Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: Slavery in an American CityWomen and men who eked out an existence-the laboring poor whose work was short term, menial, and hard and whose lives often remain hidden from the historical record-come into sharp relief in the aptly named Scraping By.In his new work, Seth Rockman immerses readers in daily struggles of the immigrant, native-born, African-American, European-American, enslaved, indentured, apprenticed, and free workers of the thriving "boom port" of Baltimore, Maryland.What these disparate groups shared was constant toil that yielded no economic security and an impoverished condition on which early republic capitalism thrived.Rockman not merely buttresses the argument that our capitalist political economy "treated human labor as a commodity readily deployed in the service of private wealth and national economic development," but also argues that capitalism was built upon this opportunity to exploit, with no holds barred, a motley pool of workers all of whom were denied the liberty "fully to claim the prerogatives of market freedom."His goal, then, in unearthing these struggling widows, enslaved mariners, Irish domestics, free black mechanics, and American-born mudmachinists, and situating them within the larger narrative of America's developing political economy, is to spotlight "capitalism's systemic dependence" on a diverse array of exploited people (4, 8, 10).Rockman acknowledges that he has built his ambitious work on a burgeoning body of scholarship seeking to give voice to those who had little or none when they were alive and to answer questions regarding their survival strategies, constraints, and opportunities, all of which differed according to race, gender, ethnicity, and legal status.Ultimately he asserts provocatively that early workers were not united by a shared preindustrial work culture or shared republican ideology, but rather by their mutual exploitation which yielded 1
Source: Civil War Book Review
Author: Cynthia M. Kennedy
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4391868117