Measuring Value: The Legacies of Slave Racial Capitalism after Emancipation

Abstract

Since the publication of Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (2013), Ed Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told (2014), and Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014), the new history of capitalism has contributed to scholarly and public conversations about enslavement’s relationship to the growth of capitalism in the United States. These histories highlight the complex legal and financial systems that the peculiar institution engendered. Before the Civil War, people could buy, sell, and mortgage property in humans, generating massive profits for enslavers, bankers, and others. In light of this research, a growing group of scholars has reconsidered the process of emancipation in the South. Formal abolition may have ended the legalized trade in Black bodies, but what happened to the legal and financial practices that the value of enslaved people necessitated? Aaron Carico’s Black Market: The Slave’s Value in National Culture after 1865 is one of the first books to answer this question. Carico argues that formal abolition did not end the commodification of Black bodies or their representations as relations of exchange, accumulation, and domination in U.S. culture. “Though no longer chattel,” he says, “blacks in America weren’t relieved of the commodity’s mark. Blackness is realized in a historical matrix of economic exchange and cultural production, a real abstraction” (p. 9). Black Market is a work of cultural criticism that contributes to American Studies and interdisciplinary studies of racial capitalism. Carico explores eclectic texts like court cases, paintings, performances, photographs, novels, poetry, and music. This broad source base puts the book in conversation with U.S. and art historians, legal and literary scholars, and especially historians of capitalism. The book’s theoretical framework relies on analyses of slave racial capitalism, a coin termed by Johnson in River of Dark Dreams to denote how race-based enslavement enabled and required westward expansion in the antebellum era. Carico also pulls from Black radical thinkers and Afro-