Slavery, Abolition, and the Antebellum Origins of Modern Business Ethics

The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs program on Global and International History presents “Slavery, Abolition, and the Antebellum Origins of Modern Business Ethics” with Seth Rockman, the George L. Littlefield Professor of American History and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Brown University.

How did business ethics come to be understood as something different from plain-old ethics? This lecture locates that departure in the middle decades of the nineteenth-century United States, specifically to the frictions that emerged from interregional commerce between Northern manufacturers and Southern slaveholders. The politics of slavery and abolition functioned in surprising ways to construct the business sector as a space where different rules applied. The outcome was a new notion of the market as a space functioning most efficiently when pesky concerns of morality did not intrude.

In-person event.  For more information about the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs programs and events, visit here.

Organized by Don Wyatt.