"Sharon Murphy's book is a powerful and unprecedented dive into the entangled history of banking and slavery in nineteenth-century America. Slaveholders developed credit and creditworthiness by using enslaved people as collateral, and this allowed them to undertake an endless array of projects. But Murphy further shows that this credit system grew and changed as banks sought new ways to realize their own profits and power. She demonstrates not merely how slavery was financed by banks but how banks were financed by slavery. By extension, everything banks enabled, not least the physical expansion of the United States itself, was also then literally indebted to that noxious institution"--

Sharon Ann Murphy is professor of history at Providence College.