Wall Street and the Colonial Slave Market
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Transcript
Wall Street’s name is unusually literal. In 1653, Dutch authorities ordered a defensive barrier across the northern edge of New Amsterdam. Enslaved Africans were among the workers who helped build the wall and other colonial infrastructure.
The street later became associated with finance, but slavery belongs directly in its geography. From 1711 to 1762, New York operated an official market near Wall Street and the East River where enslaved people could be hired and sold. The market was not the beginning or end of slavery in New York; it was one highly visible institution within a broader system.
By the eighteenth century, New York had one of the largest enslaved populations among northern colonial cities. Enslaved men and women worked in households, docks, workshops, farms and construction. The city’s merchant economy was also connected to Caribbean plantation systems through trade in sugar, molasses and other commodities.
Modern Wall Street often represents abstract finance — numbers moving faster than human beings can see. Colonial Wall Street reminds us that markets can also make human beings into assets.
The irony is severe but not accidental: one of the world’s great symbols of capitalism developed on a street whose early labor and commerce included slavery. That does not reduce New York finance to one origin. It prevents the origin from being sanitized.