Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery

Seth Rockman, Associate Professor of History at Brown University, is a historian of the United States focusing on the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. His research unfolds at the intersection of slavery studies, labor history, material culture studies, and the history of capitalism. Rockman’s earlier work— the award-winning Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (2009) and the co-edited volume Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (2016)— sought to better understand the relationship of slavery and capitalism in the American past. In December 2022, Rockman shared his research findings with the US House Financial Services Committee in live testimony. Rockman’s new book, from which this talk derives, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery, was published by University of Chicago Press in November 2024.