Sigh, well I guess somebody has to bring this up and it might as well be me. Nobody has yet mentioned the most famous and also most controversial study of the economics of slavery in the US. I am referring to _Time on the Cross_ by Robert Fogel (Nobel Prize recipient) and Stanley Engerman, published in the early 1970s by I-forget-who. Anyway, that book was one of the first to use "cliometrics," the application of econometrics to economic history, an idea very controversial in and of itself. They argued that slavery was profitable and hence would not have quietly died out on its own as all kinds of southern historians had argued. Hence, the Civil War was necessary to eliminate slavery, or at least during any remotely reasonable time period.
Besides the controversy over the use of cliometrics the book has been widely criticized and the literature on it in economics history is ongoing and unresolved. One criticism from the left was the apparently possible subtly implied approval of slavery. If it was profitable, then somehow that might mean that it was good. Needless to say F&E strongly rejected this argument and I note on a strictly personal note that Fogel is married to an African-American woman, although he is pretty much of a pro-free marketeer in general. Nevertheless, his position is that the opposition to slavery had to be on moral grounds as it was not economically nonviable. Barkley Rosser
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu