ABSTRACT
The recent surge of interest in "capitalism and slavery" belongs, like other such scholarly events, to a distinct cultural moment, this one born when the long-running focus of American historians on the "problem of the color-line" was interrupted by their rediscovery of the economy after the financial emergency of 2008. Roman patricians, French clericals, English nobles – all were consigned to the dustbin of history by the violent opposition of new social and economic forces. Free-soil truisms regarding the irrepressible conflict between capitalism and slavery have, as such, found a long afterlife in historical scholarship. The economic viability of slavery, so clearly manifested in its profitability, which was a function, in turn, of its tireless maximization of utilities, rested on a "wide-ranging system of rewards" made available to workers. The needs of government in a slave system thus transcended commercial logic.
