Erica Armstrong Dunbar, author of Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona JudgeĪ rich study of an important and understudied topic. Beautifully written and researched, Unfree Markets is a welcome addition to the history of African Americans and capitalism. Drawing on wide-ranging archival research to expand our understanding of racial capitalism, Unfree Markets shows the limits of the connection between economic activity and freedom.Ĭentering enslaved men, women, and children as actors on the grand stage of South Carolina’s economy, Hill Edwards demonstrates that the entrepreneurial enterprises of the enslaved did not undermine the institution of bondage but instead reinforced it. Despite enslaved people’s aptitude for enterprise, their market activities came to be one more part of the violent and exploitative regime that shaped their lives. As slaveholders became more profit-oriented in the nineteenth century, they also sought to control enslaved people’s economic behavior and capture the gains.

Hill Edwards demonstrates that as enslavers embraced increasingly capitalist principles, enslaved people slowly lost their economic autonomy. Focusing on South Carolina from the colonial period to the Civil War, she examines how the capitalist development of slavery influenced the economic lives of enslaved people. Did these pursuits represent a modicum of freedom in the interstices of slavery, or did they further shackle enslaved people by other means? Justene Hill Edwards illuminates the inner workings of the slaves’ economy and the strategies that enslaved people used to participate in the market. They exchanged goods with nonslaveholding whites and even sold products to their enslavers. Enslaved people led vibrant economic lives, cultivating produce and raising livestock to trade and sell.

But in spare moments, they found time in which to earn money and obtain goods for themselves. The everyday lives of enslaved people were filled with the backbreaking tasks that their enslavers forced them to complete.

Unrequited Toil by Calvin Schermerhorn