Publications:
Publications:
How did white Southerners defend slavery? My book project The Science of Slavery challenges the interpretation that proslavery ideology was rooted in a feudal or ancient republican worldview, and instead shows how the proslavery fusion of science, state power, and bureaucracy presaged twentieth-century state racism. I examine a group of intellectuals--the proslavery technocrats--who appealed to the nascent social sciences to defend bondage between the 1820s and 1860s. I show how this faction of proslavery Southerners shifted to social scientific analysis after the 1820s, and institutionalized slavery in correspondingly sophisticated forms. Throughout the Antebellum era, the proslavery technocrats gradually transcended the small family farm, Biblical authority, or the plantation patriarch, and instead appealed to mortality rates or population growth. Even though slavery was an ancient institution, the institutions and modes of thought that white Southerners grafted on to it were not.
More broadly, The Science of Slavery reinterprets the Confederate secession as prefiguring twentieth-century state racism. Fearing the social pathologies they attributed to free labor in the American North and Europe, proslavery technocracy theorized a vision for capitalism beyond the liberal variant: "a coordinated economy" based on state power, race and the plantation. This presaged the bureaucratic forms of state racism that scholars typically locate much later during the twentieth century. Today, we are accustomed to the liberal visions for capitalism of the post-WWII era—broadly defined by what scholars call neoliberalism—and the proslavery technocrats underscore the importance of non-liberal visions for capitalism in history. This history is worth returning to in the present, as intellectuals depart from capitalism in its liberal form.