Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of ...

This brilliant collection of essays by Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese covers numerous aspects of the spread of merchant capitalism in the colonial period of American history. They see the American experiment as begun in dread of modernity and as part and parcel of the most extreme early capitalist reactionary movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Far from intending to provide the cutting edge of historical development, many of the early colonists were trying to recreate a reactionary paradise before the Fall they saw occurring in European society.