"This work is a history of slavery, capitalism, and the law that not only reframes how we understand the commodification of enslaved people, but also makes a significant methodological and moral argument for how historians should seek to make sense of the lived experiences of enslaved people in the antebellum United States"--

Edward E. Baptist is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. He earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of Creating an Old South, which won the 2003 Rembert Patrick Best Book in Florida History Award from the Florida Historical Society, and the co-editor of New Studies in the History of American Slavery.