Abstract
This chapter considers J. E. Cairnes’s The Slave Power in relation to emerging research in economics and history. Published during the American Civil War, it delivered significant insights on the dispossessive logics of slavery and anti-black racism. These insights were inconsistent with dominant framings of capitalism in the twentieth century and were typically marginalized. Historians and economists have recently returned to consider the relationship of slavery to capitalism. Many of these arguments were there long before in the work of black scholars and activists, but their emergence in predominantly white academic circles is significant, calling for a reevaluation not just of received ideas about the economic impact of racism, but of the knowledge enterprises that produced and reproduced them, and, in turn, of Cairnes’s book.
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Notes
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This convergence is the subject of Baucom (2005).
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It is this premise that economist Duncan Foley (2008) calls “Adam’s Fallacy,” a category error that elevates markets onto a plane distinct from social and political institutions.
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Qtd. in Gray (1999, 157). Mill is writing here in the Morning Chronicle, part of a series of articles on the Famine that appeared that year and the next.
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South Carolina essayist Louisa McCord contended in 1856 that “It must be more profitable to [a master] to have healthy and happy slaves than sick and wretched ones” (qtd. in Carlander and Brownlee 2006, 399).
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Smallwood’s essay appears in a special edition of the Boston Review dedicated to the memory of Cedric Robinson, who died in 2016.
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Neither Beckert (2015) nor Baptist (2014) reviews this literature in any detail in their studies, signaling their departure from this earlier conversation rather than an incremental advance upon it. Beckert and Rockman’s introduction to the volume Slavery’s Capitalism (2016) outlines Fogel and Engerman’s argument, as well as Fogel’s subsequent corrective, Without Consent or Contact (1989).
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“As Gary Becker first explained systematically, the free market contains automatic penalties for the odious practices that most people have in mind when they deplore ‘discrimination’” (Murphy 2010). Empirical studies aiming to test Becker’s thesis include Charles and Guryan (2008).
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Bigelow, G. (2019). Slavery. In: Hadley, E., Jaffe, A., Winter, S. (eds) From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24158-2_4
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