Suchergebnisse

This is the first full-length study of how colour intersected with polity, society and economy in the nineteenth century South. Although legal historians have explored how early Americans legally defined and contested race, that literature has overlooked or downplayed the middle ground occupied by a sizeable mixed-race population of antebellum free people. These were the 'talented tenth' long before W.E.B. Dubois coined the term.

This is the first full-length study of how colour intersected with polity, society and economy in the nineteenth century South. Although legal historians have explored how early Americans legally defined and contested race, that literature has overlooked or downplayed the middle ground occupied by a sizeable mixed-race population of antebellum free people. These were the 'talented tenth' long before W.E.B. Dubois coined the term

"Legal and economic historians now emphasize the centrality of organizational law in determining the contractual boundaries of the firm. Nineteenth-century US law recognized a small set of firm types - proprietorship, partnership and corporation - and enforced the creditor rights and priorities associated with them. This paper investigates how those creditor rights and priorities influenced the availability of credit. Using a unique data set from the nineteenth century United States and borrower fixed effects, I find that partnerships paid more for credit than proprietorships. The interest rate disadvantage for partnerships was offset by their ability to finance larger and longer-horizon entrepreneurial ventures"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"A long-standing debate concerns the rationality of slave owners and this paper addresses that debate within the context of manumission. Using a new sample of 19th-century Virginia manumissions, I show that manumission was associated with the productive characteristics of slaves. More productive slaves were manumitted at younger ages than less productive slaves. Although more productive slaves were more valuable to slave owners, which might be expected to delay manumission, more productive slaves faced more attractive labor market opportunities outside slavery, which elicited greater effort within slavery in order to buy their way out of slavery. Further, this paper addresses three important and two emergent literatures: the economics of slavery; the economics of stature; and the economics of complexion. The results reveal that height, complexion, and sex were the principal determinants of age at manumission"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"Black is not always black. Subtle distinctions in skin tone translate into significant differences in outcomes. Data on more than 15,000 households interviewed during the 1860 federal census exhibit sharp differences in wealth holdings between white, mulatto, and black households in the urban South. We document these differences, investigate the relationships between wealth and the recorded household characteristics, and decompose the wealth gaps into treatment and characteristic effects. In addition to higher wealth holdings of white households as compared to free African-Americans in general, there are distinct differences between both the characteristics of and wealth of free mulatto and black households, whether male- or female-headed. While black-headed households' mean predicted log wealth was only 20% of white-headed households', mulatto-headed households' was nearly 50% that of whites'. The difference between light- and dark-complexion is highly significant in semi-log wealth regressions. In the decomposition of this wealth differential, treatment effects play a large role in explaining the wealth gap between all subpopulation pairs"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site