The everyday lives of enslaved people were filled with the backbreaking
tasks that their enslavers forced them to complete. But in spare
moments, they found time in which to earn money and obtain goods for
themselves. Enslaved people led vibrant economic lives, cultivating
produce and raising livestock to trade and sell. They exchanged goods
with nonslaveholding whites and even sold products to their enslavers.
Did these pursuits represent a modicum of freedom in the interstices of
slavery, or did they further shackle enslaved people by other means?
Justene Hill Edwards illuminates the inner workings of the slaves'
economy and the strategies that enslaved people used to participate in
the market. Focusing on South Carolina from the colonial period to the
Civil War, she examines how the capitalist development of slavery
influenced the economic lives of enslaved people. Hill Edwards
demonstrates that as enslavers embraced increasingly capitalist
principles, enslaved people slowly lost their economic autonomy. As
slaveholders became more profit-oriented in the nineteenth century, they
also sought to control enslaved people's economic behavior and capture
the gains. Despite enslaved people's aptitude for enterprise, their
market activities came to be one more part of the violent and
exploitative regime that shaped their lives. Drawing on wide-ranging
archival research to expand our understanding of racial capitalism,
Unfree Markets shows the limits of the connection between economic
activity and freedom.
