Slave Agriculture And Financial Markets In Antebellum America

Offers the study of Antebellum southern slavery and the credit system. This work explains how the Bank of the United States supported the government's and the nation's credit abroad by providing seemingly limitless credit facilities to southern planters, especially in the territories along the lower Mississippi River.

Slave Agriculture and Financial Markets looks at financing slave agriculture from the perspective of credit intermediaries such as chartered banks and commercial partnerships. It explains in detail how the Bank of the United States supported the government's and the nation's credit abroad by providing seemingly limitless credit facilities to southern planters, especially in the newly opened territories along the lower Mississippi River.

Offers the study of Antebellum southern slavery and the credit system. This work explains how the Bank of the United States supported the government's and the nation's credit abroad by providing seemingly limitless credit facilities to southern planters, especially in the territories along the lower Mississippi River.

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. Drawing on the expertise of sixteen scholars who are at the forefront of rewriting the history of American economic development, Slavery's Capitalism identifies slavery as the primary force driving key innovations in entrepreneurship, finance, accounting, management, and political economy that are too often attributed to the so-called free market. Approaching the study of slavery as the originating catalyst for the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism casts new light on American credit markets, practices of offshore investment, and understandings of human capital. Rather than seeing slavery as outside the institutional structures of capitalism, the essayists recover slavery's importance to the American economic past and prompt enduring questions about the relationship of market freedom to human freedom. Contributors: Edward E. Baptist, Sven Beckert, Daina Ramey Berry, Kathryn Boodry, Alfred L. Brophy, Stephen Chambers, Eric Kimball, John Majewski, Bonnie Martin, Seth Rockman, Daniel B. Rood, Caitlin Rosenthal, Joshua D. Rothman, Calvin Schermerhorn, Andrew Shankman, Craig Steven Wilder.

In 1995, the Baring Brothers collapsed over a weekend, brought down by the 'rogue trader' Nick Leeson. Utilizing British and American archives, this work charts Baring Brothers development from wool merchants to one of the most powerful global financial institutions. It also analyses the errors which led to its downfall.

"Sharon Murphy's book is a powerful and unprecedented dive into the entangled history of banking and slavery in nineteenth-century America. Slaveholders developed credit and creditworthiness by using enslaved people as collateral, and this allowed them to undertake an endless array of projects. But Murphy further shows that this credit system grew and changed as banks sought new ways to realize their own profits and power. She demonstrates not merely how slavery was financed by banks but how banks were financed by slavery. By extension, everything banks enabled, not least the physical expansion of the United States itself, was also then literally indebted to that noxious institution"--

Based on both theoretical and empirical approaches, the essays in this volume emphasise the role of ethics in a globalized economy.

Addresses the financing of the American-Mexican War of 1846-48. This study argues that the successful financing of the American-Mexican War had a long-term beneficial effect on American financial institutions and markets.