A strong case can be made that the golden age for the discipline of economic history occurred in the third quarter of the twentieth century, and that the ultimate manifestation of its importance in the world of ideas and the broader society came with the 1974 publication of Robert W. Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. The work not only caught the attention of academic scholars, but was even discussed in the popular media, with author Fogel appearing on the Today show and major newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek running stories.
The Historical Setting
To be sure, the timing was perfect for a major work on slavery. The foundational Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954) Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools had occurred just two decades earlier, unleashing a torrent of both political and scholarly activity around the treatment of blacks in American society, including significant civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965. Racially motivated rioting exploded in the 1960s. The historical antecedent of all the racial tension, of course, was slavery, and scholars were churning out new academic works in elevated numbers given the heightened public interest.
Discussed in greater detail below, in Time on the Cross Fogel and Engerman argued that slavery was a highly efficient profitable enterprise, that the South was generally flourishing economically, and that the slaves were treated reasonably well and had a standard of living comparing favorably with some northern white industrial workers. Yet the Fogel and Engerman findings regarding slavery’s profitability and the South’s prosperity were not new nor even overly controversial with many economic historians of that era.
To be sure, in the first half of the twentieth century southern historians like Ulrich B. Phillips (1905, 1929) had asserted that slavery was becoming increasingly unprofitable—after all, the price of cotton (the leading crop harvested by slaves) was trending downward over time, while the price of slaves themselves was trending upward. Yet traditional historians like Kenneth M. Stampp argued that slavery was generally a profitable institution years before Fogel became a major scholar and at least a decade before he and Engerman seriously studied slavery. In , Stampp asserted that “there is ample evidence that the average slaveholder earned
