Dartmouth Events

Moderated by Doug Irwin, John Sloan Dickey Third Century Professor in the Social Sciences in the Department of Economics at Dartmouth College. Co-sponsored with the Political Economy Project.

Historians are showing a renewed interest in the relationship between the origins of American capitalism and slavery. Some have contended that the surplus generated by slavery was key to the development of industrial capitalism. However, economists have been more skeptical about such a link. This interdisciplinary panel will provide different perspectives on this fascinating debate.

Panelist Bios:

Sven Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University, and researches and teaches the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the history of capitalism, including its economic, social, political and transnational dimensions. He just published Empire of Cotton: A Global History, the first global history of the nineteenth century’s most important commodity. The book won the Bancroft Award, The Philip Taft Award, the Cundill Recognition for Excellence and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times named it one of the ten most important books of 2015. His other publications have focused on the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, labor, democracy, global history, and the connections between slavery and capitalism. Together with a group of students he has also worked on the historical connections between Harvard and slavery and published Harvard and Slavery: Seeking a Forgotten History.

Trevon D. Logan is the Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics at The Ohio State University and is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is the youngest-ever president of the National Economics Association and was awarded the 2014 Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching His research mainly focuses on economic history, including studies of African American migration, economic analysis of illegal markets, the economics of marriage transfers, and measures of historical living standards. He has held visiting appointments at Princeton University’s Center for Health and Well-Being and at the University of Michigan, where he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research. 

Alan L. Olmstead is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Davis. He has authored several articles on slavery and southern economic development and is currently writing a book on slavery with Paul W. Rhode. His 2015 book with Rhode, Arresting Contagion, analyzes how federal disease-control policies redefined the boundaries of American federalism and states’ rights and vastly expanded federal regulatory powers.  Professor Olmstead is an Editor-in-Chief of the 5,000 page Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition.

Caitlin Rosenthal is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to Berkeley, she was the Newcomen postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Business School. Her research explores the development of quantitative management practices and seeks to blend methods and insights from business history, economic history, and labor history.  Her current book project, tentatively titled Accounting for Slavery, uses plantation record books to explore the complex relationship between slavery and capitalism in American history. The dissertation on which the book is based won the 2013 Krooss prize for the best dissertation in business history.