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Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery
An eye-opening rethinking of 19th-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor.
The industrializing North and the agricultural South—that’s how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early 19th century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. We miss slavery’s long reach into small New England communities, just as we fail to see the role of Northern manufacturing in shaping the terrain of human bondage in the South.
Using plantation goods—the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the South—historian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americans—white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free—across an expanding nation. By following the stories of material objects, such as shoes made by Massachusetts farm women that found their way to the feet of a Mississippi slave, Rockman reveals a national economy organized by slavery—a slavery that outsourced the production of its supplies to the North, and a North that outsourced its slavery to the South.
Melding business and labor history through powerful storytelling, Plantation Goods brings northern industrialists, southern slaveholders, enslaved field hands, and paid factory laborers into the same picture. In one part of the country, entrepreneurs envisioned fortunes to be made from “planter’s hoes” and rural women spent their days weaving “negro cloth” and assembling “slave brogans.” In another, enslaved people actively consumed textiles and tools imported from the North to contest their bondage. In between, merchants, marketers, storekeepers, and debt collectors lay claim to the profits of a thriving interregional trade.
Examining producers and consumers linked in economic and moral relationships across great geographic and political distances, Plantation Goods explores how people in the 19th century thought about complicity with slavery while showing how slavery structured life nationwide and established a modern world of entrepreneurship and exploitation. Rockman brings together lines of American history that have for too long been told separately, as slavery and capitalism converge in something as deceptively ordinary as a humble pair of shoes.
The industrializing North and the agricultural South—that’s how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early 19th century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. We miss slavery’s long reach into small New England communities, just as we fail to see the role of Northern manufacturing in shaping the terrain of human bondage in the South.
Using plantation goods—the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the South—historian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americans—white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free—across an expanding nation. By following the stories of material objects, such as shoes made by Massachusetts farm women that found their way to the feet of a Mississippi slave, Rockman reveals a national economy organized by slavery—a slavery that outsourced the production of its supplies to the North, and a North that outsourced its slavery to the South.
Melding business and labor history through powerful storytelling, Plantation Goods brings northern industrialists, southern slaveholders, enslaved field hands, and paid factory laborers into the same picture. In one part of the country, entrepreneurs envisioned fortunes to be made from “planter’s hoes” and rural women spent their days weaving “negro cloth” and assembling “slave brogans.” In another, enslaved people actively consumed textiles and tools imported from the North to contest their bondage. In between, merchants, marketers, storekeepers, and debt collectors lay claim to the profits of a thriving interregional trade.
Examining producers and consumers linked in economic and moral relationships across great geographic and political distances, Plantation Goods explores how people in the 19th century thought about complicity with slavery while showing how slavery structured life nationwide and established a modern world of entrepreneurship and exploitation. Rockman brings together lines of American history that have for too long been told separately, as slavery and capitalism converge in something as deceptively ordinary as a humble pair of shoes.
496 pages, Hardcover
Published November 29, 2024
18 people are currently reading
674 people want to read
About the author
Seth Rockman
10 books17 followersSeth Rockman is associate professor of history at Brown University. He is the author of Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore and coeditor of Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Rockman serves on the faculty advisory board of Brown University’s Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. He lives in Providence. His new book Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery will be published in November 2024.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
October 27, 2025
as great as its 4+ awards suggest. the carefully interwoven archival examples throughout the narrative are stunning. somehow gets even better toward the end as the plantation goods move to the South where Rockman’s analysis is refined and powerful.
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July 12, 2025okay finally finished this book after leaving the last chapter unread for like a month
really in-depth history making you think about minute connections that you otherwise may not have thought of
really in-depth history making you think about minute connections that you otherwise may not have thought of
September 4, 2025
I spent a long time reading this book because it is important to the work I do at my day job. Deeply researched, nuanced, humane, and layered. A must read for Americanists.
July 9, 2025
Seth Rockman’s Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery is a sobering and meticulously researched book that tackles the institution of slavery through an often-overlooked lens: material culture. Rather than focusing on broad ideological or political histories, Rockman draws readers’ attention to the everyday objects that formed the backbone of the plantation economy. These items like clothing, tools, textiles, shoes, hats, buckets, barrels, and more are not simply artifacts of life on the plantation. They are evidence of the complex web of global capitalism, industrial labor, and racialized exploitation that sustained American slavery and shaped the broader contours of modern economic development.
