Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Belknap, 2013.

This
book places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation
that extended across oceans. It traces the connections between planters’
pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets, and Southern schemes for
global ascendency and looks at the *intertwining*
themes of slavery, capitalism, and imperialism*. The “flush times”—the*
concomitant booms in the land market, the cotton market, and the slave
market—reshaped the Mississippi Valley in the 1830s. At the core of this
expansion was slavery. Slaves were central to cultivation of the land (bales
per acre per hand) and the production of the commodity. Thus, capitalism and
slavery were tethered and interdependent (*slave*
racial capitalism*). There was a corresponding interdependence between the*
market mechanisms that made cotton the cornerstone of the political economy,
and the enslaved whose labor produced that cotton for the market. Metrics of
exchange in Liverpool influenced the labor practices of Louisiana and the labor
practices of Louisiana shaped the practice of the global market.
This meant that “the commercial standards of the wider economy” (i.e. the value
of cotton at any given moment in any given market) could shape the “labor
practices of Louisiana,” (i.e. the number of lashes a slave might receive for
dropping a bale of cotton or trying to escape, 110). Slaveholders, in effect, were
commercially minded and understood slavery to be a direct link to the global
economy. For example, Pro-slavery political economists (Matthew Fontaine Maury)
looked to free trade – to a relation with the global economy unmediated by the
territorial sovereignty of the United States. Their commercial interests also
drove slaveholders imperial interests in Cuba and Nicaragua (Narciso López’s
1849-51 raids on Cuba and William Walker’s 1857 conquest of Nicaragua) and
started the movement to re-open the slave trade with West Africa. All of this
was to maintain the market, control it volatility, and create a haven for
restless nonslaveholding whites. Johnson thus contends that the build up of the
Civil War was more than just a sectional conflict. The South was more concerned
with Cuba, Venezuela, and Africa than Kansas and Missouri. It’s not so much
that the South was seceding from, but what they were *seceding to: an expansive Caribbean slave racial capitalism*.

Key - Chapter 9: The
sale of cotton reflect the growing credit market, but also an insurance
industry to protect crops and packaging that made it commercial viable
(fetishization) and made it suitable for speculation. *In all of this, the slaveholders played a key role: they stood between*
the schedule of the money market and the cotton trade demands of their
obligation and the natural rhythms of the seasons, between hypothetical paper
and real cotton. All of which were uncontrollable factors and, thus, they
translated the imperatives of time-scaled commercial instruments into the
astringent temporality of the lash: slave labor. *Slaves were capital, both*
in the sense that it produced the cotton and also could be sold.

See also: Walter Johnson (1), Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert, Leslie Harris

Also: Extends temporal and geographical framework of the "market revolution" and connects capitalism with slavery (slave racial capitalism)