Markets Without Contracts: The Cliometrics of Slavery

Abstract

Without Consent or Contract, by Robert W. Fogel, Stanley L. Engerman, and their colleagues, has been published by W. W. Norton as four volumes of studies on the economics of slavery written in the two decades since Time on the Cross (1974). It is a publishing event of great significance. I can think of no comparable instance of a historical enterprise organized so like a scientific laboratory to pursue a single question-collectively, rigorously, ana relentlessly-even unto its innermost parts. In the primary volume, subtitled Rise and Fall of American Slavery, Fogel sets himself three tasks: to forge of this massive research a coherent story, to set this story within the very long historiography of southern slavery, and to reach beyond economics to a system of values within which slavery can be not only analyzed but judged. Fully half the book traces the evolution of the emancipation movement from its origins in evangelical religion to its triumph in the secular politics of England and America. Incidentally, economic historians who have learned their craft from Fogel will notice with interest the emphasis this quintessentially economic historian is giving, both here and in other recent work, to the formation of moral values and shared ideation. Indeed, the chapter called Afterword is the finest statement of the moral problem of slavery that I have never seen. The second volume, Evidence and Methods, is, I think, the most remark-