Slavery in the Development of the Americas (review)

The eleven essays in this volume, a festschrift for Stanley L. Engerman, have a wide compass in time, region, and methodology. The editors' introduction serves to place the individual papers within an economic framework of plantation complexes—slave-using and export-oriented—that comprised the economic "growth nodes" of the New World (1). The gross economic dominance of these plantation complexes relative to the largely free-labor, non-plantation northern colonies is evident in the per capita export figures for 1770: 6.8 million pounds sterling for the plantation complexes of the Caribbean compared to 0.9 million pounds sterling for New England.

The role of slavery is more forcefully made when the export figures are changed to white per capita exports. New England exports remain at the 0.9 figure, those of the mainland and southern colonies rise modestly to 2.9, whereas the average for the plantation Caribbean leaps to 72.2 million pounds sterling (10, Table 2). The editors contend that although export figures are clearly not income figures, the magnitudes and trends in income are closely proxied by exports. Thus, the plantation complexes were the growth regions that gave rise to "the largest forced migration in history," whereas "the temperate Americas . . . appear to have grown more slowly than other plantation regions, and would probably have grown more slowly still had they not been able to trade with those regions" (17).

Individual chapters address various aspects of slavery's role and impact in these plantation complexes. In Part I, "Establishing the System," Seymour Drescher probes the provocative counterfactual of a "White Atlantic" (31). Why was there not a coerced, white European labor force in the plantation regions? Pieter Emmer follows with a companion essay on the Dutch failure to develop more than a South American enclave despite their earlier preeminence in the Caribbean.

Patterns of slave use are addressed in Part II with contributions by Lorena S. Walsh on mercantile strategies, credit networks, and labor supply in the colonial Chesapeake; Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein on slave production of subsistence crops in São Paulo; and Frank D. Lewis on a life-cycle approach to the timing of slave manumissions in the United States and Guadeloupe. The Lewis chapter is one of three in which historians will find a microeconomic and econometric grounding essential. The others are Elizabeth B. Field-Hendrey and Lee A. Craig's examination of one of the more contentious issues in the slavery literature, the relative efficiency of free and slave agriculture in the antebellum United States, and Robert A. Margo's study of wage gaps in the ante- and postbellum United States. Field-Hendrey and Craig may (or may not) have the final word on the relative efficiency controversy. Utilizing a stochastic production-frontier approach, they conclude that Fogel and Engerman's original hypothesis is supported in part—that is, "that use of the gang system represented a superior technology attainable only through the employment of slave labor, and practical only when sixteen or more slaves were present." So too, however, are the critics of Fogel and Engerman, in that "the effect of crop mix explains much, though not all, of the edge possessed by plantation owners" (255).

Eltis and David Richardson contribute a new, long-run series on prices of African slaves arriving in the Americas from 1673 to 1865. The series is given in pounds sterling, in current and constant prices, for cash sales of prime-age male slaves newly arrived in Jamaica. Adjusting for credit sales and converting all slave prices to a single disembarkation point required detailed work on published and unpublished primary data for some 242,274 enslaved Americans. The Eltis/Richardson series will be of considerable value to researchers. A following chapter by Laird W. Bergad concentrates more narrowly on the slave markets of the 1850s and traces the continuing price rises occurring in that decade in the United States, Cuba, and...