History Minute (097): The beating heart of the American economy

Elizabeth Kennedy writes: 

This nascent capitalism of 1619 evolved into a highly efficient system capable of powering an industrial revolution. By 1860, cotton—grown on Indigenous lands expropriated using militarized violence—comprised 59% of American exports. It was, as the saying went, “king.” Other countries could not compete with a nation that codified a caste of workers as non-human and legalized violence as a management technique. As the sociologist and ethnographer Matthew Desmond observes, “Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above.” Human bondage was the “beating heart” of this new American economy, pumping wealth to Southern planters, raw materials to Northern mills and British industrialists, and capital to European bankers.

https://www.promarket.org/2023/02/01/to-build-an-equitable-economy-we-must-understand-capitalisms-racist-heritage/

Elizabeth Kennedy is an Associate Professor of Law and Social Responsibility at the Sellinger School of Business and Management at Loyola University Maryland. Her research focuses on the evolution and application of law and policy that advances racial equity, environmental justice, and worker power. A former union organizer, she earned her J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, served as a labor policy advisor to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and practiced law with the New York firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP.