Synopses & Reviews
A Nobel Prize winner's personal account of one of the deepest conflicts among twentieth-century historians. In the 1950s, young scholars spurred by the burgeoning civil rights movement challenged the prevailing historical canon on American slavery, which 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 W. Fogel was at the forefront of the revisionists in the debates, and in this enlightening memoir he ponders the role cliometrics played in rethinking the economics of slavery and the South. Fogel chronicles the controversy surrounding his and colleague Stanley Engerman's 1974 groundbreaking book, Time on the Cross, one of the most fiercely debated works of U.S. history in the twentieth century. Using cliometrics, the authors 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. Fogel also recounts the emergence of a new generation of intellectual and political historians who questioned the progressive synthesis. Both personal and informative, The Slavery Debates offers a valuable glimpse into one of the most interesting chapters of the historical profession.
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. [73]-97) and index.