History of the United States I / Unit 12 USH1 1701 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Was It Capitalism?
The idea
The anchor raises the question and declines to settle it. Planters operated inside a capitalist society while using a labour system resembling feudalism and serfdom, and because enslaved people reaped no earnings, some economic historians consider the antebellum plantation system pre-capitalist. That phrasing is deliberate. It reports a scholarly position rather than adopting one, and the witnesses read for this course disagree with each other, which is why this entry teaches the disagreement rather than a conclusion. One witness is emphatic that the system was capitalist, calling it capitalism with its most colonial, violent and exploitative face, and pointing to banks in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia and London extending credit for southwestern land, to enslaved people counted as the largest expense of any cotton operation, and to their prices tracking the cotton market upward from seven hundred seventy-five dollars to over sixteen hundred. The other declines the frame entirely and stresses backwardness instead, recording that southern cities failed to develop diversified economies and were not centres of commerce, finance or manufacturing, that the transport network was primitive, and that illiteracy ran at twenty percent against eight percent nationally.
In practice
The same institution described as the sharpest edge of modern finance and as a brake on economic development, by two respectable sources reading the same evidence.
Where people slip
Hold the disagreement rather than resolving it, and know what each side is measuring. The capitalist reading looks at credit, commodity pricing, insurance and world markets, and finds a system fully integrated into global capitalism. The backwardness reading looks at cities, railroads, schools and manufacturing, and finds a region that did not develop. Both are describing the same South. What neither witness claims, and what the exam will not ask you to defend, is that slavery was dying of its own economic weight. One witness rejects that explicitly, saying there is no reason to think slavery was doomed for economic reasons. That much all three sources agree on, and it is the part that matters for explaining why the institution had to be ended by a war.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
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