What I appreciated most about this book is how it manages to say something both familiar and unfamiliar about American history. The fact that slavery was intimately connected to the development of American capitalism has become a more widely accepted argument in recent years, but Rockman’s approach gives this argument a tactile, grounded dimension. By zooming in on the physical goods that passed through enslaved hands as both producers and consumers he reveals how the abstract horrors of slavery were enacted through very specific, concrete systems. These goods were standardized, priced, distributed, and discussed with brutal efficiency, and in many cases the enslaved were forced to purchase the very objects they helped to create.
As a reader, I was genuinely impressed by Rockman’s archival rigor. The book is steeped in documentary evidence, including receipts, plantation records, shipping manifests, advertisements, and correspondence. It’s clear that this is a historian who has spent years in the archives, and his skill in drawing connections between disparate sources is admirable. Rockman spent years in the archives, reading them, interpreting them, and placing them within the larger machinery of profit and power. His work reminds us that the plantation was not an isolated Southern system, but a node in a much larger network of trade, labor, and industrial production that extended from New England factories to British ports.
Among the key themes Rockman explores are the commodification of the enslaved, the production and sale of goods for enslaved consumers, the intersection of plantation and factory labor, and the contradictions of slavery as both a brutal regime and a rationalized economic system. He also examines how enslaved people themselves navigated the material world around them, and how they repaired, modified, and resisted the conditions imposed by the goods they were forced to use or wear. This is a vital reminder that material culture is not neutral, but a reflection of power, hierarchy, and resistance.
That said, I did find the book a bit difficult to stay engaged with at times. The tone is very academic, and while the content is fascinating and important, it lacks some of the narrative drive that might make it more accessible to general readers. I think this is more a feature than a flaw, because it’s clear that the book is written for a scholarly audience, but it’s worth noting for anyone coming into this expecting a sweeping historical overview or character-driven storytelling. What the book offers instead is something slower and more deliberate: a deep investigation into the material and economic infrastructure that made slavery profitable and sustainable.
Plantation Goods may not be the easiest read, but it is an important one. It sheds light on the often-invisible systems that supported slavery and forces readers to confront the uncomfortable reality that capitalism and violence have long been intertwined in the American story. For historians, educators, and anyone interested in the intersections of labor, race, and material culture, this book is a valuable resource.
Recommended for readers with an interest in slavery studies, economic history, and material culture, and for those willing to sit with difficult questions about the everyday mechanics of systemic oppression.
For more check out my video:
https://youtu.be/eAoxRnjh-hc
For more reviews check out my channel:
http://www.youtube.com/@SpencerReadsE...
What I appreciated most about this book is how it manages to say something both familiar and unfamiliar about American history. The fact that slavery was intimately connected to the development of American capitalism has become a more widely accepted argument in recent years, but Rockman’s approach gives this argument a tactile, grounded dimension. By zooming in on the physical goods that passed through enslaved hands as both producers and consumers he reveals how the abstract horrors of slavery were enacted through very specific, concrete systems. These goods were standardized, priced, distributed, and discussed with brutal efficiency, and in many cases the enslaved were forced to purchase the very objects they helped to create.
As a reader, I was genuinely impressed by Rockman’s archival rigor. The book is steeped in documentary evidence, including receipts, plantation records, shipping manifests, advertisements, and correspondence. It’s clear that this is a historian who has spent years in the archives, and his skill in drawing connections between disparate sources is admirable. Rockman spent years in the archives, reading them, interpreting them, and placing them within the larger machinery of profit and power. His work reminds us that the plantation was not an isolated Southern system, but a node in a much larger network of trade, labor, and industrial production that extended from New England factories to British ports.
Among the key themes Rockman explores are the commodification of the enslaved, the production and sale of goods for enslaved consumers, the intersection of plantation and factory labor, and the contradictions of slavery as both a brutal regime and a rationalized economic system. He also examines how enslaved people themselves navigated the material world around them, and how they repaired, modified, and resisted the conditions imposed by the goods they were forced to use or wear. This is a vital reminder that material culture is not neutral, but a reflection of power, hierarchy, and resistance.
That said, I did find the book a bit difficult to stay engaged with at times. The tone is very academic, and while the content is fascinating and important, it lacks some of the narrative drive that might make it more accessible to general readers. I think this is more a feature than a flaw, because it’s clear that the book is written for a scholarly audience, but it’s worth noting for anyone coming into this expecting a sweeping historical overview or character-driven storytelling. What the book offers instead is something slower and more deliberate: a deep investigation into the material and economic infrastructure that made slavery profitable and sustainable.
Plantation Goods may not be the easiest read, but it is an important one. It sheds light on the often-invisible systems that supported slavery and forces readers to confront the uncomfortable reality that capitalism and violence have long been intertwined in the American story. For historians, educators, and anyone interested in the intersections of labor, race, and material culture, this book is a valuable resource.
Recommended for readers with an interest in slavery studies, economic history, and material culture, and for those willing to sit with difficult questions about the everyday mechanics of systemic oppression.
For more check out my video:
https://youtu.be/eAoxRnjh-hc
For more reviews check out my channel:
http://www.youtube.com/@SpencerReadsE...
October 11, 2024
The cotton grown in the antebellum south was grown at industrial scale for industrial enterprises, traded internationally, but also sold to the more industrialized north of the U.S.. Some of that cotton, after being transformed into textiles through work in the north, was sent back down to the south, to clothe the enslaved people who harvested it. Other agricultural tools of the industrialized north went along with it, along with the tools core to the infliction of slavery but also the tools of the ideology of slavery, with shoes an example of both.
That is the basic narrative of Plantation Goods, a book that is as much a general economic history of a slice of late 18th and early 19th century United States as it is a more specific material history of northern product sold in the south. It is a material history without materiel, as little survives and most of that samples rather than the products themselves. The things that they made were not meant to last, especially not as slavery was practiced in the United States.
The book gestures towards How it's Made -style trail, starting with the creation of in the north, their marketing, sale, and distribution in the south, and finally with their use and reception among the enslaved. The Hazard family is its principal characters. They were (are?) Rhode Island royalty, with a broad family tree and lots of famous relations. They epitomize the author's complaint as opponents to slavery who made a business off of it, generous to their own communities but functionally as money launderers for white supremacy.
The Hazard family was one of the major producers of "negro cloth," textiles specifically targeting the plantation market with clothing to be used for the enslaved, and one that specifically needed southern raw material. While not limited to their story, as many other types of goods are discussed (I am now hooked on the history of the fashion of axes), the higher level of specific detail about the family provides a lot of sources to work with. So we are able to follow along with things like financing, marketing, and individual business dealings, all with a product that was immediate necessity for the enslaved and worked by them to be made into one that they could use (along with ventures into ready-to-wear garments). The Hazards operated a large factory, albeit one that we would not recognize as such, which allows for discussion of labor and industrial history, and the points of overlap for how slavery affected the workers there. The book concludes with how the goods were employed by the enslaved is the most speculative, but serves the author's project of grounding the history in the lived lives all this intersected with; a sort of moral balance to the Hazards.
This is my favorite kind of history. At its heart, it is about how we can understand people through the evidence of things. It is surprising - contrarian to some conventional wisdom. It focuses on the interconnection of the past, how the neat hermetic heuristics bleed out under scrutiny. It has an absurdly high 'want to tell your neighbor at the bar what you just read' to page ratio. Highlights of this include the hilarious tariff wars of early American politics and the role of trend, fashion, and lore in purchasing decisions by slaveholders.
So why do I feel unenthusiastic about it?
The book wants to have a materialist, follow-the-item, structure. Its chapters work more as in anthology, deep focuses on each topic that it considers which usually do not have the same sort of linearity. On top of that, the author is trying to reach an ideological conclusion about how capitalism requires slavery.
Each of these legs pulls in a different direction. The ideological continuously requires references to the sociological, which is where the book is weakest (or more likely to toss it to a footnote), and the anthropological frustrates the ideological through opposed or unrepresentative examples, which to the author's credit, are included, but do not fit.
For instance, in the latter case, the book is particularly interested in the hypocrisy of northerners in being anti-slavery, and even participating in boycotts and similar for slavery in other contexts, but then not when it came to their own business. But the facts are at odds to that often enough that the position is weak, particularly when outside of the Hazard family, which itself moves through phases. The critiques are contemporary, and as often pro-slavery as not.
For the former, the most interesting parts of the read for me had to do with the commercial culture of the United States and the overlap there with the mythology of slavery: theater on theater on theater on brutality. That very material brutality is where the book excels. Case in point how the parodic takes on Adam Smith in the history of specific items that make up the interludes bring the weapons-grade pathos with the righteous anger in the context of engaging information. But the anthropological imagination around everything around that gets rushed past to get to the stuff the book is interested in. I am willing to accept this as me with a person with hammer-blindness in the case of my intellectual tool-set, but it was a constant pull away from the mission of the book.
And yet, I still kind of love it. Ultimately, its intent was likely to lose with me, but it is full of great, important, and otherwise missing history.
