Plantation Goods:
A Material History of American Slavery
By Seth Rockwell (University of Chicago Press)
The cotton grown in the antebellum south was grown at industrial scale for industrial enterprises, traded internationally, but also sold to the more industrialized north of the U.S.. Some of that cotton, after being transformed into textiles through work in the north, was sent back down to the south, to clothe the enslaved people who harvested it. Other agricultural tools of the industrialized north went along with it, along with the tools core to the infliction of slavery but also the tools of the ideology of slavery, with shoes an example of both.
That is the basic narrative of Plantation Goods, a book that is as much a general economic history of a slice of late 18th and early 19th century United States as it is a more specific material history of northern product sold in the south. It is a material history without material, as little survives and most of that samples rather than the products themselves. The things that they made were not meant to last, especially not as slavery was practiced in the United States.
The book gestures towards How it’s Made -style trail, starting with the creation of in the north, their marketing, sale, and distribution in the south, and finally with their use and reception among the enslaved. The Hazard family is its principal characters. They were (are?) Rhode Island royalty, with a broad family tree and lots of famous relations. They epitomize the author’s complaint as opponents to slavery who made a business off of it, generous to their own communities but functionally as money launderers for white supremacy.
The Hazard family was one of the major producers of “negro cloth,” textiles specifically targeting the plantation market with clothing to be used for the enslaved, and one that specifically needed southern raw material. While not limited to their story, as many other types of goods are discussed (I am now hooked on the history of the fashion of axes), the higher level of specific detail about the family provides a lot of sources to work with. So we are able to follow along with things like financing, marketing, and individual business dealings, all with a product that was immediate necessity for the enslaved and worked by them to be made into one that they could use (along with ventures into ready-to-wear garments). The Hazards operated a large factory, albeit one that we would not recognize as such, which allows for discussion of labor and industrial history, and the points of overlap for how slavery affected the workers there. The book concludes with how the goods were employed by the enslaved is the most speculative, but serves the author’s project of grounding the history in the lived lives all this intersected with; a sort of moral balance to the Hazards.
This is my favorite kind of history. At its heart, it is about how we can understand people through the evidence of things. It is surprising – contrarian to some conventional wisdom. It focuses on the interconnection of the past, how the neat hermetic heuristics bleed out under scrutiny. It has an absurdly high ‘want to tell your neighbor at the bar what you just read’ to page ratio. Highlights of this include the hilarious tariff wars of early American politics and the role of trend, fashion, and lore in purchasing decisions by slaveholders.
So why do I feel unenthusiastic about it?
The book wants to have a materialist, follow-the-item, structure. Its chapters work more as in anthology, deep focuses on each topic that it considers which usually do not have the same sort of linearity. On top of that, the author is trying to reach an ideological conclusion about how capitalism requires slavery.
Each of these legs pulls in a different direction. The ideological continuously requires references to the sociological, which is where the book is weakest (or more likely to toss it to a footnote), and the anthropological frustrates the ideological through opposed or unrepresentative examples, which to the author’s credit, are included, but do not fit.
For instance, in the latter case, the book is particularly interested in the hypocrisy of northerners in being anti-slavery, and even participating in boycotts and similar for slavery in other contexts, but then not when it came to their own business. But the facts are at odds to that often enough that the position is weak, particularly when outside of the Hazard family, which itself moves through phases. The critiques are contemporary, and as often pro-slavery as not.
For the former, the most interesting parts of the read for me had to do with the commercial culture of the United States and the overlap there with the mythology of slavery: theater on theater on theater on brutality. That very material brutality is where the book excels. Case in point how the parodic takes on Adam Smith in the history of specific items that make up the interludes bring the weapons-grade pathos with the righteous anger in the context of engaging information. But the anthropological imagination around everything around that gets rushed past to get to the stuff the book is interested in. I am willing to accept this as me with a person with hammer-blindness in the case of my intellectual tool-set, but it was a constant pull away from the mission of the book.
And yet, I still kind of love it. Ultimately, its intent was likely to lose with me, but it is full of great, important, and otherwise missing history.
My thanks to the author, Seth Rockman, for writing the book, and to the publisher, University of Chicago, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 