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

by Robert William Fogel

Overview

"[Fogel's] exceedingly careful testing of all possible sources and his pioneering methodological approach have allowed [him] both to increase our knowledge of an institutions operation and disintegration and to renew our methods of research." —from the citation to Robert William Fogel for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

Over the past quarter-century, Robert William Fogel has blazed new trails in scholarship on the lives of the slaves in the American South. Now he presents the dramatic rise and fall of the "peculiar institution," as the abolitionist movement rose into a powerful political force that pulled down a seemingly impregnable system.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393312195
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/17/1994
Series:	Norton Paperback
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	540
Sales rank:	1,173,953
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Robert William Fogel, winner of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, is director of the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago.

Editorial Reviews

"Few historians have more skillfully integrated economic with social, intellectual, and political history. . . . Pleasurable as well as instructive reading for anyone interested in the most fateful of our national crimes and the most fearful of our national crises. . . . [A] splendid book."

Los Angeles Times Book Review - Eugene D. Genovese

Fogel spells out a moral indictment of slavery that supplements his coolly statistical 1974 Time on the Cross ; findings include a high infant mortality rate due to overworked pregnant women and slave hierarchies established by masters. ``Reworking some of the material in Time on the Cross , this incisive, probing reexamination is bound to provoke controversy,'' said PW. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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

Library Journal