When we talk about slavery in Early America, we often focus on plantations: their large, fertile fields, their cash crops, and the people who labored on those fields to produce those cash crops under conditions of enslavement.
But what about the ordinary objects that made slavery work? The shoes, axes, cloth, and hoes? What can these everyday objects reveal about the economic and social systems that sustained slavery in the early United States?
Seth Rockman, a Professor of History at Brown University and author of Plantation Goods: A Material History of Slavery, which was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History, joins us to rethink how Northern manufacturing, labor, and commerce were entangled with the southern slave economy.
About the Show
Ben Franklin’s World is a podcast about early American history.
It is a show for people who love history and for those who want to know more about the historical people and events that have impacted and shaped our present-day world.
Episode Summary
Seth Rockman is a Professor of History at Brown University where he studies the period between the American Revolution and the United States Civil War. His research focuses on the intersection of slavery studies, labor history, the history of capitalism, and material culture studies. He’s known for his award-winning book, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore, and his new book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of Slavery, a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History.
During our investigation, Seth reveals:
1. How New England Manufacturers produced the clothing, tools, and textiles used by enslaved people in the South.
2. The surprising ways Northern laborers and Southern plantations were connected through everyday goods.
3. What everyday objects like hoes, shoes, and axes can teach us about resistance, race-making, and the economics of slavery in the early United States.
What You’ll Discover
- The everyday goods of slavery
- Connections between New England factories and laborers to slavery
- How Seth chose which everyday plantation goods to study
- The archive of enslaved peoples’ goods
- Applied history
- Factories in early New England & how they operated
- Roland Hazard & Co. or Peacedale Manufacturing Company
- Finding and creating a market for plantation goods
- Tension between better products & slave resistance
- Growing pains of factories producing inconsistent goods
- How inconsistent goods created more work for enslaved people
- Whether New Englanders understood that their factory work supported slavery
- How early Americans used plantation goods to define and make race
- The hemispheric spread of American plantation goods & ideas about race
Links to People, Places, and Publications
1776 in Context Question
In your opinion, what role did the American Revolution play in the development of slavery in the early United States and the economic infrastructure that early Americans built to support it?
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Bonus: Lonnie Bunch: History & Historians in the Public
🎧 Episode 084: How Historians Read Historical Sources
🎧 Episode 244: Shoe Stories from Early America
🎧 Episode 281: The Business of Slavery
🎧 Episode 390: Objects of Revolution
🎧 Episode 406: Threads of Power
Support Our Work
Love what you hear on Ben Franklin’s World? Support the show and help us keep history accessible, independent, and deeply researched. Make a tax-deductible donation at benfranklinsworld.com/donate.
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