Native American voters could sway key Senate races in next week’s election in Montana, North Carolina, Arizona and Maine. Investigative journalist Jenni Monet says that for many tribal citizens, the contest is not just about Democrats and Republicans. These voters “support those who understand their sovereignty,” says Monet, who writes the newsletter “Indigenously.” She is a tribal citizen of the Pueblo of Laguna.
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During the nineteenth century, the United States entered the ranks of the world’s most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage. This was no mere coincidence. Slavery’s Capitalism argues for slavery’s centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. According to editors Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, the issue is not whether slavery itself was or was not capitalist but, rather, the impossibility of understanding the nation’s spectacular pattern of economic development without situating slavery front and center. American capitalism—renowned for its celebration of market competition, private property, and the self-made man—has its origins in an American slavery predicated on the abhorrent notion that human beings could be legally owned and compelled to work under force of violence.
Drawing on the expertise of sixteen scholars who are at the forefront of rewriting the history of American economic development, Slavery’s Capitalism identifies slavery as the primary force driving key innovations in entrepreneurship, finance, accounting, management, and political economy that are too often attributed to the so-called free market. Approaching the study of slavery as the originating catalyst for the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism casts new light on American credit markets, practices of offshore investment, and understandings of human capital. Rather than seeing slavery as outside the institutional structures of capitalism, the essayists recover slavery’s importance to the American economic past and prompt enduring questions about the relationship of market freedom to human freedom.
Contributors: Edward E. Baptist, Sven Beckert, Daina Ramey Berry, Kathryn Boodry, Alfred L. Brophy, Stephen Chambers, Eric Kimball, John Majewski, Bonnie Martin, Seth Rockman, Daniel B. Rood, Caitlin Rosenthal, Joshua D. Rothman, Calvin Schermerhorn, Andrew Shankman, Craig Steven Wilder.
“The intimate relationship between capitalism and slavery has been too-long dismissed, and with it, the centrality of African and African American labor to the foundation of our modern economic system. Slavery’s Capitalism announces the emergence of a new generation of scholars whose detailed research into every nook and cranny of emerging capitalism reveals the inextricable links between the enslavement of people of African descent and today’s global economy.”—Leslie Harris, Emory University
“With some of the best work in one of the hottest fields in American history, Slavery’s Capitalism re-centers the history of American capitalism on racial slavery as the U.S. economy’s initial engine for development. I admire the ambition of the scholarly project and applaud the topical range of the essays.”—Gary J. Kornblith, coeditor of Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America
“The centrality of slavery to the economic development of the United States is revealed here more fully, in more dimensions, than in any other book. Anyone who wants to understand this profound revolution in historical thinking will find no better place to start.”—Edward L. Ayers, author of In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of Americ
“This fascinating collection of essays adds striking new insights to the venerable debate over the relationship between capitalism and slavery. It demonstrates slavery’s centrality to the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy, and how slavery was fully compatible with technological, managerial, and financial innovation, but also why southern slavery differed from northern capitalism in ways that helped to produce the irrepressible conflict.”—Eric Foner, author of Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad
“Slavery’s Capitalism is a time capsule, neatly containing one of the most important developments in American scholarly and public life that took place during the Obama presidency. . . . The publication of Slavery’s Capitalism at the tail end of the Obama era thus provides the perfect opportunity to take stock of what was accomplished in the last round of historicization: to see what is valuable in the paradigm of ‘slavery’s capitalism,’ what is new about the ‘new’ history of capitalism in the United States, and what, if any, dangers of presentism its practitioners succumbed to. The book both incorporates and builds on a wave of recent scholarship on slavery and capitalism in the United States.”—Times Literary Supplement
Sven Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. Seth Rockman is Associate Professor of History at Brown University.
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“Absolutely compelling.”
―Diane Coyle
“The evolution of modern management is usually associated with good old-fashioned intelligence and ingenuity… But capitalism is not just about the free market; it was also built on the backs of slaves.”
―Forbes
The story of modern management generally looks to the factories of England and New England for its genesis. But after scouring through old accounting books, Caitlin Rosenthal discovered that Southern planter-capitalists practiced an early form of scientific management. They took meticulous notes, carefully recording daily profits and productivity, and subjected their slaves to experiments and incentive strategies comprised of rewards and brutal punishment. Challenging the traditional depiction of slavery as a barrier to innovation, Accounting for Slavery shows how elite planters turned their power over enslaved people into a productivity advantage. The result is a groundbreaking investigation of business practices in Southern and West Indian plantations and an essential contribution to our understanding of slavery’s relationship with capitalism.
