Download or read book Slave Labor in the Capital written by Bob Arnebeck and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1791, President George Washington appointed a commission to build the future capital of the nation. The commission found paying masters of faraway Maryland plantations sixty dollars a year for their slaves made it easier to keep wages low for free workers who flocked to the city. In 1798, half of the two hundred workers building the two most iconic Washington landmarks, the Capitol and the White House, were slaves. They moved stones for Scottish masons and sawed lumber for Irish carpenters. They cut trees and baked bricks. These unschooled young black men left no memoirs. Based on his research in the commissioners' records, author Bob Arnebeck describes their world of dawn to dusk work, salt pork and corn bread, white scorn and a kind nurse and the moments when everything depended on their skills.

Download or read book Through the Prism of Slavery written by Dale W. Tomich and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2004 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thoughtful book, Dale W. Tomich explores the contested relationship between slavery and capitalism. Tracing slavery's integral role in the formation of a capitalist world economy, he reinterprets the development of the world economy through the "prism of slavery." Through a sustained critique of Marxism, world-systems theory, and new economic history, Tomich develops an original conceptual framework for answering theoretical and historical questions about the nexus between slavery and the world economy. The author explores how particular slave systems were affected by their integration into the world market, the international division of labor, and the interstate system. He further examines the ways that the particular "local" histories of such slave regimes illuminate processes of world economic change. His deft use of specific New World examples of slave production as local sites of global transformation highlights the influence of specific geographies and local agency in shaping different slave zones. Tomich's cogent analysis of the struggles over the organization of work and labor discipline in the French West Indian colony of Martinique vividly illustrates the ways that day-to-day resistance altered the relationship between master and slave, precipitated crises in sugar cultivation, and created the local conditions for the transition to a post-slavery economy and society.

Download or read book Saltwater Slavery written by Stephanie E. Smallwood and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bold, innovative book promises to radically alter our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade, and the depths of its horrors. Stephanie E. Smallwood offers a penetrating look at the process of enslavement from its African origins through the Middle Passage and into the American slave market. Saltwater Slavery is animated by deep research and gives us a graphic experience of the slave trade from the vantage point of the slaves themselves. The result is both a remarkable transatlantic view of the culture of enslavement, and a painful, intimate vision of the bloody, daily business of the slave trade.

Download or read book Black Hands White House written by Renee K. Harrison and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Hands, White House documents and appraises the role enslaved women and men played in building the US, both its physical and its fiscal infrastructure. The book highlights the material commodities produced by enslaved communities during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. These commodities--namely tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton, among others--enriched European and US economies; contributed to the material and monetary wealth of the nation's founding fathers, other early European immigrants, and their descendants; and bolstered the wealth of present-day companies founded during the American slave era. Critical to this study are also examples of enslaved laborers' role in building Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and George Washington's Mount Vernon. Subsequently, their labor also constructed the nation's capital city, Federal City (later renamed Washington, DC), its seats of governance--the White House and US Capitol--and other federal sites and memorials. Given the enslaved community's contribution to the US, this work questions the absence of memorials on the National Mall that honor enslaved, Black-bodied people. Harrison argues that such monuments are necessary to redress the nation's historical disregard of Black people and America's role in their forced migration, violent subjugation, and free labor. The erection of monuments commissioned by the US government would publicly demonstrate the government's admission of the US's historical role in slavery and human-harm, and acknowledgment of the karmic debt owed to these first Black-bodied builders of America. Black Hands, White House appeals to those interested in exploring how nation-building and selective memory, American patriotism and hypocrisy, racial superiority and mythmaking are embedded in US origins and monuments, as well as in other memorials throughout the transatlantic European world. Such a study is necessary, as it adds significantly to the burgeoning and in-depth conversation on racial disparity, race relations, history-making, reparations, and monument erection and removal.

Download or read book Slavery s Capitalism written by Sven Beckert and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Capitalism and Slavery written by Eric Williams and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies. In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.

