Slavery And American Economic Development (Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History)
Автор:Gavin Wright Год: 2006 Издание: [не указанo] Страниц: 162 ISBN: 0807131830 Through an original analysis of slavery as an economic institution, Gavin Wright presents a fresh look at 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; the 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. On the mainland, Wright...
