When we talk about slavery in Early America, we often focus on plantations: their large, fertile fields, their cash crops, and the people who labored on those fields to produce those cash crops under conditions of enslavement.
But what about the ordinary objects that made slavery work? The shoes, axes, cloth, and hoes? What can these everyday objects reveal about the economic and social systems that sustained slavery in the early United States?
In this episode of the Ben Franklin’s World podcast, we explore plantation goods and how these everyday objects sustained slavery in the early United States. You can listen to the podcast here.
Guest Seth Rockman is a Professor of History at Brown University where he studies the period between the American Revolution and the United States Civil War.
His research focuses on the intersection of slavery studies, labor history, the history of capitalism, and material culture studies. He’s known for his award-winning book, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore, and his new book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 2024), a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History.
Rockman reveals how New England manufacturers produced the clothing, tools, and textiles used by enslaved people in the South; the surprising ways Northern laborers and Southern plantations were connected through everyday goods; and what everyday objects like hoes, shoes, and axes can teach us about resistance, race-making, and the economics of slavery in the early United States.
Ben Franklin’s World is an award-winning podcast. It’s for people who love history and for those who want to know more about the historical people and events that have impacted and shaped our world.
Each episode features an interview with a historian who shares their unique insights into our early American past.
Read more about slavery and New York State here.
Illustration after the original in the collection of the Weston Historical Society
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