History Commons^™

The World The Liberal Capitalists Made (Book Review), Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Review of the book, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South by James Oakes. New York: Knopf, 1990.

Slavery and Freedom pursues its thesis with dogged energy. "Southerners took their definition of freedom from the liberal capitalist world which produced them and of which they remained a part," Oakes argues, "and this could only mean that southern slavery was defined as the denial of the assumptions of liberal capitalism."