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"The Civil Rights movement was also a struggle for economic justice, one that until now has not had its own history. Sharing the Prize demonstrates the significant material gains black southerners made - in improved job opportunities, quality of education, and health care - from the 1960s to the 1970s and beyond. Because black advances did not come at the expense of southern whites, Gavin Wright argues, the civil rights struggle was the rarest of social revolutions : one that benefited both sides"--

"The civil rights movement was also a struggle for economic justice, one that until now has not had its own history. Sharing the Prize demonstrates the significant material gains black southerners made--in improved job opportunities, quality of education, and health care--from the 1960s to the 1970s and beyond. Because black advances did not come at the expense of southern whites, Gavin Wright argues, the civil rights struggle was that rarest of social revolutions: one that benefits both sides. From the beginning, black activists sought economic justice in addition to full legal rights. The southern bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins were famous acts of civil disobedience, but they were also demands for jobs in the very services being denied blacks. In the period of enforced desegregation following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the wages of southern black workers increased dramatically. Wright's painstaking documentation of this fact undermines beliefs that government intervention was unnecessary, that discrimination was irrational, and that segregation would gradually disappear once the market was allowed to work. Wright also explains why white southerners defended for so long a system that failed to serve their own best interests. Sharing the Prize makes clear that the material benefits of the civil rights acts of the 1960s are as significant as the moral ones--an especially timely achievement as these monumental pieces of legislation, and the efficacy of governmental intervention more broadly, face new challenges"--Publisher description.

"Slavery and American Economic Development is a small book with a big interpretative punch. It is one of those rare books about a familiar subject that manages to seem fresh and new." -- Charles B. Dew, Journal of Interdisciplinary History "A stunning reinterpretation of southern economic history and what is perhaps the most important book in the field since Time on the Cross.... I frequently found myself forced to rethink long-held positions." -- Russell R. Menard, Civil War History Through an analysis of slavery as an economic institution, Gavin Wright presents an innovative look at the economic divergence between North and South in the antebellum era. He draws a distinction between slavery as a form of work organization -- the aspect that has dominated historical debates -- and slavery as a set of property rights. Slave-based commerce remained central to the eighteenth-century rise of the Atlantic economy, not because slave plantations were superior as a method of organizing production, but because slaves could be put to work on sugar plantations that could not have attracted free labor on economically viable terms. Gavin Wright is William Robertson Coe Professor in American Economic History at Stanford University and the author of The Political Economy of the Cotton South and Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War, winner of the Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award of the Southern Historical Association. He has served as president of the Economic History Association and the Agricultural History Society.

AbstractBritish and American debates on the relationship between slavery and economic growth have had little interaction with each other. This article attempts intellectual arbitrage by joining these two literatures. The linkage turns on the neglected part two of the 'Williams thesis': that slavery and the slave trade, once vital for the expansion of British industry and commerce, were no longer needed by the nineteenth century. In contrast to recent assertions of the centrality of slavery for US economic development, the article argues that part two of the Williams thesis applies with equal force to nineteenth‐century America. Unlike sugar, cotton required no large investments of fixed capital and could be cultivated efficiently at any scale, in locations that would have been settled by free farmers in the absence of slavery. Cheap cotton was undoubtedly important for the growth of textiles, but cheap cotton did not require slavery. The best evidence for this claim is that after two decades of war, abolition, and Reconstruction, cotton prices returned to their prewar levels. In both countries, the rise of anti‐slavery sentiment was not driven by the prospect of direct economic benefits, but major economic interest groups acquiesced in abolition because they no longer saw slavery as indispensable.