Human Cattle

Human Cattle forces readers to reckon with the violence at the root of American white supremacy, but also with the survival and resistance that brought about slavery; it also created a culture that conflicted with America’s deepest dreams of freedom.

Slavery helped finance the Industrial. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide.

The expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, capitalist economy. Until the Civil War, the most important American economic innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from enslaved African Americans. The United States controlled of the world market form cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, became a wealthy nation with global influence.