Seminar On Slavery And The Rise of Capitalism In SC

The public is invited to a virtual seminar on Sunday, March 13, to hear Dr. Justene Hill Edwards discuss her research on how market capitalism arose in colonial South Carolina. The event will be held 4-6pm on Zoom and moderated by Dr. Robert Greene II, lead faculty for the Modjeska Simkins School for Human Rights.

Dr. Hill Edwards is an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2015. She is an historian of African-American history, specializing in the histories of slavery and American capitalism. Her scholarship investigates slavery’s role in the long history of economic inequality in America, focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries. Always highlighting the experiences of enslaved and formerly enslaved people, Hill Edwards explores the complicated relationship between economic freedom and political freedom for people of African descent in the United States.

Dr. Hill Edwards is the author of the recently published Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina, acknowledged by the Economic History Association as "a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on capitalism and slavery in the United States."

Unfree Markets explores the economic lives of enslaved people, not as property or bonded laborers, but as active participants in their local economies. It provides the fullest account to date of the strategies that enslaved people used to create their own networks of commerce, from the colonial period to the Civil War.

Hill Edwards’ next book, The Economy of the Freedpeople, is a history of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, known as the Freedman’s Bank, founded in 1865.