Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery

A probing analysis of the American institution of slavery examines the lives of the slaves, their condition and treatment, the economic repercussions of subjugation, the culture and society surrounding them, and abolitionist movement that helped bring about the end of slavery

The 1974 publication of Fogel's coolly statistical study Time on the Cross (coauthored with Stanley Engerman) sparked a controversy with its thesis that slavery in the American South, though morally repugnant, was profitable, efficient and economically viable. A synthesis of two decades of research, his latest book spells out a strong moral indictment of slavery which was mainly implicit in the earlier work. Among the findings presented are the following: slave breeding was not a major source of profit; masters did not generally work field hands to death, but they so overworked pregnant women that infant mortality rates soared; masters used slaves to fill managerial slots and craft professions in an effort to create a stable hierarchy. Abolitionists, in Fogel's view, were cultural elitists and religious crusaders who sought to replace Afro-American customs, language and religion with Anglo-Saxon "civilization." Reworking some of the material in Time on the Cross , this incisive, probing reexamination is bound to provoke controversy.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fogel again creates a landmark in the scholarship on slavery, as he did with Time on the Cross (LJ 7/74), co-authored with Stanley Engerman. Here, in the first of several volumes--one on evidence and methods and two of technical papers--he draws a monumental mosaic of findings sice Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution (1956). He pictures slavery as economically efficient and rational; abolition, not slavery, as retarding the South's economic growth; politics, not economics, as destroying slavery. His analysis and narrative of slavery as an economic and social system, and of the ideological and political struggle to abolish it, and what he calls a "modern indictment"--made explicit in a highly personal afterword--help to transform perceptions of slavery and the black experience under it. No student of slavery, America, or the Atlantic world can ignore this book. Highest recommendation.
- Thomas J. Davis, SUNY at Buffalo
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.