River Of Dark Dreams By Walter Johnson: An Analysis

In the early twenty-first century, capitalism has cemented itself as the near-universal mode of social organization, and aside from certain regional and cultural variations, one can easily argue that the shared feature of humanity at this stage the unity that comes from being subject to capitalism; as capitalism registers all forms of difference imbalance into commodity, it serves to unite the globe by quite literally putting a price tag on everything. The contemporary ubiquity of capitalism makes it easy to imagine that the phenomenon itself is trans-historical, a universal structure inevitably emerging from human interaction. However, to accept this notion is to accept capitalism's own claims regarding the universality of commodification instead of finding a historical basis. In reality, when considered in

In his book River of Dark Dreams, Walter Johnson highlights this very issue during his quest to determine whether one might call the slave owners of the antebellum United States capitalists. Johnson recounts a disappointed open letter written in response to the quality of cotton bales coming into Liverpool from the American South, wherein the author claims that the low quality “has, from carelessness or otherwise, increased to such an extent” that sometimes entire shipments were found to be ruined, mislabeled, or otherwise unsatisfactory (Johnson 252). In response, Johnson suggests “'from carelessness or otherwise': the adjudication of the were-they-capitalists question has generally hinged on the interpretation of phrases such as this,” because historically delineating capitalism requires divining the purpose behind certain changes in economic practice (Johnson