Robert Fogel e a escravatura

propósito das ideias de Robert Fogel sobre escravatura citadas pelo Prof. Arroja:

Fogel's most famous and controversial work is Time on the Cross a 1974 two-volume quantitative study of American slavery co-written with Stanley Engerman. In the book, Fogel and Engerman argued that slaves in the American South lived better than did many industrial workers in the North. Fogel based this analysis largely on plantation records and claimed that slaves worked less, were better fed and were whipped only occasionally. Time on the Cross created a fire-storm of controversy, and many mistakenly considered Fogel an apologist for slavery. In fact, Fogel objected to slavery on moral grounds; he thought that on purely economic grounds, slavery was not unprofitable or inefficient as previous historians had argued, such as Ulrich B. Phillips. A survey of economic historians concludes that 48 % "agreed" and another 24 % "agreed with provisos" with Fogel and Engerman's argument that "slave agriculture was efficient compared with free agriculture." In addition, 23 % "agreed" and 35 % "agreed with provisos" with their argument that "the material (rather than psychological) conditions of the lives of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers in the decades before the Civil War."