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The Declaration of Independence, which founded the United States as an independent nation, was written in 1776—the same year that Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, the most prominent early treatise on international capitalism. Whether that represents a coincidence remains an ongoing debate. What’s clear, however, is that over the past two and a half centuries, the United States emerged as a slave economy, a free labor economy, a debtor nation, a creditor nation, and ultimately a powerful empire.

How central was slavery to U.S. economic history? Why has the United States lacked a strong tradition of socialism? Is there something distinct about the role of immigration in U.S. economic history?

The Declaration of Independence, which founded the United States as an independent nation, was written in 1776—the same year that Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, the most prominent early treatise on international capitalism. Whether that represents a coincidence remains an ongoing debate. What’s clear, however, is that over the past two and a half centuries, the United States emerged as a slave economy, a free labor economy, a debtor nation, a creditor nation, and ultimately a powerful empire.

How central was slavery to U.S. economic history? Why has the United States lacked a strong tradition of socialism? Is there something distinct about the role of immigration in U.S. economic history?

Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: Was slavery peripheral or central to American economic life at the beginning of the country’s history—and is that traceable today as well?

Adam Tooze: The short answer is surely yes. I mean, what was slavery if not an economic institution? The perversity of slavery consists precisely in the reduction of human beings to economic commodities. All the other issues associated with slavery—political, moral, civil—result from that original obscenity and that original act.

And in the historiography, this question is absolutely central, apart from anything else, because it explodes as an economic question into American history in the 1860s in the form of the Civil War. Because the Civil War is about—it isn’t about anti-racism. There are anti-racist abolitionists, and there are racist slaveholders. But it’s fundamentally a political economy question about whether as new states in the west are added to the United States, they’re added as slave labor or free labor states. And to put it crudely, the central project of challenging the slave institutions is to limit the extension of unpaid, coerced chattel slavery to further than the states in the South to which it already pertains, right? That’s the whole thing. And it’s only once that logjam is broken that then the railway buildout and the full integration of the rapidly expanding western territories can be accomplished. So no, it’s absolutely central.

And this question of how historians have read slave institutions has been absolutely fundamental and has rocked back and forth over the last 120, 130 years, from an original kind of liberal preconception that slavery was a backward, fossilized institution that had to be overturned by the more progressive North and that then unleashed rapid economic growth, to a revisionist reading that set in in the mid-20th century really which emphasized the fact that slavery could in its own terms be economically rational, to a really doubling down on that in the most critical versions of recent historiography, which insists that the foundation of American prosperity and American wealth is the violence of slavery, the racial violence of slavery, the anti-Black racism of slavery. All else follows from that initial moment, which, you know, the dating of the 1619 Project points to the fact that it wasn’t just free people coming from Western Europe that settled the United States, but that slavery came. And it’s changed........

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