Slavery and American Economic Development by Gavin Wright

Slavery and American Economic Development by Gavin Wright

Through an analysis of slavery as an economic institution, Gavin Wright presents an innovative look at the economic divergence between North and South in the antebellum era. He draws a distinction between slavery as a form of work organization--the aspect that has dominated historical debates--and slavery as a set of property rights. Slave-based commerce remained central to the eighteenth-century rise of the Atlantic economy, not because slave plantations were superior as a method of organizing production, but because slaves could be put to work on sugar plantations that could not have attracted free labor on economically viable terms.

Gavin Wright is William Robertson Coe Professor in American Economic History at Stanford University and the author of The Political Economy of the Cotton South and Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War, winner of the Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award of the Southern Historical Association. He served as president of the Economic History Association and the Agricultural History Society

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780807131831
ISBN 10	0807131830
Title	Slavery and American Economic Development
Author	Gavin Wright
Series	Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures In Southern History
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Louisiana State University Press
Year published	2006-10-01
Number of pages	162
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.