This book is one of those things, like Economic Institutions of Capitalism, I had to open and read through as if agnostic. Deep zen bath.
Can you guess why I went searching for it? mmmm. My journey began on the web. Here is the path: Veblen --> Kuznets --> NBER (bah) -->econometrics (bah) -->cleometricians (c. 1970) -->Feinstein. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
For more that a decade
Remember Donnan? Forget Donnan. Until you obtain Time on the Cross, vol. II, Evidence and Methods, wherein is revealed, presumably, all the source data omitted in vol. I, or all source data not even footnoted. That's how neolibmetricians do you, so to reconstruct historical truths from the numbers ...
scores of scholars have been exploring every conceivable source of information bearing on the operation of the slave system. The search led them into the deepest tecesses of the National Archives
...although detailed census data prior to 1970 is all county level, as I've commented elsewhere.
and various state archives where the original, handwritten schedules of information collected by the census takers of 1850 and 1860 were stored....
The bulk appears to originate from LA [!], NC, SC, VA, UT, sadly. The largest slave populations were AL, MS, GA. Also, the book makes no, ZERO, attempt to evaluate international slave trade, not even to balance national accounts or adjust price inflation.
As a result of the search, the cliometricians have amassed a more complete body of information on the operation of the slave system that has been available to anyone interested in the subject either during the antebellum era or since then. It is this enormous body of evidence which is the source of many of their new discoveries. Some of the discoveries were at one time as unbelievable to the cliometricians as they will be to the readers of this volume. Indeed many of the findings presented in the chapters that follow wer initially discounted, even rejected out of hand. But when persistent efforts to contradict the unexpected discoveries failed, these scholars were forced into a wide-ranging and radical intepretation of American slavery. [Time on the Cross: 7-8]
Some of the discoveries were at one time as unbelievable to the cliometricians as they will be to the readers of this volume. Indeed many of the findings presented in the chapters that follow wer initially discounted, even rejected out of hand. But when persistent efforts to contradict the unexpected discoveries failed, these scholars were forced into a wide-ranging and radical intepretation of American slavery. [Time on the Cross: 7-8]
Radical in the narrow sense of refuting the claims of economic historian and authoritay U.B. ("who?") Philips, 1877 - 1934.
oh, yes. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