Download or read book Black Men Built the Capitol written by Jesse Holland and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007-09-01 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book of its kind, with comprehensive up-to-date details Historic sites along the Mall, such as the U.S. Capitol building, the White House and the Lincoln Memorial, are explored from an entirely new perspective in this book, with never-before-told stories and statistics about the role of blacks in their creation. This is an iconoclastic guide to Washington, D.C., in that it shines a light on the African Americans who have not traditionally been properly credited for actually building important landmarks in the city. New research by a top Washington journalist brings this information together in a powerful retelling of an important part of our country's history. In addition the book includes sections devoted to specific monuments such as the African American Civil War Memorial, the real “Uncle Tom's cabin,” the Benjamin Banneker Overlook and Frederick Douglass Museum, the Hall of Fame for Caring Americans, and other existing statues, memorials and monuments. It also details the many other places being planned right now to house, for the first time, rich collections of black American history that have not previously been accessible to the public, such as the soon-to-open Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Monument, as well as others opening over the next decade. This book will be a source of pride for African Americans who live in or come from the D.C., Maryland, and Virginia area as well as for the 18 million annual African American visitors to our nation's capital. Jesse J. Holland is a political journalist who lives in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C. He is the Congressional legal affairs correspondent for the Associated Press, and his stories frequently appear in the New York Times and other major papers. In 2004, Holland became the first African American elected to Congressional Standing Committee of Correspondents, which represents the entire press corps before the Senate and the House of Representatives. A graduate of the University of Mississippi, he is a frequent lecturer at universities and media talk shows across the country.

Download or read book Slave Trade and Abolition written by Vanessa S. Oliveira and published by University of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Well into the early nineteenth century, Luanda, the administrative capital of Portuguese Angola, was one of the most influential ports for the transatlantic slave trade. Between 1801 and 1850, it served as the point of embarkation for more than 535,000 enslaved Africans. In the history of this diverse, wealthy city, the gendered dynamics of the merchant community have frequently been overlooked. Vanessa S. Oliveira traces how existing commercial networks adapted to changes in the Atlantic slave trade during the first half of the nineteenth century. Slave Trade and Abolition reveals how women known as donas (a term adapted from the title granted to noble and royal women in the Iberian Peninsula) were often important cultural brokers. Acting as intermediaries between foreign and local people, they held high socioeconomic status and even competed with the male merchants who controlled the trade. Oliveira provides rich evidence to explore the many ways this Luso-African community influenced its society. In doing so, she reveals an unexpectedly nuanced economy with regard to the dynamics of gender and authority.

Download or read book Slavery by Another Name written by Douglas A. Blackmon and published by Icon Books. This book was released on 2012-10-04 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Half Has Never Been Told written by Edward E Baptist and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians Winner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution -- the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Told through the intimate testimonies of survivors of slavery, plantation records, newspapers, as well as the words of politicians and entrepreneurs, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.

Download or read book Through a Fiery Trial written by Bob Arnebeck and published by Madison Books. This book was released on 1994-08-18 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the true story about how Washington, D.C. became the nation's capital. Arnebeck uncovers unknown information and chronicles the building of the city unlike anyone else.

Download or read book Accounting for Slavery written by Caitlin Rosenthal and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Five Books Best Economics Book of the Year A Politico Great Weekend Read “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 “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.” —Harvard Business Review

Download or read book Bullwhip Days written by James Mellon and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2014-12-23 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Twenty-nine oral histories and additional excerpts, selected from 2000 interviews with former slaves conducted in the 1930s for a WPA Federal Writers Project, document the conditions of slavery that . . . lie at the root of today’s racism.” —Publishers Weekly In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration commissioned an oral history of the remaining former slaves. Bullwhip Days is a remarkable compendium of selections from these extraordinary interviews, providing an unflinching portrait of the world of government-sanctioned slavery of Africans in America. Here are twenty-nine full narrations, as well as nine sections of excerpts related to particular aspects of slave life, from religion to plantation life to the Reconstruction era. Skillfully edited, these chronicles bear eloquent witness to the trials of slaves in America, reveal the wide range of conditions of human bondage, and provide sobering insight into the roots of racism in today’s society. “Remarkably articulate . . . vivid, moving, and beautifully cadenced.” —The New Yorker

