Seth Rockman — Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery - with Michael Ralph

Watch author Seth Rockman's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

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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 lay 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.

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.

Rockman is in conversation with Michael Ralph, Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies and Founding Director of the Center for an Equitable Economy and Sustainable Society (E2S2) at Howard University. Michael’s research integrates political science, economics, history, and medical and economic anthropology through an explicit focus on debt, slavery, insurance, forensics, and incarceration. Michael is the author of Before 13th, which revises the scholarly consensus about convict leasing, demonstrating that it did not begin with the 13th amendment but several decades prior.

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Founded by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in 1984, Politics and Prose Bookstore is Washington, D.C.'s premier independent bookstore and cultural hub, a gathering place for people interested in reading and discussing books. Politics and Prose offers superior service, unusual book choices, and a haven for book lovers in the store and online.

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