Author Event! Seth Rockman's "Plantation Goods"

Join us on March 20th as we host Brown professor and historian, Seth Rockman, who will be reading from and discussing his latest work, Plantation Goods: The Material History of American Slavery.

About the book:

An eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor.

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.

Examining producers and consumers linked in economic and moral relationships across great geographic and political distances, Plantation Goods 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.

About the author:

Seth Rockman is associate professor of history at Brown University. He is the author of Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore and coeditor of Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Rockman serves on the faculty advisory board of Brown University’s Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. He lives in Providence.

Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase during the event.

We'll see you there!

Host or Publisher Symposium Books Staff