Slavery and capitalism

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I look at the relationship between slavery and capitalism through exploring the counterfactual of industrialization without slavery in the United States and by analyzing the deeper connection between slavery and capitalism. As we will see, slavery, and war capitalism more generally, played an important role in industrialization, and slavery and capitalism share an underlying connection that if obscured can facilitate higher levels of exploitation under capitalism at present.

KEYWORDS:

• Slavery
• capitalism
• industrialization
• new history of capitalism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two blind reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Beckert and Rockman (2016) idea of war capitalism is parallel to Rosa Luxemburg’s (2015) idea of accumulation by dispossession. However, Beckert connects the act of dispossession more directly to creating demand in the development process. For a more recent expression on accumulation by dispossession, see Harvey (2004).

2. See A. Taylor (2016, p. 430) on the use of acquiring native American land to create political coalitions during Jefferson’s Republican reign. See Morgan (2003) on similar policies used in colonial America.

Additional information

Funding

None.

Notes on contributors

Mark Stelzner

Mark Stelzner is an economics professor at Connecticut College. All of his research, from work on the degree to which Americans overpay for medical care, to work on labor laws, to the connections between slavery and capitalism, is aimed to better understand income inequality.