lusions and interpretations, they also serve the student of history as an excellent resource for further study.
The book is also well written and logically organized. Genovese (1967, p. 3) announces his purpose early in the text, stating that "these studies fall under the rubric of 'the political economy of slavery,' not the 'economics of slavery,' because they are concerned less with economies or even economic history as generally understood than with the economic aspect of a society in crisis." Genovese (1967) argues in essence, that slavery created in the American South a stratified class system as well as a particular political community, economy, ideology, and set of psychological patterns.
These effects isolated the South from the rest of the nation and from the rapidly developing and more industrialized sections of the world. Such a civilization, says Genovese (1967), did not have the capacity to survive the dramatic technological and ideological changes taking place during the nineteenth century. Slavery is seen by Genovese (1967) as having given the South a special way of life and providing the basis for a regional social order in which the slave labor system dominated all other systems.
In his first essay, Genovese (1967) interprets the slave South as a hege
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