| Reading Guide for Week 5 | |
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Tuesday Last week we focused on one element of the relationship between “capitalism” and dispossesson of indigenous Americans: to create space for the rapid expansion of the “cotton kingdom” in the 1820s and 1830s. Which is to say, for the rapid expansion of slave plantations producing cotton principally for British textile factories. The particular element of “capitalism” we scrutinized was the financing of a violent transformation of indigenous homelands into American territory, white settler lands, and cotton plantation property. This week we will examine the complex relationship between “capitalism” and slavery itself. If one defines “capitalism” as “creative destruction,” then “capitalism” as its signal contributions to the Early American Republic created the “cotton kingdom” while destroying many indigenous homelands and communities as well as millions of enslaved Black lives. Last week we also considered another element of the materiality of “capitalism”: health and cleanliness. Hopefully the challenge to imagine making things helped reinforced your sense of the historicity of the ideas of “capitalism” and “the economy,” since these abstract concepts were invented only in a time when more and more people were buying things, instead of making them. And this relates to one important way that some people in our time try as their tactic to stand outside “capitalism” by making as much as possible, and buying as little as possible. Thursday
Robin Einhorn in this essay focuses on the relationship between the existence of slavery and the formation of national tax policy in the aftermath of the War of American Independence. Slavery was a crucial factor that other historians had overlooked in their studies of American political development. Historians like Einhorn have been helping us appreciate how the existence of slavery in American life was closely connected to many fundamental elements of American political/economic culture, even where it does not appear so. Something similar could be said about the existence of racism and white supremacy in American life in the present day — and about the ongoing legacy of slavery itself, which, tragically and terribly, has not yet been removed from American political/economic culture. Einhorn discusses how the politics of slavery guided American politicians in the 1780s through the 1810s to craft a federal constitution and then to create and implement federal tax policies that either avoided sparking any controversy over slavery (in favor of national unity), or protected the political/economic interests of slaveholders. The concrete policy choices that the so-called Founders made in the Early American Republic would endure throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, even after slavery itself had ostensibly been abolished as a consequence of the American Civil War. The racist premises of these policy choices have endured even longer, into the early twenty-first century — into our time today. (The essay is not as long as it appears, as there are extensive footnotes and a number of large tables. However, the essay remains high-level political and economic analysis, which demands and deserves close attention — toward better understanding the past and the present.) |