I suppose the superiority in efficiency on the part of slaves might be because they had lived often on the plantation all or most of their lives and so knew well how to work there????
--- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> There was a big debate around this about 25 years
> ago. Some Chicago Nobel Memorial Prize winning
> economist, , I forget his name, North, something
> like
> that? he won the prize later, and a collaborate
> published a book called Time On The Cross and a
> followup book in which he argued that slave labor
> was
> pretty efficient, more than people had thought. He
> ran into a firestorm from people like Herbert Gutman
> and Eugene Genovese (then on the left). I am really
> bot qualified to judge the outcome, as a lot of it
> depended on economic issues combined with historical
> research that are a little beyond my depth, besides
> it
> was a long time ago, and I have forgotten the
> details
> I once knew. Probably there has been more recent
> research. I think that part of the problem the TotC
> people ran into was also due to the fact that they
> made the claim that most slaves were tolerably
> decently treated as valuable property and that not
> all
> slaveowners were sadistic brutes. (Genovese ran
> into
> similar problems arguing in a Gramscian vein in Roll
> Jordon Roll that slavery rested on a combination of
> consent or at least acquiescence and coercion).
> Anyway, it is at least possible that slave labor was
> highly efficient --s some smart and respectable
> people
> who did a reputable if controversial study thought
> so.
> But was certainly controversial.
>
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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