Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
The William R. Rhodes Center

Seth Rockman - The Role of Financial Institutions in the Horrors of Slavery and the Need for Atonement

Seth Rockman house committee testimony

Wednesday, December 7, 2022

10:00am – 5:00pm

Online only

Watch webcast

Assistant professor of History, Seth Rockman will be one of five scholars offering testimony at The House Committee on Financial Services, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing entitled, “An Enduring Legacy: The Role of Financial Institutions in the Horrors of Slavery and the Need for Atonement, Part Two” on Wednesday, December 7, 2022, at 10:00am E.T. in room 2128 of the Rayburn House Office Building.
 
Prof Rockman will offer "observations of and/or findings from research regarding how large financial institutions and their predecessors conducted business connected to slavery, whether and to what extent financial institutions that financed and profited from slave labor should take actions to redress their participation in and ill-gotten benefits from the slave trade, the valuation of slave labor, and the lasting harms that slavery had on the descendants of enslaved people, including economic, financial, and employment inequities.”
The event will be live-streamed on the Committee’s webpage here.
 
For more information about the hearing, here is a document regarding the committee’s work to date.


Seth Rockman’s research continues to unfold at the intersection of slavery studies, labor history, material culture studies, the history of capitalism, and the early republic United States. Rockman’s earlier work— the award-winning Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (2009) and the co-edited volume Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (2016)— sought to better understand the relationship of slavery and capitalism in the American past, and he continues to pursue these issues in a nearly-completed book-length study called “Plantation Goods and the Material History of American Slavery.” Rockman was recently the Gordon Cain Fellow at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia and one of the co-organizers of the 2022 conference, Let’s Get to Work: Bringing Labor History and the History of Science Together. 

For more information see his profile in History here: https://www.brown.edu/academics/history/people/seth-e-rockman