******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
(Didn't realize this was behind a paywall.)
THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
Shackles and Dollars
Historians and economists clash over slavery
By Marc Parry DECEMBER 08, 2016 PREMIUM
For Edward E. Baptist, the scandal was a gift. It had taken the Cornell
University historian over a dozen years to produce a study tracing the
creation of American capitalism to the expansion of slavery. It took
less than one day for a short book review to turn his 400-page narrative
into a cause célèbre.
The inciting review appeared in The Economist magazine. It faulted
Baptist’s study, The Half Has Never Been Told (Basic Books, 2014), for
exaggerating the brutality of bondage based on the questionable
testimony of "a few slaves." Baptist fired back in Politico and The
Guardian. The magazine’s critique, he wrote, "revealed just how many
white people remain reluctant to believe black people about the
experience of being black." The Economist, widely denounced online,
published an apology.
The controversy stimulated both public discussion of slavery and sales
of Baptist’s book. Within academe, though, some think it had another
effect: to squelch debate over The Half Has Never Been Told. Skeptical
scholars may have been wary of criticizing its arguments for fear of
being perceived as apologists for slavery.
That silence is breaking. In a series of recent papers and scholarly
talks, economists, along with some historians, have begun to raise
serious questions about Baptist’s scholarship. Their critiques echo
parts of the Economist review, only this time backed up by reams of
economic research. The attack is notable because it has expanded beyond
The Half Has Never Been Told to assail the wider movement to which that
book belongs.
Over the past several years, a series of books has reshaped how
historians view the connection between slavery and capitalism. These
works show the role that coercion played in bringing about a modern
market system that is more typically identified with freedom. At a
moment of rising frustration with racial and economic inequality, they
have won a level of attention and acclaim that academics dream about but
almost never get. Some think the books’ forensic accounting of how slave
labor was stolen may buttress the case for reparations.
What the economists are now assembling amounts to a battering ram aimed
at the empirical foundations of these studies, which include Walter
Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom
(Harvard University Press) and Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global
History (Knopf). The critics, whose own scholarship stakes out similar
turf, say the new histories are riddled with errors, make overblown
claims, or distort evidence to suit their story lines.
"The shocking thing is how far they have deviated from the traditional
strengths of history, in terms of using evidence and evaluating
arguments," says Paul W. Rhode, who chairs the economics department at
the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and until recently served as
co-editor of The Journal of Economic History.
The clash is a reckoning for two disciplines that have long developed in
isolation. Some researchers believe that economic history would gain
strength if historians and economists worked together. By September,
though, the sniping over slavery had gotten so nasty that one scholar
trying to build bridges between the camps, Caitlin Rosenthal, described
herself as "kind of terrified." Rosenthal, a historian at the University
of California at Berkeley, was about to visit Dartmouth College to speak
at a public debate in which Baptist would confront the economists face
to face. "I have no idea what’s going to happen," she said, adding,
"It’s possible that it’s going to just be a huge fight."
The best way to understand this fight is to take a closer look at the
book that has caused the most friction, The Half Has Never Been Told.
When you think about the slave trade, what probably comes to mind are
the voyages that brought some 600,000 to 650,000 African captives across
the Atlantic to the territories that would eventually become the United
States. The heart of Baptist’s study is a different slave migration, one
that took place within those states.
Between about 1790 and 1860, traders and owners moved some one million
enslaved people from older states like Virginia and Maryland to newer
territories within the South’s dynamically expanding cotton economy. The
slaves were marched in chains or shipped on boats to lands the U.S. had
acquired from other empires and cleared of native peoples. At first,
they ended up in Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and South Carolina, but
later migrations took them to Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Alabama,
Louisiana, and Mississippi. A slave born in Virginia after about 1800
had something like a 30-percent chance of getting sold out of state.
The Half Has Never Been Told is about the effects of slavery’s pre-Civil
War expansion. Baptist argues that the forced migration and intensified
exploitation of slaves turned the United States from the "barely
surviving postcolonial disaster" that it had been in the 1780s to the
"geopolitical and economic superpower" that it became. He uses slave
testimony to make readers feel the brutality of this new slavery. The
migrations to places brimming with disease. The families broken up in
that process. The women marketed as "fancy girls" to excite white men’s
lust.
Historians 'carry along certain ideological positions which they hold
fervently and are not willing to test.' And, especially, the work of
cotton picking itself. As Baptist dug into his sources, he realized that
antebellum cotton production had not just expanded. It had transformed.
