Professor Anthony C. Infanti, Life Fellow, released his new book, The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America. The book was published by NYU Press and was released on May 13, 2025. In the book, Professor Infanti details how tax law and taxation were used to dehumanize enslaved persons, taxing them alongside valuable commodities upon their forced arrival and then as wealth-generating assets in the hands of slaveholders.
He also examines how taxation proved to be another way of controlling enslaved persons, through its shaping of the composition of new arrivals to the colonies and through the funding of financial compensation to slaveholders for the destruction of their “property” to ensure their cooperation in the administration of capital punishment. On the other side, he also reveals how several colonies used the power of tax law as a means of curtailing the slave trade, showing how taxation can be used in the service of evil but also as a way to correct societal injustices.
Professor Infanti is currently the Christopher C. Walthour, Sr. Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and also holds a secondary appointment in Pitt’s Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program. He previously authored Tax and Time: On the Use and Misuse of Legal Imagination and Our Selfish Tax Laws: Toward Tax Reform That Mirrors Our Better Selves. Professor Infanti has received both the University of Pittsburgh Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award as well as an Excellence-in-Teaching Award from the graduating students at Pitt Law.
Find more information on his book here.