Three Phases of Cliometric Research on Slavery and Its Aftermath

Abstract

The cliometric investigation of slavery and its aftermath is now nearly two decades old. Initiated by the path-breaking paper presented by Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer in 1957, it has been carried forward in more than 100 subsequent papers, doctoral dissertations, and books.1 This extensive scholarly effort has contributecl not only to the reshaping of the discipline of economic history but has greatly altered our understanding of the nature of slave society and, most important, has helped to reveal the remarkable record of black achievement in the protracted and difficult struggle to overcome racist oppression. It is not possible in this brief paper to review adequately the many contributions to the reinterpretation of the slave economy. I would, however, like to outline what I believe to be the three main phases of cliometric research on the subject and to suggest some priorities for future research. During the first phase, which extended roughly from 1957 to 1969, cliometric research was focused on three issues: the profitability of an investment in slaves to slaveholders; the economic viability of the slave economy; and the effect of slavery on southern economic growth. All three of these issues were, of course, raised in the original Conrad and Meyer paper, but not all of them were explored to the same extent by either Conrad and Meyer or by their successors. Much of the initial work focused on the issues of profitability and viability, partly, perhaps, because these seemed to be more tractable than the question of growth, partly because the evidence bearing on profitability appeared to be more readily available. The debates on profitability have involved both theoretical and empirical issues. Much of the discussion has turned on the equation originally employed by Conrad and Meyer to estimate the rate of return on male slaves. They became involved in the difficult task of estimating the average amount of land and capital employed per slave, although this issue could have been finessed by employing a slightly different variant of their basic equation.2 More vexing were the implicit assumptions that all twenty-year-old slaves lived for exactly thirty additional years (the approximate life expectation of male slaves at age twenty) and that between ages twenty and fifty average annual earnings * Professor of economics and history at the Universities of Chicago and Rochester. Research on the paper was supported by a grant from the National Science loundation. I See, in addition to the references at the end of this paper, those in F'ogel and S. L. Engerman 1974a. Convenient collections of cliometric papers on slavery are H. G. J. Aitken, Engerman and E. D. Genovese, and Genovese and R. N. Rosett. 2 See E. Saraydar, R. Sutch, and J. I). Foust and I). E. Swan. Also, see Fogel and Engerman 1974a, vol. 2, p. 66.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.