Presenting the fourth William R. Rhodes ’57 Ethics of Capitalism annual lecture:
How did business ethics come to be understood as something different from plain-old ethics? This lecture locates that departure in the middle decades of the nineteenth-century United States, specifically to the frictions that emerged from inter-regional commerce between Northern manufacturers and Southern slaveholders. The politics of slavery and abolition functioned in surprising ways to construct the business sector as a space where different rules applied. The outcome was a new notion of the market as a space functioning most efficiently when pesky concerns of morality did not intrude.
Q & A to follow moderated by Mark Blyth, Director of the Rhodes Center for International Economics & Finance.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Seth Rockman is a historian of the United States focusing on the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. His research unfolds at the intersection of slavery studies, labor history, material culture studies, and the history of capitalism. Rockman’s latest book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (2024), is an eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor.
