Walter Johnson (historian)

His first book, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market was published by Harvard University Press in 1999. The book won several prizes: the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize; the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner and Avery O. Craven Prizes; the Southern Historical Association’s Francis B. Simkins Prize; the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic’s SHEAR Book Prize; and the Thomas J. Wilson Prize from Harvard University Press. It was also a selection of the History Book Club.

Johnson based Soul by Soul upon the records of the Louisiana Supreme Court, the nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, slaveholders’ personal records, and the economic documentation produced by the trade itself. He developed the book over years, beginning with ideas he explored first in a seminar on Southern History taught by Nell Irvin Painter. He enlarged that through research and made it the topic of his 1995 Princeton Ph.D. dissertation.

In this book, Johnson took up and engaged with many of the themes which had occupied historians of slavery in the thirty years before it was published. The book was among the first in the historiography of slavery in the United States to place the question of capitalism and the market at the heart of its investigation of slavery. By demonstrating the extent to which slaveholders' identities were embodied in their slaves, it also explored the master-slave dialectic and the relationship between slaveholding households and the slave market. By following slaves’ efforts to forge human connections amidst the violent dislocation of the slave trade, it provided an account of the ability of "the slave community" to reproduce itself over time and space. It explored slaveholders' gendered fantasies about the slave market, describing the questions they asked and the examinations they made in the slave market. In this way, it investigated the daily reproduction of racist ideas about medicine, management, and sexuality in the institution that was at the heart of the slaveholding economy. By recovering traces of slaves' efforts to shape their own sales, it altered the central symbol of slavery's brutality by placing it in a history of opposition, resistance, and manipulation. In noting the vulnerability of slaveholders' identities, which were dependent upon slaves for their performance, Johnson sought to explain the extraordinary violence that characterized all of antebellum slavery.

Johnson published an article titled "On Agency" in the Journal of Social History in 2003. It is a historiographical and theoretical consideration of the notion of "agency" central to a large body of scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It is not, as it is sometimes understood to be, a blanket condemnation of the writing of "history from the bottom up," but rather a call for a more critical attention to the terms in which that history is written. “Agency,” Johnson argues, has come to aggregate too many different sorts of actions under one heading, thus losing the ability to distinguish between different sorts of material contexts, cultural framings, and political purposes. "On Agency," is a critique of the crypto-liberal philosophical premises of progressive historiography, and a call for what the historian Richard White termed a more "radical" approach to the writing of history.

Johnson's article "The Pedestal and the Veil" was published in the Journal of the Early Republic in 2004. The piece develops a consideration of Marx's treatment of cotton and slavery in the first volume of Capital into a critique of the orthodox analytical separation of “slavery” and “capitalism” into separate stages of economic development. The piece suggests that, while the nineteenth century developed a hard-and-fast ideological distinction between the two which has made its way into the work of many subsequent historians, in historical fact slavery and industry were so deeply intertwined that they should be considered as differentiated aspects of a single economic system.

River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom was published by Harvard University Press in 2013. In it, Johnson seeks to empirically substantiate some of the conceptual arguments made in his articles from the preceding decade, as well as to resituate the historiography of nineteenth-century slavery in the history of the global economy of the nineteenth century. Where much of Johnson's earlier work had been framed around the consideration of various notions of historical time, River of Dark Dreams is a book about space: the material space of the landscape of the cotton South, the economic space of the Atlantic World, and the imagined space of white supremacy and pro-slavery imperialism. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013) won the 2013 SHEAR Book Prize and received an Honorable Mention for the 2014 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians. It was also a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013.

While Johnson's work is often described as an example of the "New History of Capitalism," Johnson himself rejects that label. He emphasizes his indebtedness to a historiographical tradition dating back to W. E. B. Du Bois's 1899 The Suppression of the African Slavery Trade to the United States of America and, especially, Du Bois's 1935 Black Reconstruction, and especially to Du Bois's emphasis on the ineluctably racial character of capitalism, and on the experience and historical action of working people, especially African American working people. Among his principal scholarly influences, Johnson cites Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, Nell Irvin Painter, Robin D. G. Kelley, David Roediger, George Lipsitz, Daniel Rodgers, Richard White, Lisa Lowe, Adam Green, and Stephanie Smallwood. Writing at length in the Boston Review, Johnson has recently invoked the models of Du Bois and Cedric Robinson in proposing that the historiography of slavery be reframed around the idea of "racial capitalism."

• John Lauritz Larson; Michael A. Morrison, eds. (2005). Whither the Early Republic: A Forum on the Future of the Field. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-1932-6.