Eric Herschthal, writing in The Daily Beast, April 24, 2015:

The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 establishes its author, Calvin Schermerhorn, as among the best practitioners within this new group of historians. While Walter Johnson, Seth Rockman, Edward Baptist, and Sven Beckert have recently made the same core argument, Schermerhorn exposes the links between capitalism and slavery with remarkable clarity, economy, and force. By focusing on the most successful firms involved in the domestic slave trade, Schermerhorn shows how the building blocks of modern capitalism—from innovations in marketing and technology, to the development of sophisticated financial instruments—fueled slavery’s expansion throughout the South. The possibility of bloodless abstraction is saved by his emphasis on the devastating human cost.

Frank J. Byrne, writing in the Civil War Book Review, November, 2015:

The thread of the slave trade, Schermerhorn argues, reveals its centrality to the innovations in finance, technology, and transportation that made a modern capitalist system possible in the United States. In short, that the utter commodification of slaves made their enslavers, along with their financial partners in the North, forbearers of the swashbuckling businessmen of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In at least two respects The Business of Slavery builds upon Schermerhorn’s first book, Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South (2011). First, both studies focus upon the economic dimensions of slavery in the Chesapeake region. The Business of Slavery, however, goes well beyond the upper South by detailing the many connections enslavers built between the upper and lower South through the slave trade. Second, in both works Schermerhorn deftly employs case studies of slaves and their enslavers to illustrate how this trade in flesh helped drive the growing capitalist economy in the antebellum United States.

[Schermerhorn] argues convincingly that interstate slave traders—at least the successful ones—were early adopters and innovators who were quick to employ state-of-the-art modes of transportation, take advantage of government support, and create new financial instruments to facilitate their business operations. In that regard, they did more than traffic slaves from one region to another; they made markets more efficient, fostering the growth of American capitalism itself.

Calvin Schermerhorn’s analysis on slavery and American capitalism adds a layer of complexity to our understanding of how slave traders, financiers, and slaveholders manipulated complex financial instruments to profit from their traffic and ownership of human chattel. If one thinks that the crash of worldwide financial markets is a thing of our modern reality, one only needs to examine antebellum American finance to be disabused of that idea. Investors on both sides of the Atlantic bought mortgage-backed securities—similar in theory to the explosion of complex financial products that played a role in tanking the American economy in 2008. Yet, during the antebellum period, instead of packaging financial products based on houses and other real estate, investors sought mortgage-backed securities based on human property.