| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Gavin Wright. Slavery and American Economic Development. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 162. $25.00.

For more than thirty years, the economics of slavery in the antebellum South—and elsewhere—has elicited sharp debate. Rejecting traditional views of slavery as backward and inefficient, Robert W. Fogel and his followers have argued not only that slavery was profitable and efficient, but also that it enabled the southern economy to grow more rapidly than the northern economy during the two decades before the Civil War. But if the profitability of slavery (to slaveowners) now seems incontrovertible, most non-economic historians of slavery, and some economic historians as well, have been unwilling to discard the argument that slavery retarded southern economic development and impeded southern "modernization." Perhaps the most influential of these dissenters among economic historians has been Gavin Wright. The book under review, an "extensively revised" (p. ix) version of the Walter L. Fleming Lectures that Wright delivered at Louisiana State University in 1997, both builds upon and extends his earlier critique of the prevailing paradigm.

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