The New
York Times covered a project by Edward Baptist to collect runaway slave
ads. The website for the project states that "Such ads provide significant quantities of individual and
collective information about the economic, demographic, social, and cultural
history of slavery, but they have never been systematically collected.”
I added the underline.
Yet another illustration
of the superiority of the New History of Capitalism. Why didn’t economic
historians think to use this valuable resource? Why didn’t they try to
systematically collect this data? It must be because of their narrow
mindedness: their ideological and methodological constraints.
Oh, wait a
minute. Here is a link to a
working paper by Suresh Naidu and Jeremiah Dittmar based upon the 29,000
runaway slave ads they collected. This isn’t new. They received funding from
Institute for New Economic Thinking and they have been presenting the work at
conferences for about 4 years now, including the Economic History Association
and the Organization of American Historians.
Earlier,
John Komlos had done a study that involved more than 10,000 ads.
All of this isn't to say that it is not potentially a good project and one that may add to our knowledge, but can you honestly say that it has never been systematically collected?
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