ABB Atlantic World Connections Event | Dr. Seth Rockman on Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery 10/23

Hosted by Atlantic Black Box

Wednesday, October 23 at 6:00 pm 
Online

Our Atlantic World Connections online speaker series continues with a virtual presentation by leading scholar on slavery and capitalism Dr. Seth Rockman of Brown University’s Department of History, who will discuss his forthcoming book Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery.

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.

“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

Rockman’s earlier work— the award-winning Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (2009) and the co-edited volume Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (2016)— sought to better understand the relationship of slavery and capitalism in the American past. In December 2022, Rockman shared his research findings with the US House Financial Services Committee in live testimony. Rockman’s new book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery, will be published by University of Chicago Press in Fall 2024. 

At Brown, Rockman sits on the faculty advisory board of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and published “The Dialectics of Racism and Repair” in the 2021 re-issue of the university’s influential Slavery & Justice Report. 

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Order your copy of Plantation Goods from The University of Chicago Press now.