Word: engerman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...find their way into discussions in or out of the classroom are being accepted too uncritically. The massive reevaluative scholarship on slavery, summarized in Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by Robert William Fogel (who will teach at Harvard beginning next year) and Stanley Engerman, is now the single best-known work of quantitative history. The book is published in two volumes--the first presents the conclusions, while the second, more technical volume explains how the authors got there. Much of the second volume cannot be understood without advanced mathematical training--but much...
...quantitative history themselves often deter this broader evaluation of their work by their exaggerated claims to objectivity. "Success in this operation required, no less than in the operating room of a modern hospital, the adroit use of professional skills in a cool, detached manner." Fogel and Engerman write in their second volume. But it was not a detached analysis that told Fogel and Engerman how many whippings constitute harsh treatment of slaves, or how much confidence slaveholders had that the system would endure. So long as a researcher confines himself to recompiling old records, his work can indeed be devoid...
Time on the Cross is an ambitious enough work to contain a good deal of bad history. Its lapses would be easier to excuse if Fogel and Engerman were not so insistent on the revolutionary nature of their method. Often they exaggerate the myopia of earlier historians, in order to make their own conclusions seem more extraordinary. Their work is not, even in conception, the comprehensive evaluation the authors believe it to be. It is a work with new insights and with new speculation; more of the truth could be discovered if people spent more time thinking about the history...
Among the most widely accepted and notable errors, the authors suggest, was the belief that slavery was economically dying in 1860, that slave labor was inefficient and slovenly, and-most important-that slavery produced hideously hard conditions of life for the average slave. Not so, say Fogel and Engerman, offering statistics on per capita income and return on capital to prove it. Slavery was booming in 1860, and plantations were 40% more efficient than Northern agriculture...
...index of economic growth is questionable when applied to a nonindustrial society. Economic Historian Murray Rothbard said, "Cliometrics doesn't work for the current economy, so how could it work on information from 1860?" Sociologist Orlando Patter son questioned some of the inferences that Fogel and Engerman draw from their statistics, such as the assumption that young black girls were prudish, not promiscuous, because the average age of black slave women on having a first child...