The economic character of pre-Civil War slavery has been debated for generations. While the roots of this conflict can be found in ante-bellum discussions of slavery, the debate continues into our own era. Three main positions on the question of profitability can be identified. One position sees ante-bellum slavery as unprofitable; if the slaves had been replaced with "more efficient" wage labourers this would have been beneficial to the plantation owners and the Southern economy as whole. Abolitionist such as Hinton Rowan Helper and Frederick Law Olmstead argued against slavery on these grounds. Historians who share this view of slavery as unprofitable differ as to why the practice was not given up voluntarily, but most of their explanations stress non-economic factors. Others historians maintain that slavery was, in fact, profitable; slaves were very productive workers, and the Civil War can be explained by the resistance of slaveholders to giving up such productive assets. In the pre-Civil Era, Southern political economists such as Thomas R. Dew and Edward Ruffin advocated this position. For about a century after the Civil War, the unprofitability thesis remained dominant. Remarkably, the period of a few decades has seen the nearly total victory of the opposing view. However, the view of slavery as profitable has been attacked in its ascendancy by a third position, which sees something philosophically objectionable in applying twentieth-century economic theory to a nineteenth-century social institution. Today, some argue that while slavery was not unprofitable, the real motives for continuing to hold slaves must to be understood in non-economic terms. This position synthesizes the good points made by both sides in the profitability debate and seems most valid. Many important issues are clustered around the question of slavery's profitability, including crucial points about the limitations of cliometrics articulated by those approaching this issue. The question of slavery's profitability is not an obscure antiquarian one but an issue with ties to some of the most fundamental issues in American history.
Ulrich B. Phillips supported the view that slavery was essentially unprofitable, and that left alone, it would have gradually disappeared from capitalist America. In discussing the "business aspects" of slavery in his 1918 work, American Negro Slavery, Phillips begins by describing the reasons for the gradual disappearance of serfdom from Western Europe; it suited both landlords and serfs to move to a new system of labour. The suggestion here is that African slavery would have gradually disappeared without political intervention. Phillips draws on an unprofitability of slavery tradition that extends back to Adam Smith, who theorized that the slave's lack of personal interest in the work at had made him an indifferent and unproductive worker.(1) In the nineteenth-century, American and British liberal economists echoed this view, the foremost opponent of slavery on economic grounds being J.E. Cairnes of Ireland. Cairnes felt that slavery could only be profitable in a very narrow set of circumstances. For instance, the crop had to be one best harvested in gangs, which can be supervised fairly cheaply, rather than one harvested by isolated individual workers. Otherwise the cost of overseers would be to great. The crop also had to afford a steady stream of work during the year, otherwise slaves would be idle too much of the time. The commodity being produced had to be valuable to support the costs of maintaining overseers, but at the same time the production of the commodity could not be skill-intensive, as slaves are only good for physical labour performed under threat of the lash.(2) Phillips drew on the idea that slavery was only profitable in "special circumstances" in formulating his analysis of the nineteenth-century. Clearly, slavery had to have been profitable in colonial times for English colonists to create such a system. But Phillips sees a great transformation taking place with the closing of the African slave trade and the opening of the uplands to cotton cultivation that followed the invention of the cotton gin. The "colonial period" in terms of cotton production ended around 1815, according to Phillips. The prices of slaves soared after the end of slave imports, making slave labour more costly, while the expanded area of production made possible by the cotton gin to drive prices down.(3) In 1905 in The Economic Cost of Slaveholding in the Cotton Belt, Phillips wrote that "it was only in special industries and times of special prosperity, that negro slave labour was of such decided profit to escaped condemnation for its inherent disadvantages."(4) Echoing Cairnes, Phillips felt that these "inherent disadvantages" were legion, causing Southern agriculture was technologically retarded, depleting the soil, and necessitating the constant search for virgin land. If in the post-1815, slavery did not make economic sense, why then did slavery continue for decades more ?