“Slavery in the United States was a business. A morally reprehensible―and very profitable business… Rosenthal argues that slaveholders…were using advanced management and accounting techniques long before their northern counterparts. Techniques that are still used by businesses today.”
―Marketplace (American Public Media)
“Rosenthal pored over hundreds of account books from U.S. and West Indian plantations… She found that their owners employed advanced accounting and management tools, including depreciation and standardized efficiency metrics.”
About the Author
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In existence for 258 years, the English East India Company ran a complex, highly integrated global trading network. It supplied the tea for the Boston Tea Party, the cotton textiles used to purchase slaves in Africa, and the opium for China’s nineteenth-century addiction. In India it expanded from a few small coastal settlements to govern territories that far exceeded the British Isles in extent and population. It minted coins in its name, established law courts and prisons, and prosecuted wars with one of the world’s largest armies. Over time, the Company developed a pronounced and aggressive colonialism that laid the foundation for Britain’s Eastern empire. A study of the Company, therefore, is a study of the rise of the modern world.
In clear, engaging prose, Ian Barrow sets the rise and fall of the Company into political, economic, and cultural contexts and explains how and why the Company was transformed from a maritime trading entity into a territorial colonial state. Excerpts from eighteen primary documents illustrate the main themes and ideas discussed in the text. Maps, illustrations, a glossary, and a chronology are also included.
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The end of the 16th century saw Dutch expansion in Asia, as The Dutch East India Company (the VOC) was fast becoming an Asian power, both political and economic. By 1669, the VOC was the richest private company the world had ever seen. This landmark study looks at perhaps the most important tool in the Company’ trading – its ships. In order to reconstruct the complete shipping activities of the VOC, the author created a unique database of the ships’ movements, including frigates and other, hitherto ingored, smaller vessels.
Parthesius’s research into the routes and the types of ships in the service of the VOC proves that it was precisely the wide range of types and sizes of vessels that gave the Company the ability to sail – and continue its profitable trade – the year round. Furthermore, it appears that the VOC commanded at least twice the number of ships than earlier historians have ascertained. Combining the best of maritime and social history, this book will change our understanding of the commercial dynamics of the most successful economic organization of the period.
Robert Parthesius is a naval historian and director of the Centre for International Heritage Activities in Leiden.
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The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Its trading empire encircled the globe, importing Asian luxuries such as spices, textiles and teas. But it also conquered much of India with its private army and broke open China’s markets with opium. The Company’s practices shocked its contemporaries and still reverberate today.
The Corporation That Changed the World is the first book to reveal the Company’s enduring legacy as a corporation. This expanded edition explores how the four forces of scale, technology, finance and regulation drove its spectacular rise and fall. For decades, the Company was simply too big to fail, and stock market bubbles, famines, drug-running and even duels between rival executives are to be found in this new account.
For Robins, the Company’s story provides vital lessons on both the role of corporations in world history and the steps required to make global business accountable today.
Nick Robins has more than 20 years experience in the policy and practical realities of corporate accountability. A historian by training, he currently works on sustainable and responsible investment in London, and has written on the East India Company for the Financial Times, New Statesman and Resurgence.
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Floods, storms and droughts. Melting Arctic ice, shrinking glaciers, oceans turning to acid. The world’s top scientists warned last week that dangerous climate change is taking place today, not the day after tomorrow. You don’t believe it? Then, says Geoffrey Lean, read this…
Sunday 06 February 2005 01:00
Future historians, looking back from a much hotter and less hospitable world, are likely to play special attention to the first few weeks of 2005. As they puzzle over how a whole generation could have sleepwalked into disaster – destroying the climate that has allowed human civilisation to flourish over the past 11,000 years – they may well identify the past weeks as the time when the last alarms sounded.
Future historians, looking back from a much hotter and less hospitable world, are likely to play special attention to the first few weeks of 2005. As they puzzle over how a whole generation could have sleepwalked into disaster – destroying the climate that has allowed human civilisation to flourish over the past 11,000 years – they may well identify the past weeks as the time when the last alarms sounded.
Last week, 200 of the world’s leading climate scientists – meeting at Tony Blair’s request at the Met Office’s new headquarters at Exeter – issued the most urgent warning to date that dangerous climate change is taking place, and that time is running out.
Next week the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty that tries to control global warming, comes into force after a seven-year delay. But it is clear that the protocol does not go nearly far enough.
The alarms have been going off since the beginning of one of the warmest Januaries on record. First, Dr Rajendra Pachauri – chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – told a UN conference in Mauritius that the pollution which causes global warming has reached “dangerous” levels.
Then the biggest-ever study of climate change, based at Oxford University, reported that it could prove to be twice as catastrophic as the IPCC’s worst predictions. And an international task force – also reporting to Tony Blair, and co-chaired by his close ally, Stephen Byers – concluded that we could reach “the point of no return” in a decade.
Finally, the UK head of Shell, Lord Oxburgh, took time out – just before his company reported record profits mainly achieved by selling oil, one of the main causes of the problem – to warn that unless governments take urgent action there “will be a disaster”.
But it was last week at the Met Office’s futuristic glass headquarters, incongruously set in a dreary industrial estate on the outskirts of Exeter, that it all came together. The conference had been called by the Prime Minister to advise him on how to “avoid dangerous climate change”. He needed help in persuading the world to prioritise the issue this year during Britain’s presidencies of the EU and the G8 group of economic powers.
The conference opened with the Secretary of State for the Environment, Margaret Beckett, warning that “a significant impact” from global warming “is already inevitable”. It continued with presentations from top scientists and economists from every continent. These showed that some dangerous climate change was already taking place and that catastrophic events once thought highly improbable were now seen as likely (see panel). Avoiding the worst was technically simple and economically cheap, they said, provided that governments could be persuaded to take immediate action.
About halfway through I realised that I had been here before. In the summer of 1986 the world’s leading nuclear experts gathered in Vienna for an inquest into the accident at Chernobyl. The head of the Russian delegation showed a film shot from a helicopter, and we suddenly found ourselves gazing down on the red-hot exposed reactor core.
It was all, of course, much less dramatic at Exeter. But as paper followed learned paper, once again a group of world authorities were staring at a crisis they had devoted their lives to trying to avoid.
I am willing to bet there were few in the room who did not sense their children or grandchildren standing invisibly at their shoulders. The conference formally concluded that climate change was “already occurring” and that “in many cases the risks are more serious than previously thought”. But the cautious scientific language scarcely does justice to the sense of the meeting.
We learned that glaciers are shrinking around the world. Arctic sea ice has lost almost half its thickness in recent decades. Natural disasters are increasing rapidly around the world. Those caused by the weather – such as droughts, storms, and floods – are rising three times faster than those – such as earthquakes – that are not.
We learned that bird populations in the North Sea collapsed last year, after the sand eels on which they feed left its warmer waters – and how the number of scientific papers recording changes in ecosystems due to global warming has escalated from 14 to more than a thousand in five years.
Worse, leading scientists warned of catastrophic changes that once they had dismissed as “improbable”. The meeting was particularly alarmed by powerful evidence, first reported in The Independent on Sunday last July, that the oceans are slowly turning acid, threatening all marine life (see panel).
Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, presented new evidence that the West Antarctic ice sheet is beginning to melt, threatening eventually to raise sea levels by 15ft: 90 per cent of the world’s people live near current sea levels. Recalling that the IPCC’s last report had called Antarctica “a slumbering giant”, he said: “I would say that this is now an awakened giant.”
Professor Mike Schlesinger, of the University of Illinois, reported that the shutdown of the Gulf Stream, once seen as a “low probability event”, was now 45 per cent likely this century, and 70 per cent probable by 2200. If it comes sooner rather than later it will be catastrophic for Britain and northern Europe, giving us a climate like Labrador (which shares our latitude) even as the rest of the world heats up: if it comes later it could be beneficial, moderating the worst of the warming.
The experts at Exeter were virtually unanimous about the danger, mirroring the attitude of the climate science community as a whole: humanity is to blame. There were a few sceptics at Exeter, including Andrei Illarionov, an adviser to Russia’s President Putin, who last year called the Kyoto Protocol “an interstate Auschwitz”. But in truth it is much easier to find sceptics among media pundits in London or neo-cons in Washington than among climate scientists. Even the few contrarian climatalogists publish little research to support their views, concentrating on questioning the work of others.
Now a new scientific consensus is emerging – that the warming must be kept below an average increase of two degrees centigrade if catastrophe is to be avoided. This almost certainly involves keeping concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main cause of climate change, below 400 parts per million.
Unfortunately we are almost there, with concentrations exceeding 370ppm and rising, but experts at the conference concluded that we could go briefly above the danger level so long as we brought it down rapidly afterwards. They added that this would involve the world reducing emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 – and rich countries cutting theirs by 30 per cent by 2020.
Economists stressed there is little time for delay. If action is put off for a decade, it will need to be twice as radical; if it has to wait 20 years, it will cost between three and seven times as much.
The good news is that it can be done with existing technology, by cutting energy waste, expanding the use of renewable sources, growing trees and crops (which remove carbon dioxide from the air) to turn into fuel, capturing the gas before it is released from power stations, and – maybe – using more nuclear energy.
The better news is that it would not cost much: one estimate suggested the cost would be about 1 per cent of Europe’s GNP spread over 20 years; another suggested it meant postponing an expected fivefold increase in world wealth by just two years. Many experts believe combatting global warming would increase prosperity, by bringing in new technologies.
The big question is whether governments will act. President Bush’s opposition to international action remains the greatest obstacle. Tony Blair, by almost universal agreement, remains the leader with the best chance of persuading him to change his mind.
But so far the Prime Minister has been more influenced by the President than the other way round. He appears to be moving away from fighting for the pollution reductions needed in favour of agreeing on a vague pledge to bring in new technologies sometime in the future.
By then it will be too late. And our children and grandchildren will wonder – as we do in surveying, for example, the drift into the First World War – “how on earth could they be so blind?”
WATER WARS
What could happen? Wars break out over diminishing water resources as populations grow and rains fail.
How would this come about? Over 25 per cent more people than at present are expected to live in countries where water is scarce in the future, and global warming will make it worse.
How likely is it? Former UN chief Boutros Boutros-Ghali has long said that the next Middle East war will be fought for water, not oil.
DISAPPEARING NATIONS
What could happen? Low-lying island such as the Maldives and Tuvalu – with highest points only a few feet above sea-level – will disappear off the face of the Earth.
How would this come about? As the world heats up, sea levels are rising, partly because glaciers are melting, and partly because the water in the oceans expands as it gets warmer.
How likely is it? Inevitable. Even if global warming stopped today, the seas would continue to rise for centuries. Some small islands have already sunk for ever. A year ago, Tuvalu was briefly submerged.
FLOODING
What could happen? London, New York, Tokyo, Bombay, many other cities and vast areas of countries from Britain to Bangladesh disappear under tens of feet of water, as the seas rise dramatically.
How would this come about? Ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica melt. The Greenland ice sheet would raise sea levels by more than 20ft, the West Antarctic ice sheet by another 15ft.
How likely is it? Scientists used to think it unlikely, but this year reported that the melting of both ice caps had begun. It will take hundreds of years, however, for the seas to rise that much.
UNINHABITABLE EARTH
What could happen? Global warming escalates to the point where the world’s whole climate abruptly switches, turning it permanently into a much hotter and less hospitable planet.
How would this come about? A process involving “positive feedback” causes the warming to fuel itself, until it reaches a point that finally tips the climate pattern over.
How likely is it? Abrupt flips have happened in the prehistoric past. Scientists believe this is unlikely, at least in the foreseeable future, but increasingly they are refusing to rule it out.
RAINFOREST FIRES
What could happen? Famously wet tropical forests, such as those in the Amazon, go up in flames, destroying the world’s richest wildlife habitats and releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide to speed global warming.
How would this come about? Britain’s Met Office predicted in 1999 that much of the Amazon will dry out and die within 50 years, making it ready for sparks – from humans or lightning – to set it ablaze.
How likely is it? Very, if the predictions turn out to be right. Already there have been massive forest fires in Borneo and Amazonia, casting palls of highly polluting smoke over vast areas.
THE BIG FREEZE
What could happen? Britain and northern Europe get much colder because the Gulf Stream, which provides as much heat as the sun in winter, fails.
How would this come about? Melting polar ice sends fresh water into the North Atlantic. The less salty water fails to generate the underwater current which the Gulf Stream needs.
How likely is it? About
evens for a Gulf Steam failure this century, said scientists last week.
STARVATION
What could happen? Food production collapses in Africa, for example, as rainfall dries up and droughts increase. As farmland turns to desert, people flee in their millions in search of food.
How would this come about? Rainfall is expected to decrease by up to 60 per cent in winter and 30 per cent in summer in southern Africa this century. By some estimates, Zambia could lose almost all its farms.
How likely is it? Pretty likely unless the world tackles both global warming and Africa’s decline. Scientists agree that droughts will increase in a warmer world.
ACID OCEANS
What could happen? The seas will gradually turn more and more acid. Coral reefs, shellfish and plankton, on which all life depends, will die off. Much of the life of the oceans will become extinct.
How would this come about? The oceans have absorbed half the carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming, so far emitted by humanity. This forms dilute carbonic acid, which attacks corals and shells.
How likely is it? It is already starting. Scientists warn that the chemistry of the oceans is changing in ways unprecedented for 20 million years. Some predict that the world’s coral reefs will die within 35 years.
DISEASE
What could happen? Malaria – which kills two million people worldwide every year – reaches Britain with foreign travellers, gets picked up by British mosquitos and becomes endemic in the warmer climate.
How would this come about? Four of our 40 mosquito species can carry the disease, and hundreds of travellers return with it annually. The insects breed faster, and feed more, in warmer temperatures.
How likely is it? A Department of Health study has suggested it may happen by 2050: the Environment Agency has mentioned 2020. Some experts say it is miraculous that it has not happened already.
HURRICANES
What could happen? Hurricanes, typhoons and violent storms proliferate, grow even fiercer, and hit new areas. Last September’s repeated battering of Florida and the Caribbean may be just a foretaste of what is to come, say scientists.
How would this come about? The storms gather their energy from warm seas, and so, as oceans heat up, fiercer ones occur and threaten areas where at present the seas are too cool for such weather.
How likely is it? Scientists are divided over whether storms will get more frequent and whether the process has already begun.
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Deemed “the best history of oil ever written” by Business Week and with more than 300,000 copies in print, Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the global pursuit of oil, money, and power has been extensively updated to address the current energy crisis.
Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and the Global Energy Expert for the CNBC business news network, is a highly respected authority on energy, international politics, and economics. Dr. Yergin received the Pulitzer Prize for the number one bestseller The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, which was also made into an eight-hour PBS/BBC series seen by 20 million people in the United States. The book has been translated into 12 languages. It also received the Eccles Prize for best book on an economic subject for a general audience.
Of Dr. Yergin’s subsequent book, Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, the Wall Street Journal said: “No one could ask for a better account of the world’s political and economic destiny since World War II.” This book has been translated into 13 languages and Dr. Yergin led the team that turned it into a six-hour PBS/BBC documentary — the major PBS television series on globalization. The series received three Emmy nominations, a CINE Golden Eagle Award and the New York Festival’s Gold World Medal for best documentary. Dr. Yergin’s other books include Shattered Peace, an award-winning history of the origins of the Cold War, Russia 2010 and What It Means for the World(with Thane Gustafson), and Energy Future: The Report of the Energy Project at the Harvard Business School, which he edited with Robert Stobaugh.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning author and global energy expert, Daniel Yergin offers a revelatory new account of how energy revolutions, climate battles, and geopolitics are mapping our future
The world is being shaken by the collision of energy, climate change, and the clashing power of nations in a time of global crisis. The “shale revolution” in oil and gas–made possible by fracking technology, but not without controversy–has transformed the American economy, ending the “era of shortage”, but introducing a turbulent new era. Almost overnight, the United States has become the world’s number one energy powerhouse–and, during the coronavirus crisis, brokered a tense truce between Russia and Saudi Arabia. Yet concern about energy’s role in climate change is challenging our economy and way of life, accelerating a second energy revolution in the search for a low carbon future. All of this has been made starker and more urgent by the coronavirus pandemic and the economic dark age that it has wrought.
World politics is being upended, as a new cold war develops between the United States and China, and the rivalry grows more dangerous with Russia, which is pivoting east toward Beijing. Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping are converging both on energy and on challenging American leadership, as China projects its power and influence in all directions. The South China Sea, claimed by China and the world’s most critical trade route, could become the arena where the United States and China directly collide. The map of the Middle East, which was laid down after World War I, is being challenged by jihadists, revolutionary Iran, ethnic and religious clashes, and restive populations. But the region has also been shocked by the two recent oil price collapses–one from the rise of shale, the other the coronavirus–and by the very question of oil’s future in the rest of this century.
A master storyteller and global energy expert, Daniel Yergin takes the reader on an utterly riveting and timely journey across the world’s new map. He illuminates the great energy and geopolitical questions in an era of rising political turbulence and points to the profound challenges that lie ahead.
Daniel Yergin is a highly respected authority on energy, international politics, and economics, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, and Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War, and coauthor of Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy. He is vice chairman of IHS Markit, one of the leading information and research firms in the world, a member of the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, a senior trustee of the Brookings Institution, and has served on the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board under the last four presidential administrations.
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Transition Studies 