Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery
Plantation Goods tells the biggest stories of early American history through the most humble artifacts: woolen dresses stitched in Rhode Island for enslaved women in South Carolina to wear, for example, or shoes manufactured in Massachusetts for the use of enslaved people in Mississippi. By following these goods from the communities in which they were made (and especially South Kingstown) to the communities in which they were used, Plantation Goods rethinks the geography of slavery and freedom in the decades between American independence and the Civil War. The book poses questions that continue to preoccupy us in the age of the iPhone and fair-trade coffee: what are the moral, ecological, and political relationships linking consumers and producers across long distances? What does it mean to be “complicit"?
Seth Rockman is an 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.
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