The amount that each slave picked per day more than tripled between 1805
and 1860. The reason, he argues, comes down largely to one word:
torture. Baptist describes how planters assigned picking quotas to
slaves, whipped them if they failed to meet the targets, and steadily
increased picking expectations for workers. Slaves avoided the lash by
learning to pick faster. To this metaphorical "whipping machine,"
Baptist attributes world-historical consequences. "Systematized torture"
in "slave labor camps," he writes, was "crucial" to creating the
cotton-fueled wealth of the Industrial Revolution.
Baptist’s language is extreme, and he has been criticized for stretching
sources to the point of putting words in slaves’ mouths. But his
principal concerns are of a piece with the growing literature on
"Slavery’s Capitalism," to borrow the title of a new essay collection.
Recent scholarship has stressed slavery’s modernity, its profitability,
and its centrality to national development, as Harvard’s Sven Beckert
wrote in a 2014 Chronicle Review survey of this research. Cotton
accounted for more than half of U.S. exports. Planters drew on global
markets to finance slave agriculture. Northern mills spun slave-grown
cotton. "The slave economy of the Southern states had ripple effects
throughout the economy," Beckert wrote, "not just shaping but dominating
it."
If this doesn’t seem novel, in some ways it isn’t. Earlier scholars,
from black Marxists like C.L.R. James and Eric Williams to neoclassical
economists like Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, dealt with
related themes. But what is important to understand is how much the new
work departs from the paradigm that shaped historians’ views for
decades. Slavery, as Eugene D. Genovese presented it in his 1974 book
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Pantheon), was a unique
constellation of labor relations that was in the capitalist world, but
not of it. Genovese saw the institution as a self-contained system
marked by frequent bargaining between master and slave over the limits
of slaveowners’ authority.
For the newer crop of historians, the important relationship is not the
psychological one between master and slave. It’s the economic one
between slaves and the markets that moved and trapped them. What’s
exciting about that approach is the way it renders the slave South as a
dynamic, changing society, in contrast to Genovese’s static,
anti-capitalist vision, says Edward L. Ayers, a historian and former
president of the University of Richmond. "To have that overturned so
quickly," he says, "it looks more like the sciences than it does the
humanities."
On a Thursday night in October, two economists who have pummeled
Baptist’s work in print, Alan L. Olmstead and Trevon D. Logan, engage
historians in a public debate over slavery’s role in the coming of
American capitalism. The setting is a dimly lit basement auditorium at
Dartmouth College, where 100 or so students and professors have gathered
to hear them go at it. This is the event Berkeley’s Rosenthal worried
would devolve into a fight.
It mostly doesn’t — until, about an hour into the discussion, Olmstead
steps up to the lectern. "I came here to hammer Baptist," he says.
Olmstead, a tall, white-haired economic historian from the University of
California at Davis, fills the screen behind him with a slide about
Baptist’s torture thesis. He clutches a stack of rolled-up papers in his
left fist. "It’s hard to find anything in history that’s more ludicrous
than this, in recent years at least."
To appreciate Olmstead’s exasperation, it helps to know a bit about the
quest that has consumed much of his career. His research on the slave
economy is animated by some of the same questions that concern Baptist.
How did slaves in the antebellum South come to pick so much more cotton?
What resulted from that growth? Olmstead and his longtime collaborator,
Michigan’s Rhode, sought answers by scouring the South for plantation
records. They accumulated a data set with more than 600,000 entries
showing the daily amount of cotton that individual slaves picked between
1800 and 1861.
Baptist drew on that data to claim that calibrated torture was behind
the productivity spike. Only, to hear Olmstead and Rhode tell it, he
left out the section of it that clashed with his story. In The Half Has
Never Been Told, he reproduced one of their charts, showing a fourfold
increase in picking rates for one type of cotton, called Upland, grown
away from coastal areas. He failed to include a separate chart that had
run below it in their original paper. That one showed almost no increase
in picking rates for another cotton crop, called Sea Island, cultivated
mostly along the coasts and on the offshore islands of Georgia, Florida,
and South Carolina.
