Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery

Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974) is a quantitative study of slavery by the economists Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. The book argued that slavery was an economically rational institution and that the economic exploitation of slaves was not as catastrophic as presumed, because there were financial incentives for slaveholders to maintain a basic level of material support for those they held as property. It was controversial and attracted media attention as it contradicted the long-standing notion that slavery was economically inefficent, underdeveloped the Southern United States, and was on the path to extinction before the American Civil War broke out.