Rockman is the author of Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (2008) and co-editor, with Sven Beckert, of Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (2016). Scraping By won the OAH's Merle Curti Prize, the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, and the H.L. Mitchell Prize from the Southern Historical Association. Rockman spent the 2016-17 year at re:work, a research institute on global labor history at the Humboldt University in Berlin. 

In his talk for UCSB, Rockman explores the relationship between New England labor and how the goods they produced linked them to Southern slave plantations.