Download or read book Labour Land and Capital in Ghana written by Gareth Austin and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2005 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the varied ways, outside and inside markets, in which Asante producers obtained labor, land and capital during the transformative era. This is a study of the changing rules and relationships within which natural, human and man-made resources were mobilized for production during the development of an agricultural export economy in Asante, a major West African kingdom which became, by 1945, the biggest regional contributor to Ghana's status as the world's largest cocoa producer. The period 1807-1956 as a whole was distinguished in Asante history by relatively favorable political conditions for indigenous as well as (during colonial rule) for foreign private enterprise. It saw generally increasing external demands for products that could be produced on Asante land. This book, which fills a major gap in Asante economic history, transcends the traditional divide between studies of precolonial and of twentieth-century African history. It analyses the interaction of coercion and the market in the context of a rich but fragile natural environment, the central process being a transition from slavery and debt-bondage to hired labor and agricultural indebtedness. It contributes to the broad debate about Africa's historic combination of emerging 'capitalist' institutions and persistent 'precapitalist' ones, and tests the major theories of the political economy of institutional change. It is written accessibly for an interdisciplinary readership. Gareth Austin is a lecturer in Economic History, London School of Economics and Political Science, and Joint Editor of the 'Journal of African History'.

Download or read book The American Law of Slavery 1810 1860 written by Mark Tushnet and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an examination of Southern slave law between 1810 and 1860, Mark Tushnet reveals a structured dichotomy between slave labor systems and bourgeois systems of production. Whereas the former rest on the total dominion of the master over the slave and necessitate a concern for the slave's humanity, the latter rest of the purchase by the capitalist of a worker's labor power only and are concerned primarily with economic interest. Focusing on a wide range of issues that include contract and accident law as well as criminal law and the law of manumission, he shows how Southern slave law had to respond to the competing pressures of humanity and interest. Beginning with a critical evaluation of slave law, the author develops the conceptual framework for his own perspective on the legal system, drawing on the works of Marx and Weber. He then examines four appellate court cases decided in three different states, from civil-law Louisiana to commonlaw North Carolina, at widely separated times, from 1818 to 1858. Professor Tushnet finds that the cases display a continuing but never wholly successful attempt at distinguish between law and sentiment as modes of regulating social interactions involving slaves. Also, the cases show that the primary method of accommodating law and sentiment was an attempt to use rigid categories to confine the law of slavery to what was thought its proper sphere. Mark Tushnet is Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Download or read book Black Reconstruction in America written by W. E. B. Du Bois and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2013-05-06 with total page 686 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After four centuries of bondage, the nineteenth century marked the long-awaited release of millions of black slaves. Subsequently, these former slaves attempted to reconstruct the basis of American democracy. W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the greatest intellectual leaders in United States history, evaluates the twenty years of fateful history that followed the Civil War, with special reference to the efforts and experiences of African Americans. Du Bois’s words best indicate the broader parameters of his work: "the attitude of any person toward this book will be distinctly influenced by his theories of the Negro race. If he believes that the Negro in America and in general is an average and ordinary human being, who under given environment develops like other human beings, then he will read this story and judge it by the facts adduced." The plight of the white working class throughout the world is directly traceable to American slavery, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, Du Bois argues. Moreover, the resulting color caste was adopted, forwarded, and approved by white labor, and resulted in the subordination of colored labor throughout the world. As a result, the majority of the world’s laborers became part of a system of industry that destroyed democracy and led to World War I and the Great Depression. This book tells that story.

Download or read book The Political Economy of Slavery written by Eugene D. Genovese and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stimulating analysis of the society and economy in the slave south.