Slavery, Profitability, and the Market Process

The most significant recent development in the study of economic history has been the investigation of the profitability of American slavery made famous in Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross. Their book not only rewrote the history of antebellum slavery, it ushered in a completely new methodology of economic history: the cliometric revolution. The book was also very well received by the media, something extremely rare in an academic study.