On the American Left, a familiar idea has taken root: that slavery was not just one feature of the young republic’s economy but its actual engine, the true source of the wealth that later carried the United States into industrial preeminence. This argument, once confined to specialist debate, has since moved into the mainstream, most visibly through the New York Times’ 1619 Project, and it draws further support from a cluster of historians writing under the banner of the New History of Capitalism. These scholars argue that the productivity of enslaved labor and the credit markets built on slave-backed collateral were foundational to American growth rather than incidental to it.
