The UCLA Center for Social Theory and Comparative History
hosted an event on the topic of Free and Unfree Labor in March. Below is a link
to the page that has an audio recording. Unfortunately, there does not appear
to be video.
Speakers:
Gavin Wright is William Robertson Coe Professor
of American Economic History, Stanford University and author of Sharing
the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (2018)
and Slavery and American Economic Development (2006).
Professor Wright will present on "Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism.”
Suresh Naidu is Associate Professor of Economics
and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Professor Naidu will present on
"Labor Markets in the Shadow of American Slavery.”
John Clegg is a doctoral candidate in the
Department of Sociology at NYU. His paper is entitled “The Real Wages of
Whiteness.”
Wright tells why Eric
Williams, Barbara
Solow, and Joseph
Inikori are right about the importance of British development during the
Industrial Revolution and Ed Baptist is wrong about the importance of slavery
for American economic development during the 19th century. He also
has some positive things to say about the recent work of historians like Caitlin
Rosenthal and economists like Trevon Logan.
Naidu talks about the importance of the overall repressiveness
of the South as a prerequisite for repression on individual plantations.
Clegg talks about his work on wages of poor whites. It
seemed the most preliminary and most difficult to assess without access to the
actual paper, or at least the tables and graphs. He points to the recent work
of Keri
Leigh Merritt, but it was not clear to what extent he regards his work as either
supporting or contradicting hers.
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