State of the Field: A New Historiography for the Old South? Slavery and Capitalism, White Elites and Enslaved Blacks.

In this sense, capitalism centered on cotton production was, in the minds of NHC scholars, slavery's capitalism.[16] The appearance of Desmond's essay in I The 1619 Project i gave the NHC viewpoint broad visibility and a measure of authority to a wide readership. Desmond's "low road" to capitalism clearly ran through slavery, and he argues that the United States remained on the "low road" to capitalism long after emancipation.[15] As a body of scholarship, the NHC emphasized the global economic and political role of southern slaveholders in building a new, and arguably the first, truly global capitalist economy. As a general pattern, the older seaboard states approved concessions, in terms of voting rights and the nature of representation, to their state's more egalitarian forces while keeping protection of property, and especially property in slaves, in place.[34] Once across the Appalachian range, most newer states moved aggressively to democratize state politics as much as possible, opening voting rights to all white males, democratizing the apportionment of the state legislatures, and generally extending more political voice to all white males. Coclanis expresses similar disenchantment with NHC conclusions, noting that while slavery in the American South "was an abomination", Desmond, "taking his cues from the New Historians of American Capitalism", misrepresented American capitalism "in order to render modern financialization", and all its foibles, a "lineal descendent" of the financial dynamics of slavery's capitalism. [Extracted from the article]

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