Black Studies

Little, Brown and Company: Boston, 1974.  First edition. Signed and dated by Fogel with a warm inscription to Henry Rosovsky, economist and academic administrator who served as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University.  Rosovsky is among a large group of scholars cited in the book’s Acknowledgments who contributed to the development of the book.  The date of the inscription precedes by several weeks the New York Times’ review of the book. Fogel went on to win the 1993 Nobel Prize for Economics for “having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change,” according to the Nobel citation.  In the biography Fogel wrote for the Nobel, he acknowledges Rosovsky for providing research assistants, a computer programmer, and the computer time needed to conduct his research while at Harvard in the late 1970s. This groundbreaking book reexamined the economic foundations of American slavery, marking “the start of a new period of slavery scholarship and some searching revisions of a national tradition” (C. Vann Woodward, New York Review of Books).  The book generated somewhat of a firestorm of media coverage when it was first published due to its controversial hypothesis: that slavery was a highly efficient, profitable enterprise, that the South was generally flourishing economically on the eve of the Civil War, that the slaves were treated reasonably well, and that they had a standard of living compared favorably with many northern white industrial workers. “It is a rare monograph in economic history that gets reviewed in magazines and newspapers such as Newsweek, Time, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post among others; or whose authors appear on television talk shows. Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross was one such book — perhaps the only one.” A near fine copy in a very good dust wrapper owing to a tear on the rear panel. less