Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery

A Pulitzer Prize finalist in History, this eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history 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 ou…