Stanley Engerman on Slavery

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2006

⏱️ 71 minutes

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Summary

Stanley Engerman of the University of Rochester talks about slavery throughout world history, the role it played (or didn't play) in the Civil War and the incentives facing slaves and slave owners. This is a wide-ranging, fascinating conversation with the co-author of the classic Time on the Cross (co-authored with Robert Fogel) and the forthcoming Slavery, Emancipation, and Freedom (LSU Press, 2007). Engerman knows as much as anyone alive about the despicable human arrangement called slavery and the vastness and precision of his knowledge is on display in this interview.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk brought to you by the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:04.0	I'm your host Russ Roberts of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:10.0	My guest today is Stanley Angerman, the John Monroe Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester,
0:15.0	where he's also a professor of history.
0:17.0	Stan's most famous work is Time on the Cross, the Economics of American Negro Slavery,
0:22.0	which he wrote with Robert Fogel and was published in 1974.
0:26.0	He's written widely on a wide variety of topics in economic history.
0:30.0	His latest book Slavery, Emancipation and Freedom will be published by the LSU Press in the spring of 2007.
0:37.0	Stan, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:39.0	Thank you.
0:40.0	Now, Stan, we were talking the other day and you mentioned that Slavery is a very frequent institution in human history.
0:47.0	Tell me what you meant by that.
0:50.0	Well, we are all familiar with the Slavery which had existed in the American South.
0:56.0	One of the questions I found curious is since it's so boring to us,
1:02.0	how did people at the time live with knowing they were enslaving other people?
1:07.0	So then I started to look around to other parts of the Americas,
1:12.0	other parts of Europe, Asia, go back and forward in time.
1:15.0	And it turns out that probably some form of slavery is the most ubiquitous of all human institutions.
1:23.0	Slavery is discussed in the Bible at various times.
1:28.0	Slavery existed in just about every country, at every time.
1:32.0	Very few people in the world had either not been slaves or not enslaved others, sometimes actually both.
1:41.0	And that slavery just existed a very long time after it ended in the United States.
	...

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