Seth Rockman
Associate Professor of History:
History
Phone: +1 401 863 2819
Phone 2: +1 401 863 2819
Seth_Rockman@brown.edu
Seth Rockman is a specialist in Revolutionary and Early Republic United States history, with a focus on the relationship of slavery and capitalism in American economic and social development. The histories of race, labor, and social welfare are central to his research. Rockman supervised undergraduate research for the University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, and is now conducting his own research on the relationship of Northern manufacturing to the plantation economies of the South.
Biography
Born in Indiana and raised in San Francisco, Seth Rockman received a BA from Columbia University and completed his PhD at UC-Davis. After several years on the faculty of Occidental College in Los Angeles, Rockman joined the Brown History Department in 2004. His 2009 book Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore has won the OAH's Merle Curti Prize, the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, and the H.L. Mitchell Prize from the Southern Historical Association. Rockman is currently writing a new book about shoes, shovels, hats, and hoes manufactured in the North for use on Southern slave plantations. Additionally, he and Sven Beckert are co-editing Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development for University of Pennsylvania Press.
Interests
Trained broadly as an early Americanist, I am interested in three historical trajectories that converged in the late-eighteenth century: the emergence of capitalism in the Atlantic World, the rise of New World Slavery, and the articulation of liberal conceptions of human agency and personal freedom. Integrating economic, labor, and cultural history, my work explores the social experience of economic change in the decades surrounding the American Revolution. In 2003, I published Welfare Reform in the Early Republic: A Brief History with Documents with Bedford Books. Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore came out in 2009 from Johns Hopkins University Press.
About Scraping By: Imagine Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, circa 1818— that is, a very material look at how low-end workers found and kept jobs, navigated underground economies, employed clever strategies to keep households afloat, and what happened when they failed. Scraping By situates enslaved mariners, white seamstresses, Irish dockhands, free black domestic servants, and native-born street-sweepers in the same labor market, on the same jobsites, and ultimately within the same political economy of early republic capitalism. As a "labor history of unskilled labor" and one of the first studies to consider such diverse workers side-by-side, Scraping By explores how race, sex, nativity, and legal status determined the opportunities and vulnerabilities of working families. This study focuses on Baltimore between 1790 and 1840, when this boomtown was the nation's third-largest city, had the nation's largest population of color, and (perched at the boundary of North and South) saw its number of free and enslaved workers grow simultaneously. Sources include construction site payrolls, employment advertisements, almshouse records, court petitions, and speeches from the nation's first "living wage" campaign.
Scraping By is fundamentally a study of capitalism and class in the post-Revolutionary US. In advance of the book, I have published several stand-alone essays on 1) integrating slavery into histories of capitalism, and 2) the viability of class analysis for the early republic United States. This work suggests that at a time when issues of globalization, free trade, corporate accounting, and fair labor practices dominate the headlines, economic history is too important to be left to traditional economic historians. Eschewing social-scientific models of human behavior and market mechanisms, I propose a history of American capitalism that recognizes the cultural and social forces that constitute "the market" and shape a multiplicity of human responses to economic stimuli.
My new book project-- under contract with University of Chicago Press-- focuses on objects manufactured in the North for use on plantations in the American South. At the intersection of business history and material culture studies, I consider the multiple meanings of hoes, blankets, and machetes as they moved great distances and fell into different hands. These artifacts illuminate issues of slave resistance, abolitionism, business ethics, technological innovation, and Southern nationalism, while also situating entrepreneurs, factory laborers, planters, and slaves in the same narrative of economic development. By following "plantation goods" from production to consumption, it is possible to see the simultaneity of opportunity and oppression in American history.
In April 2011, Sven Beckert (Harvard) and I convened a three-day conference entitled "Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development." After a keynote address by President Ruth Simmons, seventeen scholars presented new research and engaged in vigorous discussion with commentators and the audience. Revised versions of these essays are now being prepared for publication in a volume to appear in the Early American Studies series at University of Pennsylvania Press.
Awards
Merle Curti Prize in Social History, Organization of American Historians, 2010
Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, 2010
H.L. Mitchell Prize, Southern Historical Association, 2010
Joseph Arnold Prize from the Baltimore City Historical Society, 2006
Phi Beta Kappa, Columbia University, 1993
Affiliations
Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
Organization of American Historians
American Historical Association
Friends of the McNeil Center
Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture Associate
Labor and Working Class History Association
Teaching
My courses are broad in their scope and approach, with particular attention to situating early American history in the historiography of the early modern world. Recent undergraduate seminars have included "The Problem of Class in Early American History" and "Poverty and Social Welfare in the Western World, 1500-1900." Lectures include "Capitalism, Slavery, and the Economy of Early America" and "American Cultural History, 1789-1865." My favorite course is "Slavery and Historical Memory in the United States," a First-Year Seminar. I am now developing a graduate seminar and an undergraduate lecture course on the History of Capitalism, 1500-Present.
Funded Research
AY 2009-10: Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies (to be held 2010-11)
Fall 2007: Research Fellow, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University.
Fall 2007: Research Fellow, Institute for Southern Studies, University of South Carolina
Spring 2007: National Endowment for the Humanities Long-term Fellow, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
AY 2001-2002: Program in Early American Economy and Society Postdoctoral Fellow, Library Company of Philadelphia.
2001: Gilder-Lehrman Fellow, New-York Historical Society.
Web Links
- Scraping By-- JHUP
- 2009 Scraping By Conference
- Scraping By-- Amazon
- Slavery's Capitalism Conference
- Paper Technologies Talk, September 2012
- Bard Talk, October 2011
- NYT Capitalism Article