Phillips answers that slavery "appeared" to be profitable long after it ceased to provide a "genuine profit." Because slaveholders were "blinded by the abolition agitation in the North and other historical developments," most of the last "generation of ante-bellum planters could not see that slaveholding was essentially burdensome." Moreover, even if slavery was unprofitable as a business practice, "it was less a business than a life; it made fewer fortunes than it made men."(5) For Phillips, further militating against view of slavery as having a "capitalist nature" is that, in his opinion, the deliberate breeding of slaves for sale simply did not take place.(6) The ultimate reason why slavery would have continued is that eliminating slavery would have required a major change in Southern life.
In the decades following the publication of American Negro Slavery, most students of American economic history agreed with the view that slavery was unprofitable, an economic dead-end, an inefficient way of obtaining labour. A 1942 work by economic historian William Chandler Bagley, Soil Exhaustion and the Civil War, presents the view that "slave labour is given reluctantly, a fact deriving from the nature of slavery itself." A slave lacks the incentives a free worker has, such as fear of unemployment. "Forced labor is as slovenly and poor in quality as the worker, with one eye on the whip, dares to make it."(7) Drawing on the classical tradition of micro-economics, Bagley cites John Stuart Mill as an authority to prove his point about the nature of slave labour, but provides little evidence from primary sources. For Bagley, the inefficiency and unproductiveness of slaves is almost a truism. Bagley demonstrates that slave labor helped to speed up soil destruction. For instance, a great deal of skill and dedication is required for contour plowing, which reduces soil erosion, a degree of skill and labor involuntary workers are not likely to provide.(8)(p72) Faced with the rapid loss of soil fertility do the actions of slaves, Southern plantation owners were forced to look westward for virgin soil. For Bagley, the technical details of soil conservation and enrichment explain why the South came to insist that slavery be allowed to expand territorially. Chester W. Wright in his 1942 Economic History of the Unites States largely concurs with Bagely's analysis, that slavery involved enormous inefficiencies "owing to lack of incentive to do good work, which resulted not only in idling, carefulness, and waste... and the necessity for constant supervision."(9)
There were some dissenters from the general view that slavery was inefficient and unprofitable. In his 1933 History of Agriculture in the Southern Unites States to 1860, Lewis C. Gray put forth the proposition that slavery was profitable.(10) Yet this view remained very much a minority view in the "post-Phillips" era of the historical writing on slavery.(11) Kenneth Stampp moved away from this dominant view of slavery's economic viability. In his 1956 book, The Peculiar Institution, Stampp argued that slavery had not retarded the South economically. For instance, he argued that economic growth occurred at roughly the same rate on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.(12) He pointed out that slaves were often employed in skillful jobs in cities and industry, calling into question the view that slave labour was of necessity poorly executed and inimical to industrialization.(13)
1958 saw the publication of The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South by Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer. In this lengthy article and in a 1964 book Conrad and Meyer used quantitative analysis to support the view that slavery was an efficient way to obtain labour and that it was generally profitable when compared to the rates of return offered by other investments of the period. Conrad and Meyer say that while their thesis is not new, their approach to proving it is.(14) Previous attempts to determine the profitability of slavery had either been dependent on travelers' accounts or fragmentary data analyzed by accountants. Conrad and Meyer base their analysis on information about large numbers of slaves. Conrad and Meyer find that investing in slaves was a good investment choice when compared to railway stock or municipal bonds. This is especially true not only because the present generation of slaves can be made to work hard, but also because of slaves reproduce themselves. Conrad and Meyer see 40 per cent of the profits from slaveholding as coming from slave reproduction. Whereas Phillips dismisses the idea of the deliberate breeding of slaves as an abolitionist shibboleth, Conrad and Meyer feel that it did occur and was economically important, especially in the Upper South.(15) Conrad and Meyer conclude by saying that "it appears doubtful that the South was forced by bad statesmanship into an unnecessary war to protect a system that must soon have disappeared because it was economically unsound."(16)
Eugene Genovese provides a Marxist interpretation of slavery The Political Economy of Slavery. Genovese is of the view that slave labour was of "low productivity" and economically "irrational," and retarded the South economically.(17) He raises problems with Conrad and Meyer's analysis. For instance, these two authors could not separate the work on smaller plantations done by whites from slaves; perhaps it was the labour of the whites (who had an incentive to work hard) that made these farms profitable. Presenting slavery as economically irrational lends credence to Genovese's attack on the "planter-capitalism thesis."(18) Being of a radically different culture ( Genovese goes so far as to call it a different "civilization" ) than the North, the "feudal" South "could not forever coexist" with the capitalist section of the nation.(19) Embracing stage analysis, Genovese sees the Civil War as the clash between two different means of production. As will, be discussed below, there are problems with stage analysis. While substantially economic, Genovese's holistic approach bears little resemblance to the micro-economic approach used by other historians; whereas one seeks to examine the decision making of individuals, the other discuss the relations between different economic civilizations.
In 1974, Time on the Cross by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman expanded and amplified the view that slavery was economically sound. Heavily relying on statistical data, they show that slaves produced more than white farmers both inside and outside the South.(20) Fogel and Engerman critique the estimate on the rate of return on slaves given by Conrad and Meyer for being too low. Fogel and Engerman look at the macro-economic evidence as well, seeing no reason to believe that slavery slowed down economic growth, railway construction, or industrialization.(21) Fogel and Engerman provide a very different picture of slave work than some other writers; slaves were hard-working, having imbibed the Protestant work ethic.(22) Fogel and Engerman see the traditional depiction of slaves as unwilling workers as possibly racist,(23) a charge that is likely true in regards to earlier writers such as Phillips. There was no shortage of positive material inducements on a Southern plantations, as slaves might work hard to be promoted within the slave hierarchy, to obtain extra-privileges, or accumulate property ( called a peculium ) with which they might purchase their freedom. Fogel and Engerman describe this as "black achievement under adversity."(24) Moreover, slaves were so productive that their was no need for their owners to engage in "stock breeding" to make a profit. Fogel and Engerman feel this almost never occurred, with blacks adhering to common nineteenth-century American "family values" in regards to sexual matters.(25) Fogel and Engerman use quantitative as well as qualitative data to show that inter-racial sex was relatively uncommon in the ante ante-bellum South, indicating that there would have been less sexual exploitation of female slaves than is sometimes suggested. They vigorously dispute Conrad and Meyer's view that stock breeding for sale took place. Fogel and Engerman see their depiction of life under slavery as according a much greater degree of "agency" to black slaves than the more negative view. Like Phillips, Fogel and Engerman have been accused of having too "rosy" an image of life under slavery. However, Fogel and Engerman's depiction of slavery is attractive because it does impute a degree of agency to blacks.
The reaction to Time on the Cross was quite intense, the book being reviewed in popular magazines as well as in scholarly journals.(26) Several distinct reactions can be discerned. Some quantitative historians critiqued the figures and methodologies of Fogel and Engerman. David Temin edited a book of essays written in response to Time on the Cross, with each essay critiquing a particular part of the authors' analysis. For instance, Richard Sutch argued that Fogel and Engerman's estimate of slave income and food supply were probably too high.(27) Gavin Wright argued that the profitability of slavery seen by Fogel and Engerman was really the product of special conditions, the "extraordinary growth of world demand for cotton."(28)
Herbert Gutman sees Time on the Cross as an attempt by consensus historians to deal with a major defect in their view of American history; consensus historians have never been able to fit blacks into alleged unifying consensus on values; Fogel and Engerman succeed in doing this in their depiction of the slaves sharing bourgeois values in regards to work and family life.(29)
Another response to Time on the Cross states that while Fogel and Engerman might be right on the some of the economic issues involved, the quantitative approach is too narrow, or limited. A distinction between "social" history and "economic" history was made by reviewers of Time on the Cross like Stampp and Gutman. Stampp prefaced his comments on Time on the Cross by describing himself as a humanist historian. While not averse to numerical data as some historians ( who are quoted as describing cliometrics as a "Bitch-Goddess" ), Stampp feels it is limited. While he suggest that the Fogel-Engerman thesis on profitability has been proven "beyond a doubt," his criticizes Fogel and Engerman for using cliometrics to convert a complex and theoretically "messy" past into a "tidy, rational world."(30) For Herbert Gutman, the question of whether slavery was profitable on unprofitable is almost irrelevant. In his 1975 book, Slavery and the Numbers Game: a Critique of Time on the Cross, Gutman asserts that while Fogel and Engerman's work is important as "economic history," it is "poor social history."(31) Gutman does critique Fogel and Engerman's quantitative data on quantitative grounds, but he also questions validity of quantitative data as such. The book begins with a quotation from Thomas Carlyle: "He who reads from the book of Nature as if it were a Merchant's Ledger is justly suspected of never having seen the book... from which... more error than insight is to be derived."(32) According to Gutman, "narrow economic analysis" often results in a "reductive fallacy." Quantitative studies are dangerous if narrowly "one-factor." Gutman feels that historical causation is usually very multi-factorial; a hypthosesis such as that put forth by Fogel and Engerman "might not be inconsistent with observed behavior, but it might not explain it either."(33) In other words, just because slave-holding was profitable, it does not mean that slaveholder's supported slavery because it was profitable. This is a crucial point.
