Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery . By Seth Rockman

Seth Rockman's highly anticipated Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery brings into direct and inescapable proximity New Englanders’ burgeoning wealth from an industrious and industrial revolution, white southerners’ profits through slavery, and enslaved African Americans’ lived experiences to reconstruct the economic, political, ethical, and material entanglements that bound north and south between roughly 1800 to 1860. At the center are “plantation goods,” a category of export items produced by overwhelmingly white workers for entrepreneurs in towns across New England through a combination of factory and outwork. These included textiles (“Negro cloth”), ready-made clothing, brogans (shoes), axes, and hoes. These artifacts were united by their low quality and price point, standardization, and intended use by enslaved people on southern plantations, as well as their purchase by white enslavers who were not the primary users. Rockman's narrative follows plantation goods from production in New England, to distribution by firms in New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, to their purchase by white southern enslavers, and finally to their use by enslaved people. Rockman thus leads the reader seamlessly between white New England women weaving and sewing ready-made clothing in their homes to enslaved Black women on plantations weaving and sewing clothing for family and enslaved community members.Rockman convincingly reveals plantation goods to be an underexplored but vital component of the “infrastructure” of slavery that facilitated nationwide economic growth while simultaneously distancing many economic actors from slavery's immorality. New Englanders “offshored their slaveholding,” reaping benefits without enslaving people directly. White slaveholding southerners, meanwhile, “outsourced . . . the manufacture of crucial supplies” to concentrate on profitable agricultural crops (4). Yet, just as important, Rockman illuminates how plantation goods bound these groups through a shared culture of anti-Black racism and white supremacy in which the material qualities of things associated with enslaved people—the coarseness of “Negro cloth,” the unwieldy weight of “Kentucky” axes, and the awkward fit of brogans—became supposed proof of Black inferiority. By bringing attention to the importance of mundane artifacts in forming and perpetuating racism, the book demonstrates the power of things to accomplish vital political and cultural work.Rockman utilizes his depth of knowledge as a renowned labor and economic historian to situate plantation goods within a precarious yet complex and quickly evolving entrepreneurial landscape in both north and south. Cumulatively the book elucidates how this overlooked category of goods contributes to historians’ understanding of the centrality of slavery to the United States’ economic development—orienting the text to a larger literature on racial capitalism. Rockman develops an ethical strand of questioning throughout: given the active anti-slavery movement around them, what did New England workers know about those who used the goods they made, and did they care? Some of the most compelling sections address the moral contortions through which white northerners and southerners condemned one another while incorporating enslaved people and plantation goods within narratives of white benevolence, philanthropy, thrift, and victimization (with comparisons to slavery rallying both white factory workers in the north demanding better wages and white planters in the south facing tariffs).Given the interregional scale, range of economic activities, and differing regimes of labor that the book encompasses, it is not surprising that at points Rockman veers into replicating the regional types that 19th-century authors and painters developed: the keen-eyed, fast-paced Yankee businessman; the socially obsessed, slow-to-pay southern planter. The book's primary sources—letters between southern planters and manufacturers, ledgers of New England textile firms, accounts of New England stores—are, as Rockman rightly notes, “a textual archive that has rarely figured in the study of Southern slavery and its material culture” (6). That northern-centered archive, however, might have contributed to the book's tendency to leave underexamined the differences in power and motivations between small and large-scale, established and new, planters, as well as regional variations in a south that stretches from Virginia to Texas.The book's focus on plantation goods also proves too limited a scope to fully encompass enslaved people's complex material worlds and thus Black creativity, skill, and joy. While Rockman explores resistance through self-fashioning, enslaved people's material actions register primarily through protest—of shoddy cloth, ill-fitting shoes, sub-par tools—which shaped enslavers’ demands on New England entrepreneurs and thus, he argues, established enslaved people's role as product developers. Through plantation goods enslaved people and enslavers negotiated a “social contract”: the biannual distribution of goods a constant in a world where violence nevertheless perpetuated unfreedom. Concentrating on enslaved people as primarily “involuntary consumers” who “constructed a material culture largely from goods they themselves did not choose,” eclipses their voluntary consumer activities and thus fails to account for the extensive knowledge of goods they gained as purchasers and sellers in both “informal” and “formal” economies (7). By framing enslaved people's remaking of clothes—through patching and dying, their inventive wearing of brogans, and their incorporation of purchased accessories and textiles within fashions that included issued clothing—as negotiated use rather than as acts of making in their own right, the book supports the idea of involuntary consumption as always secondary to New England makers.Making a greater material turn might have unsettled the assumptions behind Rockman's contention that “those making plantation goods back in New England had far greater possibilities for personal liberation and self-making than did the ‘involuntary consumers’ using them” (7). Although material goods appear fully as evidence in three tantalizing “interludes,” Rockman attributes his reliance on the “overflowing” textual archive to the relative paucity of surviving items, rendering the material world a site of absence (157). Yet the rich archaeological record, the interpretation of singular surviving artifacts, and creative strategies for approaching material absence, all offer potential pathways to make material evidence a consistent part of this story. Indeed, isolated moments yield great payoffs, as when Rockman draws out the connections between enslavers’ preference for “negro cloth” consisting of “twilled woolen fabrics in narrow widths”—not possible on power looms but ideal for handlooms—and the persistent home weaving families of New England (101). Here materials unequivocally matter.Despite these missed material opportunities, Rockman's book will compel readers to think deeply about the question: “Where does slavery end?” As it draws convincing yet troubling parallels between outsourcing and remote production past and present, Plantation Goods asks us to consider the moral and political implications of our own status as producers and consumers.