“This Slavery Business Is a Horrible Thing”: The Economy of American Slavery in the Lives of the Enslaved

Abstract

This article examines the business of American slavery from the perspective of enslaved people. It draws from narratives of enslaved fugitivity and interviews with the formerly enslaved to interrogate how they understood the business imperatives of slavery in the antebellum American South. It argues that enslaved peoples’ economic knowledge was cultivated through the violence inherent in the business of slavery, from their ideas about banking to their understanding of entrepreneurialism. Building on the current literature on capitalism and slavery, this article shows that slavery's brutality shaped enslaved peoples’ knowledge of commerce in nineteenth-century America.