Stanley Elkins has an even stronger version of this perspective. For Elkins, the question of the profitability of slavery is somewhat irrelevant; he discusses the issue in his book Slavery: a Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, conceding that it was profitable, but it is telling that his discussion is confined to an appendix.(34) While others attempt to understand slavery in relation to business practices, Elkins considers it in relation to the Holocaust; "socio-cultural" factors are clearly far more important for Elkins than economic ones. Whereas Fogel and Engerman see modern paternalistic firms like Kodak and I.B.M. as most analogous to southern plantations, Elkins prefers to compare them to Aushwitz.(35) Like Phillips, Elkins sees "sociological" rather than "economic" factors as having the power to explain the slave system. A crucial difference between Elkins and Phillips is that while Phillips has a relatively positive view of plantation life because they were not solely profit-making ventures, Elkins has a very negative view of plantation life grounded in the non-capitalist nature of plantation life. Elkins sees plantations as places where the sadistic tendencies of whites were given free-reign even if this was economically costly.
A history of the American economy published in 1994 presents the view that slavery is best understood in non-economic terms. In the fourth edition of American Economic History, the authors, Jonathan Hughes and Louis Cain, devote considerable space to the economic aspects of slavery. They conclude by stating that few today would agree with Phillip's idea that slavery was unprofitable, slavery can "be only partly a matter of economics."(36) (p.227) In other words, these economic historians concede that their specialization is defective in understanding these issues. Whereas others compare plantations to either business firms or Nazi death camps, the authors make an analogy to something in between, a modern prison, where the inmates may receive better food and dental care than if they were outside, yet are still dissatisfied with their condition.(37) This comparisons seems more reasonable than both the "rosy" depiction of slavery put forth by consensus historians (Phillips, Fogel, Engerman) and the extremely problematic comparison of Southern plantations to Nazi death camps made by "conflict" historians such as Elkins.
The most sensible position is that life for slaves on Southern plantations was neither as bad as at Aushwitz ( to make such a comparison seems a very extreme statement, since death camps were primarily designed to produce death, not goods ) nor as good as Fogel and Engerman make out. Likewise, a compromise position on the relative importance of "economic" and socio-cultural factors would seem to be advisable. Slavery was not a merely economic institution, it was a way of life. Phillips might point to the close personal ties and genuine affection that linked owner and slave. Elkins might point to the brutality that doubtless occurred on many plantations with equal legitimacy, and in fact the positions are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Slaveholders may have felt a variety of sometimes contradictory emotions towards their slaves. There are dysfunctional families today where there is both great love and concern as well as controlling abusiveness.
But at the same time as recognizing the importance of extra-economic factors, we must still accord an important place to economics in our understanding of slavery. Slavery was more than an economic institution, but it was an economic institution. Explanations for slavery's persistence that focus on non-economic factors can be problematic if taken too far. For instance, Phillips' assertion that slavery was unprofitable but that slaveholders were blind to this seems questionable, given that the ante ante-bellum South had not been immune from exposure to the emerging discipline of economics. Too many Southern writers wrote either in favour or against slavery in economic terms beginning with Thomas R. Dew in 1832.(38) There were professorships in political economy at Southern universities. Of course, even today there many activities we engage in at either an individual or a collective level which do not make economic sense. It took a long time after the problem of government budgetary deficits was widely recognized for it to be solved. Moreover, there are small business that continue operating because the owner is under the misapprehension that they are earning a profit, failing to understand the difference between a cash profit and a net profit. But it seems unlikely that a region whose millions of people including book-keepers, accountants, and economists would continue with a practice for decades after it became unprofitable ( Phillips gave 1815 as the date for this ) and then fight a major war to defend the practice.