My thanks to the author, Seth Rockman, for writing the book, and to the publisher, University of Chicago, for making the ARC available to me.
That is the basic narrative of Plantation Goods, a book that is as much a general economic history of a slice of late 18th and early 19th century United States as it is a more specific material history of northern product sold in the south. It is a material history without materiel, as little survives and most of that samples rather than the products themselves. The things that they made were not meant to last, especially not as slavery was practiced in the United States.
The book gestures towards How it's Made -style trail, starting with the creation of in the north, their marketing, sale, and distribution in the south, and finally with their use and reception among the enslaved. The Hazard family is its principal characters. They were (are?) Rhode Island royalty, with a broad family tree and lots of famous relations. They epitomize the author's complaint as opponents to slavery who made a business off of it, generous to their own communities but functionally as money launderers for white supremacy.
The Hazard family was one of the major producers of "negro cloth," textiles specifically targeting the plantation market with clothing to be used for the enslaved, and one that specifically needed southern raw material. While not limited to their story, as many other types of goods are discussed (I am now hooked on the history of the fashion of axes), the higher level of specific detail about the family provides a lot of sources to work with. So we are able to follow along with things like financing, marketing, and individual business dealings, all with a product that was immediate necessity for the enslaved and worked by them to be made into one that they could use (along with ventures into ready-to-wear garments). The Hazards operated a large factory, albeit one that we would not recognize as such, which allows for discussion of labor and industrial history, and the points of overlap for how slavery affected the workers there. The book concludes with how the goods were employed by the enslaved is the most speculative, but serves the author's project of grounding the history in the lived lives all this intersected with; a sort of moral balance to the Hazards.
This is my favorite kind of history. At its heart, it is about how we can understand people through the evidence of things. It is surprising - contrarian to some conventional wisdom. It focuses on the interconnection of the past, how the neat hermetic heuristics bleed out under scrutiny. It has an absurdly high 'want to tell your neighbor at the bar what you just read' to page ratio. Highlights of this include the hilarious tariff wars of early American politics and the role of trend, fashion, and lore in purchasing decisions by slaveholders.
So why do I feel unenthusiastic about it?
The book wants to have a materialist, follow-the-item, structure. Its chapters work more as in anthology, deep focuses on each topic that it considers which usually do not have the same sort of linearity. On top of that, the author is trying to reach an ideological conclusion about how capitalism requires slavery.
Each of these legs pulls in a different direction. The ideological continuously requires references to the sociological, which is where the book is weakest (or more likely to toss it to a footnote), and the anthropological frustrates the ideological through opposed or unrepresentative examples, which to the author's credit, are included, but do not fit.
For instance, in the latter case, the book is particularly interested in the hypocrisy of northerners in being anti-slavery, and even participating in boycotts and similar for slavery in other contexts, but then not when it came to their own business. But the facts are at odds to that often enough that the position is weak, particularly when outside of the Hazard family, which itself moves through phases. The critiques are contemporary, and as often pro-slavery as not.
For the former, the most interesting parts of the read for me had to do with the commercial culture of the United States and the overlap there with the mythology of slavery: theater on theater on theater on brutality. That very material brutality is where the book excels. Case in point how the parodic takes on Adam Smith in the history of specific items that make up the interludes bring the weapons-grade pathos with the righteous anger in the context of engaging information. But the anthropological imagination around everything around that gets rushed past to get to the stuff the book is interested in. I am willing to accept this as me with a person with hammer-blindness in the case of my intellectual tool-set, but it was a constant pull away from the mission of the book.
And yet, I still kind of love it. Ultimately, its intent was likely to lose with me, but it is full of great, important, and otherwise missing history.
My thanks to the author, Seth Rockman, for writing the book, and to the publisher, University of Chicago, for making the ARC available to me.
December 12, 2025
3-1/2. This is a well researched and interesting book on the production, transport and use of textiles, shoes and axes from New England “factories” to enslaved people on plantations in the South.
It shows how certain northern industries depended on slave plantations for their business, even though some of were headed by ardent abolitionists. This trade was only made possible by US tariffs on British goods (by far the cheapest and best quality in the world then). The South hated relying on northern companies yet could not produce enough of its own goods as substitutes, partly because it didn’t want poor white workers in the South to organize like they were doing in the north. And somehow the owners of Northern companies justified the contradiction of abolitionists selling to enslavers, even when it meant owning enslaved persons if the plantation went bust, which happened. The last parts of the book were especially interesting and sad - how enslaved persons experienced this trade and how the work of plantation goods added to their already overburdened and painful lives.
