Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Emily Eisner asked me: What would you teach if you were to teach an entire course on slavery and the shadows it cast? So I dusted out my "unfreedom" file from the "courses I have never taught" box, & updated the topics:

Ancient & medieval slavery & serfdom

1. Hierarchy and patriarchy to 1000 BC
   • Inequality, slavery & the poisoned chalice of agriculture
   • Horses, wheels, chariots, & nobles
   • High patriarchy & polygyny
2. Slavery and serfdom in the early classical world
   • Managing the household
   • “Slaves by nature”
   • Slavery & empires
3. Inequality, domination, and the market in the classical efflorescences
   • War booty
   • Plantation & mine slavery
   • Slaves “skilled in literature & music”
4. Did slavery prevent a Hellenistic or Roman industrial revolution?
   • Gaining wealth and power in the classical world
   • Merchants, princes, & oligarchs
   • Culture & work: keeping your hands clean & getting them dirty
5. From slavery to serfdom: late antiquity & after
   • Manumission & its opposite
   • Honestiores & humiliores
   • Barbarians, thralls, knights, & raids
   • High feudalism
6. Slave raids & slave trades in the Old World 500-1500
   • Slaves from Ireland, England, & Russia
   • Slaves from France, Italy, Ukraine, & the Caucasus
   • Slaves from Africa
7. Slaves on horses
   • The creation of Islamic polities
   • Sultans, amirs, clans, & slaves
   • Eunuchs & households
   • Mamelukes & janissaries
8. The Black Death & the end of the first serfdom, 1300-1600
   • Serfdom on the eve in 1345
   • The class struggle in western Europe
   • Ending feudal tenures & privileges
9. The Commercial Revolution & the coming of the second serfdom, 1300-1900
   • Cash crops & domination
   • Nobles, czars, & cossacks
   • Ending serfdom in eastern Europe
10. Conquistadores & enslaving Amerindians
    • Genocide
    • Forced labor
    • Long-term political-economy consequences for Latin America

Modern & capitalist slavery

1. The Atlantic slave trade, 1500-1780
   • Guns in Africa
   • Sugar islands and the middle passage
   • Calories & luxuries to Britain & elsewhere
2. Slavery & cotton
   • Who profited from cotton slavery?
   • Westward expansion & the Slavepower
   • The financial calculus of emancipation
3. Consequences of slavery for Africa
   • The political economy of African slave trades
   • Nathan Nunn’s correlations
   • African growth retardation
4. Modes of New World slavery
   • “Like a poor third cousin”
   • Industrial & craft slavery
   • Plantation slavery under the slave trade
   • Plantation slavery after the slave trade
   • Selling people south and west
5. The political & moral economy of a slave society
   • Thomas Jefferson
   • Cassius Clay
   • Roger B. Taney
   • Jefferson Davis
   • Abraham Lincoln

Post-slavery North American “herrenvolk” democracy

1. Abolitionism, abolition, & “reconstruction” 1820-1880
   • The Selling of Joseph & Uncle Tom’s Cabin
   • Wartime “necessity”
   • 40 acres & a mule—not
2. Jim Crow 1865-2020
   • The corrupt bargain of 1876
   • “Separate but equal”
   • Disenfranchisement & disempowerment
3. “Race science” & eugenicism 1850-2020
   • “Survival of the fittest”
   • “Improving the race”
   • The need to believe in racial hierarchies
4. Civil rights 1920-2020
   • The appeal to American ideals
   • The opportunity of 1965
   • The corruption of the Republican Party
5. The Great Migration & the Great Redlining 1920-2020
   • Other immigrant ghettoes in America
   • How the Black inner city was different
   • Long-term consequences of the great redlining
6. Mass incarceration & policing
   • White fear & flight
   • Crack & incarceration
   • “Aggressive policing” & Black Lives Matter
7. The “declining significance of race”? 1970-2020
   • Roads to upward mobility
   • The coming of the second gilded age
   • The mockery of "equal opportunity"

Other dimensions of unfreedom

1. Master & servant
   • The duties of a servant
   • The duties of an employee
   • Employer monopsony power
2. The arrival of modern feminism
   • Being female in the agrarian age not for sissies
   • Eating for two & “women’s work”
   • The demographic transition
   • Institutions & opportunities
   • Gender & identity
3. Wage slavery
   • Marx’s vision
   • Forcing people to enslave themselves
   • The Polanyian view of the market
4. Gilded ages
   • “I can hire half the working class to shoot the other half”
   • Pinkertons & porters
   • Mass media & the public sphere
   • Monopoly capitalism