The Long Argument: Capital vs. Labor · Episode 1 of 12 · 14 min
The Oldest Bargain: Work Before the Factory
Long before the factory, every society had answered who controls work and who keeps the surplus. The episode walks four pre-industrial answers in order: the guild, the wage statute, the indenture, and chattel slavery, where a human being was converted entirely into capital. It defines the series' terms and asks whether capital against labor drives history.
Who's who
- Abraham Lincoln+7 more episodesHeld that labor is prior to and independent of capital
- Eric FonerHistorian whose Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men defined free-labor ideology's account
- Sheilagh OgilvieHistorian who argues guilds were rent-seeking cartels
- S. R. EpsteinHistorian who argues guilds transmitted skill and technology efficiently
- Elizabeth IQueen whose Parliament enacted the Statute of Artificers in 1563
- Edmund MorganHistorian whose influential reading links Bacon's Rebellion to racialized slavery
Where it happens
- Virginia+3 more episodesColony of Jamestown, indentured servitude and early slave law
- Point Comfort, Virginia+1 more episodeWhere captive Africans landed in 1619
Timeline
- 1347-1351Black Death kills a large share of Europe, making labor scarce and wages surge
- 1351England's Statute of Labourers tries to freeze wages at pre-plague levels
- 1563Statute of Artificers puts wages and apprenticeship under state control
- 1619Captive Africans landed at Point Comfort, conventional start of slavery in British North America
- 1662Virginia enacts partus sequitur ventrem, making slavery heritable
- 1676Bacon's Rebellion unites former servants and some enslaved people
Still debated
Historians dispute whether guilds were cartels or engines of skill transmission, and whether the Statute of Artificers suppressed wages or ordered a paternalist society. Morgan's thesis on race and class, and the claim that slave wealth exceeded all other capital, are contested.
Connected episodes in other series
Dred Scott: The Ruling That Helped Cause the Civil WarThe Least Dangerous Branch? · Episode 4Also features Abraham Lincoln
The Presidents Who Inherited Andrew Jackson's PlaybookAs Long as the Grass Grows · Episode 10Also features Abraham Lincoln
Three Hundred Dollars: How Money Bought a Civil War ExitGreeting: America and the Draft · Episode 3Also features Abraham Lincoln
Manifest Destiny and the Road to WarTake the Land, Not the People · Episode 1Also features Abraham Lincoln