Slavery and American economic development [electronic resource] / Gavin Wright.
Material type: TextSeries: Publication details: Baton Rouge, La. : Louisiana State University Press, c2006 2013) 2015)Description: 1 online resource (1 electronic text (x, 162 p.) :) ill., maps, digital fileISBN:- 9780807152751
- 306.3/620973 22
- E441 .W93 2006
Issued as part of UPCC book collections on Project MUSE.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 135-151) and index.
Preface -- Introduction : what was slavery? -- 1. Slavery, geography, and commerce -- 2. Property and progress in antebellum America -- 3. Property rights, productivity, and slavery -- Epilogue : the legacy of slavery -- Appendix -- Works cited -- Index.
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.
Description based on print version record.
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