“This Slavery Business Is a Horrible Thing”: The Economy of American Slavery in the Lives of the Enslaved

This article examines the business of American slavery from perspective enslaved people. It draws narratives fugitivity and interviews with formerly to interrogate how they understood imperatives in antebellum South. argues that peoples’ economic knowledge was cultivated through violence inherent slavery, their ideas about banking understanding entrepreneurialism. Building on current literature capitalism this shows slavery's brutality shaped commerce nineteenth-century America.