The most significant recent development in the study of economic history has been the investigation of the profitability of American slavery made famous in Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross. Their book not only rewrote the history of antebellum slavery, it ushered in a completely new methodology of economic history: the cliometric revolution. The book was also very well received by the media, something extremely rare in an academic study.
Slavery, Profitability, and the Market Process
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Mark Thornton, “Slavery, Profitability, and the Market Process,” review of Time on the Cross by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, The Review of Austrian Economics 7, no. 2 (1994): 21–47. (