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Slavery and Scientific Management
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2010
Extract
In the last few years, the controversy over the economic history of slavery has centered about two positions. On the one hand, Genovese has argued that the slave mode of production was fundamentally antagonistic to the bourgeois mode and that the conflicts between the two systems doomed slavery to a nineteenth-century grave. On the other hand, Conrad and Meyer spawned many studies which, on the whole, denied that any specifically economic difficulties resulted from the fact that the American south was based on slave labor. Against Genovese's original claim that “the material basis of the planters' power was giving way,” the statistical evidence indicated that the profits of the slave plantation were as high as those on non-slave business investments, and that the diffusion of technological changes was rapid enough to cause a rate of productivity increase equal to that of all but the most rapidly growing sectors of the free economy. Sheer volume supplemented the elegance of the early discussion and our knowledge of the slave economy expanded considerably.
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- Copyright © The Economic History Association 1973
References
Thanks to John McNees, Albert O. Hirschman, Stanley Engerman, Nathan Rosenberg, David B. Davis, Samuel Bowles, Steve Marglin.
1 Genovese, Eugene, The Political Economy of Slavery (New York: Vintage, 1965).Google Scholar
2 Conrad, Alfred and Meyer, John, “The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South,” Journal of Political Economy, LXVI (April 1958).Google Scholar See also Engerman, Stanley and Fogel, Robert, The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York: Harper and Row, 1971)Google Scholar, and Time on the Cross: the Economics of American Negro Slavery (forthcoming).
3 Genovese, Political, p. 3.
4 Fogel and Engerman, Time.
5 Engerman, Stanley, “Some Considerations Relating to Property Rights in Man,” Journal Of Economic History, XXXIII (March 1973).Google Scholar
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7 Genovese, Eugene, The World the Slaveholders Made (New York: Pantheon, 1969), p. 3Google Scholar; Bell, Daniel, The End of Ideology (New York: Free Press, 1962), p. 231.Google Scholar
8 Taylor, Frederick W., Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 19.Google Scholar
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10 Ibid., p. 26.
11 Ibid., pp. 41, 42.
12 ibid., p. 59.
13 Genovese, World, p. 160.
14 Ibid., p. 163.
15 Ibid., p. 167.
16 Quoted in Fogel and Engerman, Time.
17 For examples documenting this self-conscious attitude, see Phillips, Ulrich B., American Negro Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1969), Chapter 14.Google Scholar
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22 Burn, W. L., Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies (London: J. Cave, 1937), p. 41.Google Scholar See also Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, Select Committee of 1842, pp. 483, 366.
23 Genovese (Political) argues that slave systems are inferior to free systems with respect to technological development. He follows Marx who wrote: “… it is a universal principle in the production by slave labor that none but the rudest implements be used, such tools as are difficult to damage owing to their sheer clumsiness.” Capital, I (New York: Modern Library, 1968), p. 191.Google Scholar
24 British Colonial Office, 7/42. Quoted in Douglas Hall, Five of the Leewards (forthcoming).
25 Taylor, Principles, p. 47. See Phillips, American, p. 273. That slavery is not a sufficient condition for the rejection of the plow is shown by the fact that Louisiana planters used it extensively.
26 Taylor, Principles, concluding chapter.
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31 Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), p. 554.Google Scholar
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33 Phillips (American, pp. 270–274, 276, 272) transcribes the advice of planters to overseers on this count: “Punishment must never be cruel or abusive … any man who [whips a negro from mere passion and malice] is utterly unfit to have control of negroes; and if ever any of my negroes are cruelly or inhumanely treated [sic!], bruised, maimed or otherwise injured, the overseer will be promptly discharged.” Or: “The Negroes must be made to obey and to work with very little whipping.” Or: “The best evidence of the good management of slaves is the keeping of good discipline with little or no punishment.”
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35 Dubois, W. E. B., Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 12.Google Scholar
36 Lidell Papers, 1841; Sterling Papers, 1828. Department of Archives, Louisiana State University.
37 Pugh Plantation Diary, February 24, 1861. Department of Archives, Louisiana State University.
38 Ibid., through November, 1862.
39 See Gideon, Siegfried, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Norton, 1969).Google Scholar
40 Thompson, Scientific, p. 242.
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