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Date June 17, 2025
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The history behind Brown historian’s Pulitzer finalist ‘Plantation Goods’

By Georgia Sparling

Inspired by his scholarship and teaching at Brown, Seth Rockman uncovered an unknown facet of pre-Civil War history that he detailed in an acclaimed book.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — In his much-lauded book “Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery,” Seth Rockman offered a compelling insight on antebellum history by exploring a little-known link between the North and South: the Northern business of making, selling and marketing clothing, tools and even whips to Southern plantations.

Rockman, an associate professor of history at Brown University who will be promoted to full professor of American history on July 1, began research for the book after contributing to the 2006 Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, a groundbreaking report that publicly examined the University’s historical ties to the transatlantic slave trade.

Book cover of Plantation GoodsAlmost two decades and countless hours of research later, “Plantation Goods” was named a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in history, which Rockman learned while teaching a class at Brown in May. When students returned from a mid-class break, he casually told them of the honor.

“Everyone was yelling, everyone was clapping,” recalled Isabel Cole, a first-year history Ph.D. student and Rockman’s advisee. “I was so glad we all got to celebrate that moment with him. It was so great to witness.”

It was appropriate that Rockman received this news during a class because “Plantations Goods” is, at heart, a Brown book, he said.

“So much of this book was driven by my students,” Rockman said. “They said I was missing out if I limited my research to paper records, they insisted on recognizing economic questions as moral questions and they pushed me to think harder about the relationship of consumer goods to racial categories. This book is about the kinds of interactions between undergraduates and graduate students, and Brown’s institutional culture.”

Published in November 2024 by the University of Chicago Press, the book represented the culmination of years of hands-on research to unearth information about the physical materials that shaped Northern involvement in the slavery economy, Rockman said.

“I wanted to tell a story that would get us from New England to the South — from the makers to the users and wearers of these goods and all the different stops on the way — and finally come to the plantation where you’ve got the competing interest of slaveholders butting up against the quest of enslaved people to contest horrific forms of exploitation,” he said.

Weaving historical accounts, drawing present-day lessons

Rockman started his research a few blocks from Brown’s campus at the Rhode Island Historical Society.

shoe
Seth Rockman examining a shoe for enslaved children made in the 1830s in Massachusetts. Photo courtesy of Seth Rockman 

“They have this enormous collection of materials: Thousands of letters from slaveholders, Southern merchants and sales agents, all of whom are reporting on the ground, reporting from Louisiana or from Georgia on who’s using these things, how are they using them and what do they have to say about them,” Rockman said.

He also visited seven Southern states to understand how Northern goods were received and the impact they had on plantations. What emerged from his research is a Northern economy propped up, in part, by sales to Southern plantations. 

“Seth is at the forefront of thinking about how the 19th century U.S. must be understood in terms of the symbiosis of the North and South,” said Professor of History Ethan Pollock. “His work shows that there was a single, integrated economy.”

In his book, he spotlights factory owners Isaac and Rowland Hazard, brothers who turned their family’s small Rhode Island textile mill into an empire by capitalizing on their Southern connections and designing functional clothing. Each year, either Isaac or Rowland would spend six months traveling across the South to meet with enslaved people and slaveholders. Entrepreneurs like the Hazards balanced the feedback they received from Black laborers with the reality that slaveholders viewed laborers as chattel. There was even a marketing ploy that labeled some products as race specific, Rockman said.

“This category of goods emerges in the textile trade called ‘negro cloth,’” Rockman said. “It doesn’t refer to anything other than a textile intended for Black people to wear. This is part of the way that race is made in America.”

As part of his research, Rockman learned to weave the same type of fabric using the same techniques. A swatch of his woven material appears on the cover of “Plantation Goods” and shows how thorough Rockman’s research was, Pollock said.

“ Seth is at the forefront of thinking about how the 19th century U.S. must be understood in terms of the symbiosis of the North and South.
”

Ethan Pollock Brown University Professor of History

“To write the book he wanted to write, he had to think about what it means to labor, what it means to produce certain cloth, what might that have meant to someone working in the North,” Pollock said. “I admire his willingness to take his time, talk to people, to learn new skills.”

How people in the North felt about contributing to the slave economy is something that wasn’t in the historical records. Many small, financially depressed towns benefitted from making plantation goods, but whether or not they saw themselves as bolstering slavery is conjecture.

“Imagine a Rhode Island farm girl weaving, throwing the shuttle back and forth. Where does her mind wander to? Is she thinking about who is responsible for why her back hurts? Is she imagining herself as doing God’s work as basically helping to alleviate the suffering of the slave by making warm endurable clothing?” Rockman posed. “Whether they’re casting aspersions on Black people or think they’re doing good, what is most certain is that none of this work is unfolding in some kind of moral or ethical vacuum.”

That’s where “Plantation Goods” becomes particularly relevant to a modern audience, he said. For example, everyone who reads the book does so while surrounded by hundreds of things that would never pass fair-trade certification, Rockman noted.

“This is a book not just about the past but about our present and our future,” said Rockman, whose previous books include “Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery and Survival in Early Baltimore” and the co-edited volume “Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development.”

Looking back at the years it took him to complete “Plantation Goods,” Rockman says there were times when it seemed that the book would never be finished.

“When all was said and done, I feel lucky to have been able to write what I wanted to write and say what I wanted to say,” Rockman said. “And that was because I had wonderful support from Brown and wonderful support from my editor.”

In addition to being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, “Plantation Goods” won the 2025 Philip Taft Labor History Book Award and was also a finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize and the Hagley Prize from the Business History Conference.

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