Calvin Schermerhorn

Calvin Schermerhorn (born 1975) is an American historian who specializes in the study of slavery, capitalism, and African-American inequality. Educated at Saint Mary's College of Maryland, Harvard Divinity School and University of Virginia, he teaches at Arizona State University.

Research In 2012, he annotated a newly recovered slave narrative by a man named Henry Goings, who Schermerhorn called "a brilliant observer of places, events and human nature. He also was a gifted writer." His 2015 The Business of Slavery was about "how specific decisions and adaptations of individual slavers to changing conditions helped create an American empire of slavery," and "belies the alleged moral divide between the North and the South by reconstructing interregional and global networks of finance, charting the voluntary and coerced movement of people from northern to southern states, and highlighting the southern business ventures of northern capitalists." A review by Peter Kolchin commented, "In arguing that slavery was capitalist, Schermerhorn neatly evades the quandary that tormented Fogel and Engerman of how such an evil system as slavery could be so efficient, and he does so by seeing capitalism itself as being, by nature, rapacious and exploitative." In 2019, following a spike in interest in the slave traders Franklin & Armfield, Schermerhorn observed that they were men who bragged "about raping enslaved people" but for decades if not centuries, standard American histories "let them off scot-free."

Schermerhorn's Unrequited Toil was described as "highly readable" and "a masterful fusion of the latest scholarship."

Schermerhorn was awarded a Fulbright in 2021 to continue his study of "Slavery, Capitalism, and Inequality in the Anglophone Atlantic World" in the United Kingdom.

Selected works