However, I did not find the book fully satisfying. First, the author writes relatively clearly, but tends to add too much to each paragraph - a maddening curse that many academics bear. Second, there is very little data to give a sense of dimensions of the trade. What was the quantitative extent of the economic interaction between north and South? What share of the north’s/south’s economy was involved? Third, there is a lot of conjecture in the book about how enslaved persons felt. I suppose this is to be expected since there are few first hand records. But I would have appreciated greater use of accounts by former enslaved persons (at least as much as the early chapters rely on letters between northern businesses and their representatives). And the conclusion section was disappointing - focused on the creation of 3 million free consumers. I would hope the war was about more than that. Finally, many nuggets were hidden in the book or not discussed - for example, how did the labor movements in the north affect the politics ahead of the civil war?
It shows how certain northern industries depended on slave plantations for their business, even though some of were headed by ardent abolitionists. This trade was only made possible by US tariffs on British goods (by far the cheapest and best quality in the world then). The South hated relying on northern companies yet could not produce enough of its own goods as substitutes, partly because it didn’t want poor white workers in the South to organize like they were doing in the north. And somehow the owners of Northern companies justified the contradiction of abolitionists selling to enslavers, even when it meant owning enslaved persons if the plantation went bust, which happened. The last parts of the book were especially interesting and sad - how enslaved persons experienced this trade and how the work of plantation goods added to their already overburdened and painful lives.
However, I did not find the book fully satisfying. First, the author writes relatively clearly, but tends to add too much to each paragraph - a maddening curse that many academics bear. Second, there is very little data to give a sense of dimensions of the trade. What was the quantitative extent of the economic interaction between north and South? What share of the north’s/south’s economy was involved? Third, there is a lot of conjecture in the book about how enslaved persons felt. I suppose this is to be expected since there are few first hand records. But I would have appreciated greater use of accounts by former enslaved persons (at least as much as the early chapters rely on letters between northern businesses and their representatives). And the conclusion section was disappointing - focused on the creation of 3 million free consumers. I would hope the war was about more than that. Finally, many nuggets were hidden in the book or not discussed - for example, how did the labor movements in the north affect the politics ahead of the civil war?
January 1, 2026
While slavery flourished in the southern United States in the centuries before the Civil War, and Northerners increasingly theoretically stood against the "peculiar institution," northern manufacturers of "plantation goods" benefitted economically by making and selling the clothing and implements Southern plantations required for their laborers. Even those who supported emancipation were not above selling textiles to slaveholders. Seth Rockman weaves the history of their complicity via invoices, letters, advertisements, newspaper articles, and even an actual pair of russet brogans found in boxes of materials from the 18th century, with details on weaving, shipping, receiving payments, and distribution of goods both to stores in the south and within the plantations themselves.
February 19, 2025
This is an excellent examination of the ways in which Northern capitalism and Southern slavery were inextricably linked through economy and culture in the 19th-century United States. A staggering feat of research and critical analysis. Absolute masterpiece. If you're into American History at all, read this book.
March 22, 2025
Rockman argues that plantation goods facilitated a close connection between Northern manufacturers and Southern plantation owners. He demonstrates that these goods were active in promoting ideas about race. Interesting arguments about ideology. Some unnecessary elements, such as the over-analysis of gendered outcomes in a New England factory.
January 25, 2026
A fascinating history looking into the manufacture and sale of goods exclusively used by American slaves. Items include fabric, clothing. tools and even whips. The thesis here is that the Northern states where many people were linked to absolutism cast a blind eye to enjoying the financial benefits of the trade. Rockman uses a vast amount of primary source materials to build his case.
December 8, 2024
Last few chapters were definitely my favorite, focusing on enslaved people’s perspectives on textile production and imported goods, as well as the chapter on rural women’s contributions to the slave economy through outwork.
January 19, 2025
Very thorough, interesting, and readable study of the interconnectedness of Northern and Southern interests regarding slavery. Told through the lens of material culture, this book explores the widespread impacts slavery had on American workers, manufacturing, advertising, tariffs, and consumption.
April 18, 2025
Very much worth your time. Well-sourced and researched. Showed how Northern merchants were as tied to the Southern slave economy as slaveholders were, as well as how plantation goods helped shape what it meant to be enslaved.
Read
February 23, 2025Professor Rockman my guy
November 5, 2025
Decent. Wouldn't read again.
February 3, 2026
Bro lovedddd taking about ax measurements (this book is fireeeee)
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews