Slavery and American Economic Development

Download or read book Slavery and American Economic Development written by Gavin Wright and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2013-02-18 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an analysis of slavery as an economic institution, Gavin Wright presents an innovative look at the economic divergence between North and South in the antebellum era. He 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. Slave-based commerce remained 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.