Winner of the SHEAR Book Prize Honorable Mention, Avery O. Craven Award “Few books have captured the lived experience of slavery as powerfully.” ―Ari Kelman, Times Literary Supplement “[One] of the most impressive works of American history in many years.” ― The Nation “An important, arguably seminal, book…Always trenchant and learned.” ― Wall Street Journal A landmark history, by the author of National Book Critics Circle Award finalist The Broken Heart of America , that shows how slavery fueled Southern capitalism. When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an “empire for liberty” populated by self-sufficient white farmers. Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labor of slaves. River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reconsideration dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War. Walter Johnson deftly traces the connections between the planters’ pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets, and Southern schemes for global ascendency. Using slave narratives, popular literature, legal records, and personal correspondence, he recreates the harrowing details of daily life under cotton’s dark dominion. We meet the confidence men and gamblers who made the Valley shimmer with promise, the slave dealers, steamboat captains, and merchants who supplied the markets, the planters who wrung their civilization out of the minds and bodies of their human property, and the true believers who threatened the Union by trying to expand the Cotton Kingdom on a global scale. But at the center of the story are the enslaved people who pulled down the forests, planted the fields, picked the cotton―who labored, suffered, and resisted on the dark underside of the American dream. “Shows how the Cotton Kingdom of the 19th-century Deep South, far from being a backward outpost of feudalism, was a dynamic engine of capitalist expansion built on enslaved labor.” ―A. O. Scott, New York Times “River of Dark Dreams delivers spectacularly on the long-standing mission to write ‘history from the bottom up.’” ―Maya Jasanoff, New York Review of Books “With deep insights, original readings, expansive vision, and dramatic narratives, Walter Johnson reconfigures both the political economy of American slavery and the landscape of struggle in the slave South.” ― Steven Hahn, author of A Nation under Our Feet “ River of Dark Dreams is a unique, brilliant, and relentless critique of the sordid logic of American slavery as it unfolded on cotton plantations, aboard steamboats plying the Mississippi, and in toxic proslavery adventures that spilled across the country’s borders. The next generation of debates over slavery in the United States must wrestle with Johnson’s startling and profound insights.” ― Adam Rothman, author of Slave Country “Johnson’s book attempts something daring and bold. Instead of perpetuating the regularly compartmentalized treatment of American slavery and the global antebellum political economy, he follows the example of Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944) by bringing both together. He does this with an eye toward the enslaved on the ground, observing what they ate and produced, how they lived, how they were brutalized and died. Johnson is brilliantly attuned to the stories of the enslaved whose lives were coexistent with the cycle of production, who planted and harvested cotton but were at the same time commodities themselves, whose every biological function (reproduction, waste elimination) was an economic calculation.” ― Lawrence P. Jackson , Los Angeles Review of Books “ River of Dark Dreams is an important, arguably seminal, book… It is always trenchant and learned. And in highly compelling fashion, it helps us more fully appreciate how thoroughly the slaveholding South was part of the capitalist transatlantic world of the first half of the 19th century.” ― Mark M. Smith , Wall Street Journal “Johnson has written a book as big and bold as the Mississippi River valley region it surveys. In it, he maps the various interlocking connections among slavery, land surveys and speculation, steamboats, capital and credit, cotton planting, and more to show how President Jefferson’s promise of an ‘empire for liberty’ to come from the Louisiana Purchase became instead a place of people grasping for advantage, gouging for wealth, and gaining through will and brutality… An essential book for understanding the dynamism and direction of American economic ambitions and the human and environmental costs of the physical, poli