The Ledger and the Chain

Regular price €38.99
Regular price €39.99 Sale Sale price €38.99
A01=Joshua D. Rothman
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Alexandria Natchez
antebellum
Author_Joshua D. Rothman
automatic-update
black history
business commerce
capitalism
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HB
Category=HBJK
Category=HBTB
Category=HBTS
Category=NH
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Category=NHTS
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
economic
enslaved people
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
Language_English
Louisiana
Mississippi
PA=Available
plantation
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
reparations
slavery
softlaunch
Virginia

Product details

  • ISBN 9781541616615
  • Weight: 750g
  • Dimensions: 154 x 236mm
  • Publication Date: 27 May 2021
  • Publisher: Basic Books
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

Our Delivery Time Frames Explained
2-4 Working Days: Available in-stock

10-20 Working Days
: On Backorder

Will Deliver When Available
: On Pre-Order or Reprinting

We ship your order once all items have arrived at our warehouse and are processed. Need those 2-4 day shipping items sooner? Just place a separate order for them!

In The Ledger and the Chain, prize-winning historian Joshua D. Rothman tells the disturbing story of the Franklin and Armfield company and the men who built it into the largest and most powerful slave trading company in the United States. In so doing, he reveals the central importance of the domestic slave trade to the development of American capitalism and the expansion of the American nation.

Few slave traders were more successful than Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who ran Franklin and Armfield, and none were more influential. Drawing on source material from more than thirty archives in a dozen states, Rothman follows the three traders through their first meetings, the rise of their firm, and its eventual dissolution. Responsible for selling between 8,000 and 12,000 slaves from the Upper South to Deep South plantations over a period of eight years in the 1830s, they ran an extensive and innovative operation, with offices in New Orleans and Alexandria in Louisiana and Natchez in Mississippi. They advertised widely, borrowed heavily from bankers and other creditors, extended long term credit to their buyers, and had ships built to take slaves from Virginia down to New Orleans. Slavers are often misremembered as pariahs of more cultivated society, but as Rothman argues, the men who perpetrated the slave trade were respected members of prominent social and business communities and understood themselves as patriotic Americans.

By tracing the lives and careers of the nation's most notorious slave traders, The Ledger and the Chain shows how their business skills and remorseless violence together made the malevolent entrepreneurialism of the slave trade. And it reveals how this horrific, ubiquitous trade in human beings shaped a growing nation and corrupted it in ways still powerfully felt today.

Joshua D. Rothman is professor of history and chair of the department of history at the University of Alabama. He is the author of two prize-winning books, Flush Times and Fever Dreams and Notorious in the Neighborhood. He lives in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, Alabama.