Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction to students
- Introduction to instructors
- Contributors
- I Introduction
- II Colonial and early national economy
- III Slavery and servitude
- 4 “The rise and fall of indentured servitude in the Americas: An economic analysis”
- 5 “The anatomy of exploitation”
- 6 “Slavery: The progressive institution?”
- 7 “Explaining the relative efficiency of slave agriculture in the antebellum South”
- IV The South since the Civil War
- V The rise of American industrial might
- VI Populism
- VII Women in the economy
- VIII The Great Depression
- Appendix: Basics of regression
- Glossary
- Name index
- Subject index
6 - “Slavery: The progressive institution?”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction to students
- Introduction to instructors
- Contributors
- I Introduction
- II Colonial and early national economy
- III Slavery and servitude
- 4 “The rise and fall of indentured servitude in the Americas: An economic analysis”
- 5 “The anatomy of exploitation”
- 6 “Slavery: The progressive institution?”
- 7 “Explaining the relative efficiency of slave agriculture in the antebellum South”
- IV The South since the Civil War
- V The rise of American industrial might
- VI Populism
- VII Women in the economy
- VIII The Great Depression
- Appendix: Basics of regression
- Glossary
- Name index
- Subject index
Summary
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Historical Perspectives on the American EconomySelected Readings, pp. 177 - 225Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995