Includes bibliographical references (pages 299-384) and index.

During the nineteenth century, the United States entered the ranks of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage. This was no mere coincidence. Slavery's Capitalism argues for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. According to editors Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, the issue is not whether slavery itself was or was not capitalist but, rather, the impossibility of understanding the nation's spectacular pattern of economic development without situating slavery front and center. American capitalism?renowned for its celebration of market competition, private property, and the self-made man?has its origins in an American slavery predicated on the abhorrent notion that human beings could be legally owned and compelled to work under force of violence.