Time on the Cross brings to a close an historiographic cycle that began with the publication of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips' American Negro Slavery (1918). According to Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, the material conditions under which plantation slaves lived and worked compared favorably to those of free workers in the agriculture and industry of the time. Slavery, then, was not a physically harsh, labordegrading regime. But neither was it an unprofitable system irrationally supported by paternalistic planters. It was good business practice in a highly competitive industry to care for and seek to make the most productive use of the competent and industrious workforce – particularly when abusive treatment of so valuable an asset would be at the economic expense of the slaveowners themselves. The system that had grown up around the holding of human chattels was not riddled with “internal economic contradictions” or verging upon “collapsing under its own weight.” On the eve of the Civil War, slavery was a commercially vigorous and highly efficient mode of agricultural production, and the slave plantations formed the leading sector in the rapidly developing regional economy of the antebellum South.

Obviously, this is an ambitious and imposing book. Unlike most works of the new economic history, it has been featured in Time, Newsweek and many other popular journals and newspapers.