To economists, that comparison makes all the difference, because it
enables a kind of natural experiment. As Olmstead writes in a review of
The Half Has Never Been Told, "If Baptist’s ‘whipping machine’ drove the
huge increase in Upland cotton picking output, he needs to explain why
the nabobs producing other crops did not apply more (or new forms of)
torture to increase their output." The increase in one kind of cotton
but not the other suggested a different explanation. Olmstead and Rhode
concluded that biological innovation — improved varieties of seeds that
yielded more pickable cotton — propelled the Upland jump.
Then there’s the question of how important cotton really was to the
American economy in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Baptist’s
book walks readers through a series of calculations to arrive at the
striking conclusion that more than $600 million, or almost half of
economic activity in 1836, derived directly or indirectly from
slave-produced cotton. But the notion that cotton was the prime driver
of antebellum economic growth has been repeatedly tested and rejected by
economic historians, as Olmstead and Rhode detail in a 34-page draft
paper attacking Baptist, Beckert, and Johnson.
Even worse, economists accuse Baptist of manipulating statistics to pump
up cotton’s importance. They say he tramples widely accepted methods for
calculating a country’s gross domestic product. For example, his $600
million includes pork, corn, and axes bought by slave plantations. But
those are production inputs, says Eric Hilt, an economic historian at
Wellesley College who has his own forthcoming critique of Baptist et al.
Including them and the cotton output is one of numerous examples of
Baptist’s double-counting. You could similarly claim almost any
commodity was crucial. Hay, say.
It’s "hocus-pocus," Olmstead says at Dartmouth, a number pulled from
thin air. He drives home the point by spinning around while waving a
pretend magic wand above his head.
These themes — innumeracy, overstatement, and ignorance of economics
research — pop up again and again in economists’ critiques of the new
histories of slavery and capitalism. But here’s the broader point. Most
economic historians have argued that "cotton textiles were not essential
to the Industrial Revolution," and that cotton production did not
necessarily depend on slavery, according to Douglas A. Irwin, an
economist who held and moderated the Dartmouth debate. Summarizing
economists’ thinking for the debate audience, Irwin points out that
cotton was grown elsewhere in the world without slaves. Cotton
production continued to rise in the United States even after slavery was
abolished. "In this view, the economic rise of the West was not
dependent on slavery," Irwin says, "but came about as a result of an
economic process described by Adam Smith in his book The Wealth of
Nations — a process that depended on free enterprise, exchange, and the
division of labor."
Much criticism of Baptist and others originates within the subfield of
economic history. These are scholars, trained mostly in economics, who
bring a social-science perspective to studying historical economic
behavior. That means testing hypotheses against data. It means
quantitative analysis. And it means counterfactual thinking. When
historians claim slavery was essential to the Industrial Revolution, as
Beckert and Baptist both do, to economists that implies it would not
have happened in slavery’s absence. If scholars feel uncomfortable
making that statement, "than they should think harder about the initial
claim," Hilt says. Economic historians have thought very hard about the
slave economy for decades. They believe slavery was profitable. But they
also believe the institutions created to sustain it harmed the South’s
long-term development.
As they see it, the problem with the new slavery books stems in part
from how the discipline of history has developed. In the ’60s and ’70s,
historians and economists battled over economic history. But as
historians turned toward culture, and economists became more
quantitative, economic history increasingly became just a subfield of
economics. For a variety of reasons, including the 2008 crisis,
historians are turning their attention back to financial matters. But
they "did not build up their tools in order to understand the material
world," says Rhode. "And they carry along certain ideological positions
which they hold fervently and are not willing to test." Historians, he
says, "can’t be making stuff up."
Not surprisingly, Rhode’s targets see things differently. Start with
Baptist. He ended up pulling out of the Dartmouth debate, blaming
scheduling problems, so he was not on stage to rebut Olmstead’s
wand-waving. Reached by phone, however, he does so aggressively. Baptist
sees a basic flaw in Olmstead and Rhode’s research — a problem that
points to the methodological gulf dividing historians and economists.
Economists are 'so obsessed with detail that they don't really confront
the broader dynamics of the interpretations.' It comes down to seeds.
Olmstead and Rhode say that cotton picking got more efficient because of
improved varieties of Upland cotton. They reach that conclusion in part
by comparing the growth in Upland cotton to the lack of growth in Sea
Island cotton. The problem, Baptist says, is that comparison assumes
there was no real difference in the labor systems used to produce those
crops. But there was. As Baptist writes in a blog post responding to
Olmstead and Rhode, historians have shown that Sea Island planters
assigned slaves a "task," or a specific amount of work they had to get
done each day. Task accomplished, they could go home. The quantity of
work demanded under the task system did not change much prior to
emancipation, he says, partly because those slave communities resisted
increased labor demands.
