JF: As you mentioned in your article, historians of capitalism have avoided trying to define capitalism. Why do you think historians have avoided this and why is it important to define capitalism?
CR: Definitions can be really limiting. If you set out with a narrow definition then it may lead you to exclude certain things before you get started. For example, if scholars assume slavery could not be capitalist, then they run the risk of ruling the possibility that it could out before they even start to understand how the economy works. So I understand the field’s reluctance to define capitalism. Starting without a definition was a good way for the field to reframe questions in powerful ways. It made it easier to see that many of the things we usually call capitalist (like cotton mills and banks) were closely connected to things we do not usually associate with capitalism — here chattel slavery.
But now, well over a decade since people started trumpeting this new field, our conversations need more clarity. What is distinctive about the system we are describing? And how can we share our findings if we don’t write precisely? This is what I try to do in the paper. I came to my definition by thinking about how capitalism changes the conditions of workers. One way of identifying capitalism historically has been to point to the rise of wage labor — something changed when an hour of labor could be bought and sold without reference to individuals. But wage labor obviously excludes slavery, so I wanted to see if I could think more broadly about what wage labor and slavery had in common, which is how I arrived at my focus on commoditization. Wage labor is highly commoditized. This paper argues that — setting aside the wage — a similar kind of commoditization characterized the variety of slavery that emerged in the late antebellum United States.
JF: You write that “leaving capitalism undefined has contributed to ongoing misunderstandings between historians and economists.” How can a shared definition of capitalism among historians and economists create a productive dialogue?
CR: I go into much more detail about the slippery politics of the word “capitalism” in my article, but one thing that I particularly push against is reducing capitalism to markets. I see capitalism as being about how capital shapes markets in ways that are often invisible but fundamentally important. Markets are rarely (perhaps never!) equally “free” for everyone — slavery is an extreme example where the market freedoms of enslavers were more important than basic human freedoms for the enslaved. Slaveholders did not see abolition as the triumph of the free market — they saw it as the expropriation of their property and they argued that it infringed on their rights to buy and sell that property as they pleased. They saw the abolition of slavery as encroaching on their own economic freedoms.