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The historiography of slavery in the nineteenth century has undergone a dramatic shift over the past few years. The "second slavery " as well as work on the relationship between American slavery and capitalism, have altered some of the basic paradigms which have propped up thinking about the institution in the history of the United States. This essay surveys the intellectual origins and development of both projects. It offers a critique of the assumptions which undergird this new work, while at the same time pointing up how these two projects might engage with and be challenged by the history and historiography of American emancipation. In particular, a history of coerced labor in the United States and around the world in the nineteenth century, counters the often insular way in which the story of emancipation and Reconstruction is traditionally cast.
Over the past two decades, historians of slavery have undertaken a thorough renovation of their field. Two interlocking research projects-boldly conceived, conceptually sophisticated-contend that slave systems all over the Americas changed radically over the course of the nineteenth century and that slavery stood at the center of a political and economic transformation of global proportions. For scholars of the "second slavery," as well as those who study the history of slavery and its importance to the development of capitalism in the United States, the institution was hardly retrograde or a holdover from an earlier era. By their lights, it was also anything but an impediment to the onrush of modernity. Rather, in the hands of a new generation of historians, nineteenth-century slave systems became engines of capitalist innovation and sat at the furious leading edge of modern systems of labor exploitation that have come to dominate much of the globe in the twenty-first century.
The forcefulness of this new literature has transformed American historiography. Scholars have long recognized that southern cotton and the slaves who grew it helped fuel the Industrial Revolution. But historians of the second slavery and the history of American capitalism have undermined foundational assumptions about southern backwardness and northern modernity in U.S. history. Older narratives of sectional difference may no longer hold as much water. The national reach of the institution seems clearer now than ever before. Southern planters now look...