Justene Hill Edwards | Slavery, Freedom, and the Complicated Logics of American Capitalism

 

What is the relationship between capitalism and freedom in the United States? This question has motivated a generation of scholars who have looked to the history of American slavery to better understand the origins of American capitalism. But scholars have yet to fully grapple with the ways in which enslaved people, both as property and as economic agents, understood the complicated logics of American capitalism. This presentation, organized in collaboration with the Slavery and Freedom workshop, considers the centrality of enslaved people's lived experiences to the history of capitalism in the United States.

Professor Justene Hill Edwards is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank (Norton, 2024) and Unfree Markets: The Slaves' Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (Columbia University Press, 2021). She received her PhD from Princeton University.

The lecture will be followed by comments from Stanford Professor Kathryn Olivarius, a historian of the nineteenth-century United States whose research examines the intersections of slavery, capitalism, and medicine.

Please RSVP here (Lunch will be served)