Recent work in the economic history of slavery has increasingly challenged what might be called the ‘labor theory of slavery’–the idea that the value of enslaved people for their enslavers can be primarily explained by their role as industrial laborers. Occupying an unstable position between chattel and real property, slaves could be collateralized, hypothecated, inherited, and strategically positioned within kinship structures in ways that linked household organization directly to expanding systems of credit and finance. In light of this history, it has become more and more untenable to explain the durability of slave power primarily by reference to the profitability of industrial commodities like cotton, sugar, and tobacco. Rather, it depended on the capacity of slaveholding households to function as dynastic units: to consolidate assets, manage reproduction and inheritance, secure political influence, and transmit wealth and authority across generations.

Despite some important recent interventions by scholars like Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers and Patrice Douglass, these dynamics remain undertheorized. Often, their significance is treated only negatively, as an illustration of the limits of labor-centered accounts of slavery and capitalism. At the same time, dominant theories of modern wealth and power tend to presuppose a model of accumulation centered on the production and exchange of commodities, marginalizing the household and the intergenerational transmission of wealth and power as secondary or pre-modern concerns. Within such frameworks, slave power appears as an anomaly or determinate negation, rather than as a phenomenon that calls for a different theory of property, kinship, and political economy—one in which household-based, dynastic accumulation is understood to be central rather than peripheral.

This panel invites papers around the following or related questions:

• How did the enslaved person’s position within the household—as belonging to but not in the family—shape their valuation as property and asset?
• In what ways did slaveholding households operate as dynastic institutions, enabling intergenerational accumulation, inheritance, and political power beyond the logic of commodity production?
• How did legal distinctions among chattel, real, and “real-adjacent” property emerge from, and reinforce, household-based strategies of accumulation?
• How should histories of credit, banking, and finance be rethought when enslaved people are treated as inheritable household assets rather than as labor inputs?
• What alternative theories of wealth and power become possible when slavery is approached as a constitutive case of household-centered accumulation?

Contributions engaging empirical examples drawn from law, finance, or history are especially welcome insofar as they bear directly on the household, kinship, and intergenerational dynamics of slave power.