It's now widely understood that the fullest expression of nineteenth-century American capitalism was found in the structures of chattel slavery. It's also understood that almost every other institution and aspect of life then was at least entangled with-and often profited from-slavery's perpetuation. Yet as Sharon Ann Murphy shows in her powerful and unprecedented book, the centrality of enslaved labor to banking in the antebellum United States is far greater than previously thought. Banking on Slavery sheds light on precisely how the financial relationships between banks and slaveholders worked across the nineteenth-century South. Murphy argues that the rapid spread of slavery in the South during the 1820s and '30s depended significantly on southern banks' willingness to financialize enslaved lives, with the use of enslaved individuals as loan collateral proving central to these financial relationships. She makes clear how southern banks were ready-and, in some cases, even eager-to alter time-honored banking practices to meet the needs of slaveholders. Her book provides an essential examination of how our nation's financial history is even more intimately intertwined with the dehumanizing institution of slavery than scholars have previously thought.