Department of History

Seth Rockman is a historian of the United States focusing on the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. His research unfolds at the intersection of slavery studies, labor history, material culture studies, and the history of capitalism. 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. In December 2022, Rockman shared his research findings with the US House Financial Services Committee in live testimony. 

Rockman’s newest book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery, was published by University of Chicago Press in Fall 2024 and named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. The book won the 2025 Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, earned distinction as a finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize, and appears on the longlist for the Cundill Prize. A number of Rockman’s book events can be found on YouTube, including a conversation at the New York Public Library and a talk at the John Carter Brown Library. Rockman has spoken about the book on such podcasts as Drafting the Past and Sew What?

At Brown, Rockman sits on the faculty advisory board of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and leads their Slavery and Finance research cluster.  He published “The Dialectics of Racism and Repair” in the 2021 re-issue of the university’s influential Slavery & Justice Report. Rockman is a faculty affiliate of the William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance and regularly teaches a course on slavery and capitalism for the IE-Brown Executive MBA program. 

Rockman welcomes inquires regarding Brown’s doctoral program from students focused on the United States from the era of the American Revolution to the Civil War. Prospective students interested in Atlantic Slavery and the history of capitalism more broadly should not hesitate to contact Rockman by email. Rockman’s recent advisees have pursued dissertations on the politics of money in Jacksonian America; the hemispheric history of the American consular corps; New England women’s communities of care during the Revolutionary War; and the role of the New Bedford whalefishery in the rise of the American administrative state. Recent graduates include Ann Daly, Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, Alicia Maggard, Rebecca Marisseau, Sarah Pearlman Shapiro, and Simeon Simeonov.

Rockman’s teaching includes a graduate seminar on the global history of capitalism (which published an extensive bibliography in 2021), as well as undergraduate lecture courses (co-taught with Professor Philip Gould of the English Department) on the American Revolution and the Early Republic United States. Rockman offers such upper-division seminars as “Early American Money," as well as “The Problem of Class in Early American History.” He also teaches “A Textile History of Atlantic Slavery” as a seminar for students in their first semester of college.