Historians Clash Over Fogel's Book

Eighteen months after the publication of his book on slavery, "Time on the Cross," the controversy surrounding Robert W. Fogel, Burbank Professor of Political Economy and professor of History, has not died down. Recent weeks have even seen a distinct heating up of the scholarly polemic.

Thomas L. Haskell, professor of History at Rice University, started the newest round of historical infighting last week in an article calling "Time on the Cross" "possibly not even worth further attention by serious scholars."

The article, which appeared in the New York Review of Books, went on to attack Fogel's book, which Stanley Engerman coauthored, for "carelessness" in the interpretation and collection of statistical evidence and "extreme overindulgence in the heady art of pyramiding assumptions."

In "Time on the Cross," Fogel said that the Southern slave plantation was economically more efficient than Northern agriculture, and that efficiency came from the slaves' ability to rise in the plantation system of incentives to do so.

Fogel--whose method is based on quantitative materials, mainly census tracts and plantation records--also argued that the slave system was less brutal than past historians have said.

Critics of Fogel, including Haskell, have said that Fogel's data is misleading and fragmentary, and that his basic mathematical comparison between Southern and Northern agriculture are inaccurate and possibly make the book's conclusions worthless.

Unusually Intense Controversy

Although the historians involved admit the controversy is unusually intense because of present concerns over racial issues, Fogel's detractors and defenders both say that the final evaluation of the book's worth rests on more esoteric issues, like the accuracy of Fogel's comparison of pre-Civil War Northern agriculture, which was multi-crop, and Southern agriculture, which grew only cotton.

Fogel received tenure at Harvard last year in the Economics Department and the History Department, where senior faculty support for him, and for quantitative history has apparently not diminished.

Kenneth J. Arrow, Conant University Professor, said yesterday that he is still "very impressed with Fogel" and that Fogel has a "diligence and expertness at finding a broad base of information."

Arrow said that Fogel's central contention in "Time on the Cross"--that plantation agriculture was "at least as efficient as Northern agriculture"--has not been seriously challenged in the several books that have recently come out attacking the book.

Fragmentary Data

But Arrow added that the idea that efficiency was related to the good treatment of slaves "was not proven--the data is too fragmentary."

Dean Rosovsky, who is also Barker Professor Economics, said yesterday that "Time on the Cross" is a "very important book" and that quantitative history--also called cliometrics--is a field with "a great deal of promise."

The controversy over the book partly stemmed from Fogel's statistical methods, Rosovsky said, which many conventional historians either "don't understand or don't like."

Haskell, who is on leave from Rice this year to work at Yale, said yesterday that his respect for cliometrics and for Fogel "remain high," but added, "I can't help but be skeptical, because Fogel has not yet responded to his critics."

Fogel, who is on leave this year at Cambridge University in England, could not be reached for comment yesterday