The Fabric of Capitalism

What can we learn about the history of capitalism by following slavery’s supply chains?

A brogan made by Little & Co. in the nineteenth century. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection)

Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery
by Seth Rockman
University of Chicago Press, 2024, 496 pp.

On April 24, 2013, Rana Plaza, an industrial building in Bangladesh, collapsed, killing 1,134 workers and injuring more than 2,000 others. The day before, large cracks had been discovered in the building. Businesses on the lower floors closed, but garment production continued on the upper floors. The building, which housed five factories supplying companies like Primark and Mango, collapsed in mere minutes. The responses of global brands took only a little longer. As the news broke around the globe, the Italian firm Benetton Group issued a press release distancing itself from the tragedy, declaring that “none of the companies involved are suppliers to Benetton Group or any of its brands.”

Scraps of fabric pulled from the rubble told a different story. As rescue workers dug through the wreckage for survivors, they found labels for a number of brands, including Benetton. Executives backtracked. Statements were updated: a “one-time order” had been “shipped out of one of the manufacturers involved several weeks prior to the accident,” but the offending subcontractor had since been “removed from our supplier list.” In tangled supply chains, global fashion brands conveniently did not know the conditions under which their garments were produced. Fragments of cloth became the key to holding corporations accountable.

Seth Rockman’s recent book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery, uses a set of swatches from a very different setting to tell a story with striking parallels. The book explores the history of the clothing, shoes, and tools produced and sold by Northern entrepreneurs to Southern enslavers. It is a history of global supply chains, and of what connects and divides the producers and consumers at each end. Unlike at Rana Plaza, those most exploited in this supply chain were the “consumers”—the enslaved people who wore the rough fabrics and ill-fitting shoes supplied by New England merchants. Yet the parallels are striking, both in how distance enabled many to overlook exploitation and how material artifacts have forced us to remember. Writing about a nineteenth-century fabric sample, Rockman’s words might have described the Rana Plaza tragedy: “a small piece of woolen cloth . . . communicate[d] the intricacies of long-distance commerce in its fibers. Where words failed, the sample spoke.”

It has become commonplace to say that Northern textile mills wove slave-grown cotton. Yet until Plantation Goods, far less has been written about the manufactured goods that made the return trip: shoes, axes, hoes, and cloth purchased by enslavers for use on plantations. Even as cotton planters supplied fiber to New Engl...