The Lowest Freedom

Justin Leroy has produced an indispensable and dazzling book that will forever change our understanding of modern intellectual history. He reintroduces us to nineteenth-century Black thinkers whose incisive critique of the political economy of slavery and capitalism rivals that of the leading economists of their times—and ours. Indeed, they anticipated by two centuries the question we are asking ourselves today: Is genuine abolition possible under racial capitalism? For the answer, read this book. – Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical ImaginationJustin Leroy’s The Lowest Freedom is a landmark book in both the historical literature on the nineteenth-century United States and thinking about racial capitalism more generally. The next generation of scholars and perhaps even the next generation after that will use it as a trailhead and a point from which to orient their own work. – Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United StatesThrough its unique excavations of the Black radical tradition’s critiques of US freedom, The Lowest Freedom provides a radical rethinking of Black freedom and racial capitalism in the nineteenth-century United States. – Zach Sell, author of Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital

Justin Leroy is assistant professor of history at Duke University. He is coeditor of Histories of Racial Capitalism (Columbia, 2021).