Whenever you read a historical book, you owe it to yourself to find good critics of the book. Those critics could be other historians writing other books on the topic. Or they could be book reviewers.
Case in point, the book Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery by Seth Rockman. Rockman writes about “the rise of wage work and factory labor, the relationship between slavery and capitalism, the emergence of a market society, the varieties of coercion under capitalism”. Reading it, you might be inclined to come to the same sweeping conclusion that the author does. I did when I read about the book. Which is why I was glad to read this review of the book, The Hazards of Slavery by Scott Spillman, in the LA Review of Books. In his review, Spillman notes the following:
Following plantation goods allows Rockman to provide an effective tour of how both capitalism and slavery operated in the early United States. He also shows that the Northern and Southern economies were knit together more tightly than our typical caricature of the free North versus the slave South might suggest. All this is welcome and generally well done…
Yet Rockman falls short in his larger ambition to prompt “a rethinking of the sectional geography of a United States where the division between slavery and freedom would eventually start a Civil War.” Like many scholars of slavery and capitalism, he focuses so intently on establishing ties between North and South that he excludes the internal development of the Northern economy from his story. His book is notably light on numbers, but one gets the impression that plantation provisioning predominated only in fringe areas of the industrializing Northeast, while larger manufacturing centers saw the South as just one of many markets. As Rockman himself admits, the production of plantation goods did not power the Northern economy as a whole.
Critics of capitalism might be inclined the come to the strong conclusion that Rockman does. I was inclined to at first. However after reading Spillman, I backed off and considered the situation might be more complicated than that.
The next time you are swept up in the conclusions of a historian, do yourself a favour and seek out other historians on the topic. If nothing else, you’ll have a wider and better view of the history you are studying.
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