Time in the Paddies: A Comparison of Rice Production in the Southeastern United States and Lower Burma in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The Question Of the relative efficiency of agricultural production within the institutional framework of slavery flared in the 1970s. Fogel and Engerman (1971, 1977) found antebellum Southern agriculture to have been considerably more productive than previously thought. Although this aspect of their finding became generally accepted, the controversy focused on just how efficient slave production actually was compared to Northern agriculture (David and Temin, 1974; David et al., 1976; Schaefer and Schmitz, 1979; Wright, 1979).