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) undertoo

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e sees in slavery as an economic and political system, an inability to respond to changing economic conditions and new technological developments. By reducing the slave to the status of what could be thought of as talking livestock, the slave master reduced further the productivity of his modes of production. Slave labor is described by Genovese (1967) as associated with low levels of productivity. By depending on enslaved laborers, Genovese (1967) also claims that a culturally dislocated labor force was automatically an uninvolved and unmotivated labor force. While considering slavery in terms of its economic, political and social effects, Genovese (1967) does not in any way dismiss or ignore the ill effects of this institution upon its primary victims - the slaves themselves. Genovese (1967, p. 81) contends that "slavery, once it becomes a large-scale enterprise, reverses its earlier contribution to the productivity of the laborer and undermines the culture, dignity, efficiency, and even the manhood of the enslaved worker." Though Genovese (1967) recognizes as many historians have chosen not to recognize, that African societies also employed slave labor, he makes the point that African slavery and American slavery diffe
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Approximate Word count = 1705
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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