To Baptist, the root problem with Olmstead and Rhode’s work is
reductionism. The economists are bent on stripping causality down to one
variable (seeds), assuming away things they have no business discarding
(different systems of labor). They also falsely suppose that economic
actors will always look at a situation and identify the most efficient
way of achieving their goals. So, by this logic, planters in 1800
understood everything about extracting labor that they understood in
1860. But that’s antithetical to how many historians think, Baptist
says. Historians believe causality is complex and cultural frameworks
are in constant flux. By 1860, planters may have formed different ideas
about what they should be trying to get out of laborers.
Baptist calls Olmstead and Rhode "profoundly naïve" about the plantation
records that anchor their research. "These are not documents that were
generated to test seeds," he says. "They are documents that were
generated to measure labor. And to measure labor that was being
extracted by force. And to measure labor that we know, from dozens and
dozens of different testimonies by people who survived it, was generated
by the threat of being whipped for not picking enough cotton."
When economists gripe about historians retreating from economics,
historians offer a counternarrative: "The problem is the economists left
history for statistical model building," says Eric Foner, a historian of
19th-century America at Columbia University. "History for them is just a
source of numbers, a source of data to throw into their equations."
Foner considers counterfactuals absurd. A historian’s job is not to
speculate about alternative universes, he says. It’s to figure out what
happened and why. And, in the history that actually took place, cotton
was extremely important in the Industrial Revolution.
Some economists who attack the new slavery studies are "champion
nitpickers," adds Foner, who has praised Baptist’s book in The New York
Times and who taught Beckert at Columbia. "They’re barking up the wrong
tree. They’re so obsessed with detail that they don’t really confront
the broader dynamics of the interpretations. Yes, I’m sure there are
good, legitimate criticisms of the handling of economic data. But in
some ways I think it’s almost irrelevant to the fundamental thrust of
these works."
Part of what those works are trying to do, he says, is to counter the
idea that capitalism is a natural system. They want to put that system
back into history by showing the contingencies that shaped its rise.
Historians also want to come up with a new way of writing about economic
change, Berkeley’s Rosenthal says, one that brings politics and power
back into the mix. Beckert, for example, coined the phrase "war
capitalism" to describe the violent phase of development that laid the
foundation for the more familiar industrial capitalism that began in
Britain in the late 18th century. War capitalism was based on "slavery,
the expropriation of indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed
trade, and the assertion of sovereignty over people and land by
entrepreneurs," he writes in Empire of Cotton.
For all the mudslinging, the slavery fight does not break cleanly along
disciplinary lines. Historians under attack find support for their ideas
in the writing of some economists, like Ronald Findlay and Kevin H.
O’Rourke. Some historians think Olmstead and Rhode have the better side
of the facts in their battle with Baptist. Historians and economists
criticize the new slavery scholarship on grounds that go beyond economics.
One economist, Trevon Logan of Ohio State University, sounds much like a
historian in what may be the most personal of all challenges to the new
scholarship. Logan, who is African-American, cuts down Baptist for
misusing slave testimony in a misguided effort at racial amelioration.
Baptist has suggested that his book could help liberate
African-Americans from the shame of being the descendants of slaves.
This feels oddly familiar to Logan. In the ’70s, he writes, the same
impulse led Fogel and Engerman to highlight "black achievement under
adversity" and argue that slave laborers were far more productive than
their Northern counterparts. "I was not freed from shame from having
read Baptist’s book," he writes. " … American slavery will never be a
source of pride for anyone. It is time to accept that fact."
The greatest breakthroughs in historical scholarship on slavery, Logan
writes, concerned the slaves themselves. Think of Genovese’s work on
Southern culture, or Herbert Gutman’s on family structure, or John W.
Blassingame’s on psychological development. But in Baptist’s analysis,
slaves are not the real subject, Logan says. The meat of Baptist’s book,
as Logan reads it, concerns "the people who bought and sold other
individuals for profit, the way that they organized the people they
bought and sold, and how they fostered relationships with those that did
not own people to further their cause." Like many others, Baptist
"continues to see the enslaved as a vehicle for his own need to tell us
something new, even when it is not," Logan writes. "That, I believe, is
the true shame about the historiography of slavery."
Marc Parry is a senior reporter at The Chronicle.
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