This leads into another, more philosophical problem with positions that rely too heavily on non-economic factors to explain slavery's persistence. Historicism has been described as the extreme view that human nature, including basic motivations, are highly malleable and subject to change by culture. Thus, in different cultures or at different historical stages ( e.g., "capitalism," "communism" ) human motivations will be radically different. For a historicist, the depiction of "man" in general as self-interested economic actors is really just the projection of our own lifestyle onto humanity as a whole. Now while Phillips sees "non-economic" factors as important in understanding slavery, he does not go as far as Genovese, Gutman, or Elkins in this direction, and much of American Negro Slavery explores the complexities of the economic situation. In contrast, the latter three thinkers, Genovese in particular, seem to implicitly deny that questions of profitability were important in determining slaveholder's perceptions of slavery.(39) Not only does this seem implausible given the importance of economic issues of present-day life, but it suggestive of historicism, the extremely problematic view of human motivations as entirely malleable and the product of different epochs. Even if we were to accept the historicist view that people in pre-possessive individualism"(40) cultures are cavalier and more indifferent about money, it is hard to see how the culture of the Southern states could have produced people with motivations radically different those prevailing in "modern, capitalist, bourgeois" societies. For one thing, the South was probably not that different from the Northern states ( a bourgeois society par excellence ) or even our own society. The South had all the paraphernalia of a modern capitalist economy, such as railroads, banks, interest rates, law suits, commodity markets, life insurance companies. There was commercial and social intercourse between the two sections; the cotton gin was invented by a Northern inventor. While manners and mores were somewhat different than in the North, they were not radically dissimilar. The division between South and North was not sharp, there being transitional areas such as the Upper South. While Southern planters liked to view themselves as "aristocrats", there is nothing inherently anti-bourgeois about this, as many Northern millionaires of the post-1865 "Gilded Age" aped European aristocrats and married into their families. Those who explain slavery ( and the Civil War ) in terms of cultural differences between North and South are perhaps exaggerating the difference between the two sections.
There is a tension between "cultural" and "economic" explanations of slavery. A balance needs to be struck between these two approaches. Monocausal explanations of such a complex phenomenon as slavery will likely prove unsatisfactory. A historian's common sense indicates that historical actors were likely not influenced exclusively by one class of factors but by both, because people today are rarely purely "economic men" and equally rarely utterly indifferent to material things. While saying that balance is needed in approaching a historical topic is neither terribly original or very profound, this is the lesson to be drawn from an examination of historiography of the cluster of issues surrounding the cliometrics of slavery.
Bibliography
Works on Slavery
Bagley, William Chandler, Jr. Soil Exhaustion and the Civil War. Washington: American Council on Public Affairs, 1942.
Conrad, Alfred H. and John R. Meyer. The Economics of Slavery and Other Studies in Econometric History. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1964.
------------------------------------------- The Economics of Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South in Reading in United States Business and Economic History. Edited by Ross M. Robertson and James L. Pate. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.
David, Paul A., Herbert G. Gutman, Richard Sutch, Peter Temin, and Gavin Wright. Reckoning With Slavery: a Critical Study in the Quantitative history of American Negro Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Elkins, Stanley. Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.
Fogel, Robert William and Stanley L. Engerman. Time on the Cross: the Economics of American Negro Slavery. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974
Genovese, Eugene. The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965.
Gray, Lewis Cecil. History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1958.
Gutman, Herbert. Slavery and the Numbers Game: a Critique of Time on the Cross. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976.
Hughes, Jonathan and Louis P. Cain. American Economic History: Fourth Edition. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell. American Negro Slavery: a Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1918.
------------------------- The Economic Cost of Slaveholding in the Cotton Belt in Reading in United States Economic and Business History Edited by Ross M. Robertson and James L. Pate. Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1966.
Stampp, Kenneth, M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New York: A.A.Knopf, 1969.
Wright, Chester W. Economic History of the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1941.
Works on the Philosophy of History
Hacker, Louis M. The Anticapitalist Bias of American Historians in Capitalism and the Historians. Edited by Friedrich August von Hayek. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.
Macpherson, C.B. The Rise of Possessive Individualism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.
Popper, Sir Karl Raimund. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Cape Publishing, 1956.
Approaches to the Economics of Slavery
by Andrew Smith
371 3628
for Kevin Kee
History 429
Queen's University
December 17, 1998
1. 1Ulrich B. Phillips. American Negro Slavery: a Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime , p.397 2Ibid., p.355 3Ibid., Chapter VIII. 4Phillips. The Economic Costs of Slaveholding in the Cotton Belt in Readings in United States Economic and Business History. Ed. by Ross M. Robertson and James L. Pate. Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1966. p.196 5Phillips. American Negro Slavery., p.401 6Ibid., p.362 7William Chandler Bagley, Jr. Soil Exhaustion and the Civil War. Washington: American Council on Public Affairs, 1942. p.52 8Ibid., p.72 9Chester W. Wright. Economic History of the United States. New York: McGraw Hill, 1941. p.373 10Lewis C. Gray. History of Agriculture in the Southern States to 1860. 11According to Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. Time on the Cross: the Economics of American Negro Slavery. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. p.65 12Kenneth M. Stampp. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1956. p.390 13Ibid., p. 397-399 14Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer. The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South in Readings in United States Economic and Business History., op cit., p.205 15Conrad and Meyer. The Economics of Slavery and Other Studies in Cliometric History. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1954. pp.66-74 16Ibid. p. 82 17Eugene D. Genovese. The Political Economy of Slavery : Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South. New York: Random House, 1965., Chapter 2, pp. 43-70 18Ibid., p.19 19Ibid., p.34 20Fogel and Engerman. Time on the Cross. p.195, Fig. 45. 21Ibid., pp.247-257 22Ibid. p.224 23Ibid., pp.223-232 24Ibid., p.258 25Ibid., pp.78-86 26The book was reviewed in the following popular magazines: Village Voice, New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, Reader's Digest. See Gutman Slavery and the Numbers Game p.2 27See Richard Sutch, Care and Feeding of Slaves in Reckoning With Slavery: a Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery. Paul A. David, Herbert G. Gutman, Richard Sutch, Peter Temin, and Gavin Wright. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. 28Gavin Wright. Prosperity, Progress, and American Slavery in Reckoning with Slavery, p. 303 29Herbert G. Gutman. Slavery and the Numbers Game: a Critique of Time on the Cross. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1975.p.167 30Kenneth M. Stampp. Introduction to Reckoning with Slavery: a Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery. by Paul A. David et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976., pp 1-30 31Gutman. Slavery and the Numbers Game. p.2 32Ibid., p.iv 33Ibid., p.167 34Stanley Elkins. Slavery: a Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959. Appendix B. 35Ibid., Chapters 4, 5, and 6. 36Jonathan Hughes and Louis P. Cain. American Economic History: Fourth Edition. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. p.227 37Ibid., p.225 38T.R. Dew's arguments that slavery was a) not inhumane and b) profitable seem to be of seminal importance; Kenneth Stampp calls the Fogel-Engerman thesis "neo-Dewism." Stampp, Introduction to Reckoning with Slavery., p. 19 39In The Anti-Capitalist Bias of American Historians, Louis M. Hacker argues that a historian goes beyond the legitimate examination of cultural differences and into historicism when he denies that social sciences ( like economics ) based on the study of present day individuals have value for studying the past. Hacker singles out stage analysis, which divides history into antagonist stages ( e.g., "industrial capitalism," "merchant capitalism." ) for particular criticism. 40The historicist position in regards to pre-modern attitudes toward pre-modern attitudes towards wealth is out forth in C.B. Macpherson The Rise of Possessive Individualism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.