Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina

April 13, 2021

Unfree Markets examines the economic lives of enslaved people, not as property or bonded laborers, but as active participants in their local economies. Unfree Markets provides the fullest account to date of the strategies that enslaved people used to create their own networks of commerce, from the colonial period to the Civil War. It confronts one of the most enduring questions in African American history and the history of American capitalism: How beneficial was capitalism to African Americans? Through examining an array of archival records, from slaveholders’ account books to legislative petitions, Unfree Markets shows that even though enslaved people shaped the increasingly capitalist economy of slavery, economic participation alone could not secure what slaves wanted most—their freedom. The time and energy that enslaved people invested in their own economic enterprises did not bring them out of slavery; instead, it kept them enslaved. Ultimately, Unfree Markets demonstrates that the vestiges of race-based economic inequality are not in the late-nineteenth or twentieth centuries, but in the period of legal slavery.