The Slavery Debates, 1952-1990: A Retrospective Book

During World War II, the United State's ideological position asserting races as fundamentally equal stood in sharp contrast to the reality of segregated American society. This contradiction, and the burgeoning civil rights movement, spurred young scholars to challenge the prevailing historical canon on American slavery. Rooted in racial stereotypes, it held that slavery, while inefficient and unprofitable, was overall socially benign. The ensuing "slavery debates" encompassed a reexamination of almost every aspect of American slavery and became one front in a battle waged over the place of cliometrics - the use of quantitative data and statistical methods to analyze historical problems. Economist and historian Robert William Fogel was at the forefront of the revisionists in the debates, and in this enlightening memoir he offers a personal account of the role cliometrics played in rethinking the economics of slavery and the South.

Fogel and his colleague Stanley Engerman were among those who led in applying cliometrics to the study of slavery in the United States. Their 1974 ground-breaking book, Time on the Cross, revealed slavery to be a profitable and efficient labor system, demonstrating that economic growth and technological progress were possible even in a deeply immoral order. Slavery ended not because of any inherent economic weakness but due to antislavery political tactics and ultimately war, and that antislavery struggle, Fogel argues, transformed American civilization. Initial accolades from the scholarly community soon turned to condemnation and eventually accusations that Fogel and Engerman were racists themselves. Even after thirty years, and a Nobel Prize ineconomics for Fogel, Time on the Cross remains one of the most fiercely debated works of U.S. history in the twentieth century.

Fogel chronicles all of these events as well as the emergence of a new generations of intellectual and political historians who questioned the progressive synthe