In 1965 Eugene Genovese published his first book, The Political Economy of Slavery, a stunning reinterpretation of the antebellum South. Although he wrote as a Marxist, he revived the bourgeois critique of slavery most closely associated with Adam Smith. The class conflict that might have driven the history of the South was stifled, he argued, by the slave owners' paternalism towards their slaves and by their hegemony over farmers who did not own slaves. Yet there was no mistaking his Marxism: at a time when most American historians rejected political economy as a form of economic determinism, Genovese placed class analysis at the centre of his work. He argued that slavery lacked the rational efficiency that characterised a genuinely capitalist economy, that it inhibited Southern economic development and, most important, that it gave rise to a ruling class that was intrinsically and increasingly hostile to the emerging bourgeoisie of the North. He thereby situated the American Civil War as one of the revolutionary struggles over capitalist development that he saw as the distinguishing feature of modern global history.

LRB 11 March 2010 | PDF Download