Slavery and American Economic Development

Gavin Wright (Author)

9780807152287

Paperback / softback, published 18 February 2013

176 pages
21.3 x 13.7 x 1.2 cm, 0.333 kg

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 organisation, 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.