The industrializing North and the agricultural South--that's how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early nineteenth century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. We miss slavery's long reach into small New England communities, just as we fail to see the role of Northern manufacturing in shaping the terrain of human bondage in the South. Using plantation goods--the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the South--historian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americans--white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free--across an expanding nation.

By following the stories of material objects, such as shoes made by Massachusetts farm women that found their way to the feet of a Mississippi slave, Rockman reveals a national economy organized by slavery--a slavery that outsourced the production of its supplies to the North, and a North that outsourced its slavery to the South. Melding business and labor history through powerful storytelling, Plantation Goods brings northern industrialists, southern slaveholders, enslaved field hands, and paid factory laborers into the same picture. In one part of the country, entrepreneurs envisioned fortunes to be made from planter's hoes and rural women spent their days weaving negro cloth and assembling slave brogans. In another, enslaved people actively consumed textiles and tools imported from the North to contest their bondage. In between, merchants, marketers, storekeepers, and debt collectors laid claim to the profits of a thriving interregional trade.

Examining producers and consumers linked in economic and moral relationships across great geographic and political distances, Plantation Goods explores how people in the nineteenth century thought about complicity with slavery while showing how slavery structured life nationwide and established a modern world of entrepreneurship and exploitation. Rockman brings together lines of American history that have for too long been told separately, as slavery and capitalism converge in something as deceptively ordinary as a humble pair of shoes.

Co-winner, 2010 Merle Curti Award, Organization of American HistoriansWinner, 2010 Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, ILR School at Cornell University and the Labor and Working-Class History AssociationWinner, 2010 H. L. Mitchell Award, Southern Historical Association

Enslaved mariners, white seamstresses, Irish dockhands, free black domestic servants, and native-born street sweepers all navigated the low-end labor market in post-Revolutionary Baltimore. Seth Rockman considers this diverse workforce, exploring how race, sex, nativity, and legal status determined the economic opportunities and vulnerabilities of working families in the early republic.

In the era of Frederick Douglass, Baltimore's distinctive economy featured many slaves who earned wages and white workers who performed backbreaking labor. By focusing his study on this boomtown, Rockman reassesses the roles of race and region and rewrites the history of class and capitalism in the United States during this time.

Rockman describes the material experiences of low-wage workers--how they found work, translated labor into food, fuel, and rent, and navigated underground economies and social welfare systems. He also explores what happened if they failed to find work or lost their jobs. Rockman argues that the American working class emerged from the everyday struggles of these low-wage workers. Their labor was indispensable to the early republic's market revolution, and it was central to the transformation of the United States into the wealthiest society in the Western world.

Rockman's research includes construction site payrolls, employment advertisements, almshouse records, court petitions, and the nation's first living wage campaign. These rich accounts of day laborers and domestic servants illuminate the history of early republic capitalism and its consequences for working families.

Ever since W.E.B. du Bois conceptualized slaves' self-emancipation during the U.S. Civil War as a general strike, the language of labor history has informed scholarly understandings of slavery. While the analogy of the plantation to the factory has its obvious limitations, historians have understood slaves and slaveholders as engaged in recognizable struggles over the speed of work, the ownership of time and expertise, and the informal rights and privileges that governed the labor process. However, an older materialist history rooted in marxist categories has not always succeeded in capturing the dynamics of racial dominance and human commodification at the heart of the American slave system. A new history of capitalism has offered one remedy, namely to embed slavery firmly within a capitalist mode of production whose investment in free labor was always more rhetorical than real. A different response may now be emerging through what scholars call the new materialism--an approach organized around human/non-human entanglements and drawing on recent theoretical work on things, networks, and assemblages. This talk considers the implications of this new materialism for the history of slavery, and by extension, for the field of labor history more generally.