"This book is well worth reading for scholars of banking history, slavery, and antebellum institutions generally. The author has clearly done her homework in various archives, and the details associated with individual cases are often fascinating."

EH.net

"Murphy’s meticulously researched and clearly written study examines the role of banks in what she terms the concomitant 'financialization' of human property and the southwestern expansion of plantation economies in the mid-19th-century South. . . . The lives of enslaved persons caught in the web of the capitalist marketplace haunt the pages of Murphy's excellent work."

Choice

«“A tremendous accomplishment. We cannot fully understand the history of banking in the United States without reckoning with Murphy’s important findings. Banking on Slavery sets the stage for new understandings of the history of capitalism and its relation to slavery.”»

Claire Priest, author of Credit Nation: Property Laws and Institutions in Early America

"In a pathbreaking account of the way Americans financed slavery, Murphy connects the vast sweep of that tragedy to the banking that made it possible. Detail by dollar detail, she exposes the structures that transmuted enslaved people into assets and collateral, building white wealth all the while. A powerful--and chilling--book."

Christine Desan, author of Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism

"More surprising has been the lack of historical analysis of the banking firms and financial practices that underwrote the expansion of slavery in the antebellum United States. In her groundbreaking new book, Banking on Slavery, historian Sharon Ann Murphy corrects this glaring omission."

Sean Vanatta, Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation