What role did slavery play in the story of U.S. capitalism? Does the fact that slavery wasn’t rooted in wage labor mean that it wasn’t a form of capitalist practice? Caitlin Rosenthal offers a definition of capitalism and shares her understanding of how commodification, and the power to impose it, operated under slavery. (Encore presentation.)
Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management Harvard University Press, 2019 (paper)