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Reviewed by:
  • Slavery and American Economic Development
  • Russell R. Menard
Slavery and American Economic Development. By Gavin Wright. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Pp. 162. Cloth. $25.00.)

Gavin Wright is persuaded that economic historians have emphasized slavery as a system of labor organization to the neglect of trying to understand slavery and its economic consequences as a system of property rights. In Slavery and American Economic Development, he tries to right the balance by rethinking the major debates in the economic history of slavery from a property rights perspective. Wright begins by noting that there was substantial variation in the way slave labor was organized, but there was a remarkable consistency in slavery as a system of property rights: "Slaves could be purchased and carried to any location where slavery was legal; they could be assigned to any task—male or female, young or old; 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. Particularly in the British colonies and the United States, slaves could be used as the basis for credit transactions" (7).

Most of Slavery and American Economic Development is an effort to rethink the economics of slavery from the perspective of this unique set of legal and institutional rules. The result is a stunning reinterpretation of southern economic history and what is perhaps the most important book in the field since Time on the Cross. Wright provides fresh perspectives on familiar debates, the Williams thesis, the productivity of slave labor, the differential performance of southern and northern economies, the economic legacy of slavery, and the like. He also introduces new topics that deserve more attention than they have received, such as the impact of slavery on Southern credit and land markets and on patterns of southern migration. Throughout, Wright's arguments are clear, elegant, and persuasive. I frequently found myself forced to rethink long-held positions. This book is likely to reshape the way we think about the economics of slavery and to structure debates on the southern economy among the next generation of historians.

My only criticism is that Wright is too sharply focused on the British mainland colonies and the United States for my taste. This is a surprise, [End Page 309] because slavery has become one of our discipline's most comparative fields and it is common for historians of slavery in one part of the Americas to pay close attention to the literature on other regions. Further, by ignoring much of the Americas, Wright missed an opportunity to test some of his arguments against the rich scholarship available elsewhere. In particular I was disappointed that Wright did not take the opportunity to explore further his arguments concerning slavery and credit. While Wright is correct that property rights in slaves show a remarkable consistency across time and space, there is one important variation. In the British colonies and the United States, slaves could be seized by creditors seeking to collect debts, while in most of Latin America, legislation protected the integrity of the plantation as a working unit by prohibiting the seizure of slaves. Wright argues that the liquidity of slave property was crucial to the development of credit systems in plantation society. If he is correct, one might expect to find significant differences between the credit networks of the United States and Brazil.

Of course, one might argue that Wright's focus is not a weakness at all and that his book defines a research agenda for the comparative economic history of slavery in the Americas. I hope this is the case and that scholars working in other places follow Wright's lead and begin to look at slavery around the Americas through the lens of property rights. If this happens, the field will be much richer.

Russell R. Menard
University of Minnesota
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