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A Pulitzer Prize finalist in History, this eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history 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 nineteenth 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 laid 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 nineteenth 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.

In his On the Glory of Athens, Plutarch complained that the Athenian people spent more on the production of dramatic festivals and “the misfortunes of Medeas and Electras than they did on maintaining their empire and fighting for their liberty against the Persians.” This view of the Athenians’ misplaced priorities became orthodoxy with the publication of August Böckh’s 1817 book Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener [The Public Economy of Athens], which criticized the classical Athenian dēmos for spending more on festivals than on wars and for levying unjust taxes to pay for their bloated government. But were the Athenians’ priorities really as misplaced as ancient and modern historians believed?

Drawing on lines of evidence not available in Böckh’s time, Public Spending and Democracy in Classical Athens calculates the real costs of religion, politics, and war to settle the long-standing debate about what the ancient Athenians valued most highly. David M. Pritchard explains that, in Athenian democracy, voters had full control over public spending. When they voted for a bill, they always knew its cost and how much they normally spent on such bills. Therefore, the sums they chose to spend on festivals, politics, and the armed forces reflected the order of the priorities that they had set for their state. By calculating these sums, Pritchard convincingly demonstrates that it was not religion or politics but war that was the overriding priority of the Athenian people.