Soul by Soul

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Soul By Soul
Soul by Soul: Life inside in the Antebellum Slave Market by Walter Johnson tries to trace the human past events of the slave trade in the United States. Johnson designed this as a complement to and a measured criticism of the economic and the demographic view of the slave trade. The book focuses on the 19th Century of the New Orleans and slave market in that place. On top of other workings of slavery, the slave markets lowered the dignity of human beings to that of commodities such that humans had prices. Particularly this book mostly based its interest on the stories of slave showrooms that held over 100 slaves and how appraisals, back-rooms dealings, accountings and other activities were taking place.
Johnson attributes slave trade to the mercantilism in which people were imported and stocked in the metropolitan centers where they were to add profits before their sales. The profits benefited the state-sponsored companies and the individual slave dealers. Johnson placed the enslaved African-Americans as his center of analysis; he moved his focus on slave market from the aggregate of numerical measures to the alarming daily commerce in people. Soul by Soul tends to indict the antebellum south using a different approach. It meticulously dismantles the slaveholders’ planet. Johnson (1999) shows that the market was the foundation of the frightening life the planters, as the slaves kept imagining whom could be bought by …