Towards a New Legal History of Capitalism and Unfree Labor: Law, Slavery, and Emancipation in the American Marketplace

摘要: New work on the "history of capitalism" reveals how personal freedom enjoyed by people living within liberal capitalist mainstream is often purchased coerced labor at social margins. Walter Johnson’s book "River Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in Cotton Kingdom" (2013) makes this argument with force, utilizing concept "slave racial to suggest race-based slavery constituted a necessary component early American economic expansion. Using framework as starting point, essay argues that legal institutions property contract, underwriting genuinely capitalist" regime, also contained certain subversive possibilities themselves, eventually challenging unfree modality rule modernizing United States.