution to the study of the institution that helped define early America and, therefore, helped make us who we are today."
-- Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family "Plantation Goods is the most satisfying history of commodities and one of the most multidimensional histories of slavery I have ever read, embracing as it does consumers, workers, and manufacturers. Critics of the 'slavery's capitalism' framework have sometimes asked, what about the northern economy? Here is the answer, and so much more. Bold yet careful, precise, and thoughtful, Rockman shucks off overreach and sensationalism to deliver the goods."
-- David Waldstreicher, author of Slavery's Constitution and The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley "In this remarkable book, Seth Rockman shows how close attention to the circulation of material goods related to slavery-agricultural implements, clothing supplied to slaves by their owners, whips, and the like-sheds new light on the complex economic connections between northern manufacturers and southern purchasers. Rockman reminds us of the central role played by slavery in the evolution of American capitalism, and how the hope of liberating slaves' purchasing power contributed to abolition."
-- Eric Foner, author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
Seth Rockman is associate professor of history at Brown University. He is the author of Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore and coeditor of Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Rockman serves on the faculty advisory board of Brown University's Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. He lives in Providence.
Note on Language
Introduction: A Captive Market
Part One: Production
Chapter 1: Plantation Entrepreneurs
Chapter 2: Masters of Negro Cloth
Interlude 1: The Russet Brogan
Chapter 3: Plantation Labor Outsourced
Chapter 4: Wage Slaves
Part Two: Distribution
Chapter 5: The Middlemen
Interlude 2: The Negro Cloth Sample
Chapter 6: Racial Knowledge for Sale
Part Three: Consumption
Chapter 7: The Fantasies of Provisioning
Chapter 8: Commercial Emancipation
Interlude 3: The Newark Whip
Chapter 9: Complaints and Compliance
Chapter 10: Coerced Consumers
Conclusion: Four Million Liberated Consumers
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
