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Baptist’s language is extreme, and he has been criticized for stretching sources to the point of putting words in slaves’ mouths. But his principal concerns are of a piece with the growing literature on "Slavery’s Capitalism," to borrow the title of a new essay collection. Recent scholarship has stressed slavery’s modernity, its profitability, and its centrality to national development, as Harvard’s Sven Beckert wrote in a 2014 Chronicle Review survey of this research. Cotton accounted for more than half of U.S. exports. Planters drew on global markets to finance slave agriculture. Northern mills spun slave-grown cotton. "The slave economy of the Southern states had ripple effects throughout the economy," Beckert wrote, "not just shaping but dominating it."
If this doesn’t seem novel, in some ways it isn’t. Earlier scholars, from black Marxists like C.L.R. James and Eric Williams to neoclassical economists like Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, dealt with related themes. But what is important to understand is how much the new work departs from the paradigm that shaped historians’ views for decades. Slavery, as Eugene D. Genovese presented it in his 1974 book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Pantheon), was a unique constellation of labor relations that was in the capitalist world, but not of it. Genovese saw the institution as a self-contained system marked by frequent bargaining between master and slave over the limits of slaveowners’ authority.
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