Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery | Research Seminar with Seth Rockman

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Meeting ID: 864 5179 5058

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. In his book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery, Associate Professor of History, Seth Rockman, uses plantation goods—the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the South—to locate the biggest stories in American history in everyday objects, stitching together the lives and livelihoods of Americans—white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free—across an expanding nation.

Bio: Seth Rockman is a historian of the United States focusing on the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. His research unfolds at the intersection of slavery studies, labor history, material culture studies, and the history of capitalism. Rockman’s earlier work— the award-winning Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (2009) and the co-edited volume Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (2016)— sought to better understand the relationship of slavery and capitalism in the American past. In December 2022, Rockman shared his research findings with the US House Financial Services Committee in live testimony. Rockman’s new book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery, will be published by University of Chicago Press in Fall 2024.