Genovese, E.D. (1967). The Political Economy of Slavery.
Eugene D. Genovese (1967), in The Political Economy of Slavery, undertook a comprehensive investigation of the agricultural reform movement in the Old South. The end result of his investigation was the aforementioned text, which is divided into four sections. This report will offer a critical review of Genovese's (1967) central themes and theses.
The first section of Genovese's (1967) book identifies the setting, which consists of the slave South. The second section discusses the intersection between land and slave labor in five essays that address the causes and effects of low slave labor productivity, the nature of the African laborer in both Africa and the slave South, cotton, slavery, and soil exhaustion, livestock, and the limits of agricultural reform.
Part three of Genovese's (1967) text positions Southern towns as subservient to the countryside. In this section, the author assesses the significance of the slave plantation as the key vehicle for Southern economic development. He then considers the industrialists that functioned under a slave regime. The section concludes with a political analysis of the economic debate regarding slave versus free labor in Southern factories. The book concludes in part four with Genovese's (1967) analysis of the general crisis of the slave-holding South.
In reading this text, one immediately becomes aware that Genovese (1967) undertook a massive research effort that resulted in a substantial amount of bibliographic citations and extensive documentation. Genovese (1967) drew upon primary sources as well as secondary analyses to create a synthesis of these disparate sources. Each of the chapters of this book is extensively footnoted and the author includes both a bibliographical note and a thorough index of the book's contents. These additions to the text not only provide substantiation for Genovese's (1967) conc...