Offers the study of Antebellum southern slavery and the credit system. This work explains how the Bank of the United States supported the government's and the nation's credit abroad by providing seemingly limitless credit facilities to southern planters, especially in the territories along the lower Mississippi River.
Offers the study of Antebellum southern slavery and the credit system. This work explains how the Bank of the United States supported the government's and the nation's credit abroad by providing seemingly limitless credit facilities to southern planters, especially in the territories along the lower Mississippi River.
Slave Agriculture and Financial Markets looks at financing slave agriculture from the perspective of credit intermediaries such as chartered banks and commercial partnerships. It explains in detail how the Bank of the United States supported the government's and the nation's credit abroad by providing seemingly limitless credit facilities to southern planters, especially in the newly opened territories along the lower Mississippi River.
The United States has long epitomized capitalism. From its enterprising shopkeepers, wildcat banks, violent slave plantations, huge industrial working class, and raucous commodities trade to its world-spanning multinationals, its massive factories, and the centripetal power of New York in the world of finance, America has come to symbolize capitalism for two centuries and more. But an understanding of the history of American capitalism is as elusive as it is urgent. What does it mean to make capitalism a subject of historical inquiry? What is its potential across multiple disciplines, alongside different methodologies, and in a range of geographic and chronological settings? And how does a focus on capitalism change our understanding of American history? American Capitalism presents a sampling of cutting-edge research from prominent scholars. These broad-minded and rigorous essays venture new angles on finance, debt, and credit; women’s rights; slavery and political economy; the racialization of capitalism; labor beyond industrial wage workers; and the production of knowledge, including the idea of the economy, among other topics. Together, the essays suggest emerging themes in the field: a fascination with capitalism as it is made by political authority, how it is claimed and contested by participants, how it spreads across the globe, and how it can be reconceptualized without being universalized. A major statement for a wide-open field, this book demonstrates the breadth and scope of the work that the history of capitalism can provoke.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.
A series of penetrating, original, and authoritative essays on the history and historiography of the institution of slavery in the New World, written by a team of leading international contributors.
Most scholarship on nineteenth-century America’s transformation into a market society has focused on consumption, romanticized visions of workers, and analysis of firms and factories. Building on but moving past these studies, Capitalism Takes Command presents a history of family farming, general incorporation laws, mortgage payments, inheritance practices, office systems, and risk management—an inventory of the means by which capitalism became America’s new revolutionary tradition. This multidisciplinary collection of essays argues not only that capitalism reached far beyond the purview of the economy, but also that the revolution was not confined to the destruction of an agrarian past. As business ceaselessly revised its own practices, a new demographic of private bankers, insurance brokers, investors in securities, and start-up manufacturers, among many others, assumed center stage, displacing older elites and forms of property. Explaining how capital became an “ism” and how business became a political philosophy, Capitalism Takes Command brings the economy back into American social and cultural history.
"Focuses on networks of people, information, conveyances, and other resources and technologies that moved slave-based products from suppliers to buyers and users." (page 3) The book examines the credit and financial systems that grew up around trade in slaves and products made by slaves.
This book attempts to redress the imbalance in knowledge of southern and northern agriculture before the Civil War. Against the rich historical analysis and description of the slave South must be compared the relative paucity of quantitative analysis, and even description, of antebellum northern agriculture. The study is the first of its kind to organize a large sample of quantitative data drawn from across the northern tier of the United States. The temporal coverage is the second half of the nineteenth century with the primary emphasis on the late antebellum period. What emerges is a detailed quantitative description and analysis of norther agriculture. This compelling picture provides not merely a statistical profile but also a revealing insight into american behavior and attitudes in the nineteenth century. The northern United States throughout most of the nineteenth century, with its peculiar notions of independence, mobility, equality, and agrarianism, was even perceived by contemporaries as an experiment. Yeoman agriculture represented the economic foundation for this ideal world whose success or failure largely depended upon how closely the agricultural ideal could be approached. Analytically, measuring the agricultural record indirectly assesses the success of this entire vision of democratic America. This clear recurrent theme that emerges throughout the book is the tension that existed between national pursuit of a new kind of social order characterized by individualism, independence, and self-containment founded upon a tightly knit family system, on the one side, and the drive for a market-oriented, capitalistic national economy in which farming assumed the trappings of a business enterprise, on the other. Conflict was inevitable. Ultimately, the forces of market capitalism based upon interdependent national economic system dominated, but the national split personality, though overwhelmed by the onrushing forces of the business system and corporate industrial enterprise, persisted into the twentieth century reappearing as periodical agrarian unrest even into the current decade. -- publisher description.
In 1995, the Baring Brothers collapsed over a weekend, brought down by the 'rogue trader' Nick Leeson. Utilizing British and American archives, this work charts Baring Brothers development from wool merchants to one of the most powerful global financial institutions. It also analyses the errors which led to its downfall.
