Slavery and American Economic Development
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 176
ISBN-13: 9780807152287
Subjects: Slavery, united states; Right of property; United states, economic conditions, to 1865
Description: Through an original analysis of slavery as an economic institution, Gavin Wright presents a fresh look a the economic divergence between North and South in the antebellum era. Wright 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. Slaves could be purchased and carried to any location where slavery was legal; they could be assigned to any task regardless of gender or age; they could be punished for disobedience, with no effective recourse to the law; they could be accumulated as a form of wealth; they could be sold or bequeathed Wright argues that slave-based commerce was 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"--Book jacket.