斯坦利·恩格曼

斯坦利·L·恩格尔曼（英语：Stanley Lewis Engerman，1936年3月14日—2023年5月11日）是一位美国经济史学家，专攻美国奴隶制时期的历史，主要作品有《苦难的时代：美国奴隶制经济学》（Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery，与罗伯特·福格尔合著，获1975年班克洛夫特奖）、《剑桥美国经济史》（The Cambridge Economic History of the United States，三卷本，与罗伯特·E·高尔曼合著）等。

Stanley Lewis Engerman (March 14, 1936 – May 11, 2023) was an American economist and economic historian. He was known for his quantitative historical work along with Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Fogel. His first major book, co-authored with Robert Fogel in 1974, was Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. This significant work, winner of the Bancroft Prize in American history, challenged readers to think critically about the economics of slavery. Engerman has also published over 100 articles and has authored, co-authored or edited 16 book-length studies.

Engerman served as president of the Social Science History Association as well as president of the Economic History Association. He was professor of Economics and Professor of History at the University of Rochester, where he taught classes in economic history and the economics of sports and entertainment. From 2009 to 2012 he was a visiting professor in the Harvard University Economics Department, where he taught the economics of sports and entertainment.

Engerman's students included Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, David Eltis, Gary Gorton, Art Laffer, Jeremy Lin, and Robert L. Paquette.

Early life and education

Engerman was born in Brooklyn in 1936. His father, Irving Engerman, was a wholesale furniture salesman while his mother, Edith (Kaplan) Engerman, was a homemaker. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in accounting from New York University in 1956 and 1958 before earning a PhD in economics in 1962 from Johns Hopkins University.

Academic career

After completing his PhD, he taught at Yale University for a year. He started working at the University of Rochester in 1963 where he was a professor of economics until his retirement in 2017.

Time on the Cross

The critical reception of Engerman's most widely read work, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (co-authored with Robert Fogel) was unique in its public visibility. Reminiscent of Charles A. Beard's economic analysis of the Constitution in its longevity, Time on the Cross made a variety of politically charged claims based on cliometric quantitative methods. Fogel and Engerman claimed that slavery remained an economically viable institution and slave ownership was generally a profitable investment, slave agriculture was very efficient, and the material conditions of the lives of slaves "compared favorably with those of free industrial workers."

Charles Crowe offered a summary of the work: "The cliometricians announced the scientific discovery of a vastly different South led by confident and effective slaveowning entrepreneurs firmly wedded to handsome profits from a booming economy with high per capita incomes and an efficiency ratio 35 per- cent greater than that of free Northern agriculture. In the new dispensation the efficient, often highly skilled, and very productive slaves embraced the Protestant work ethic and prudish Victorian morals, avoided both promiscuity and substantial sexual exploitation by planters, lived in father-headed and stable nuclear families, kept 90 percent of the fruits of their labor, and enjoyed one of the best sets of material conditions in the world for working class people."

The book was controversial, with critics saying that it presented a "relatively benign" depiction of slavery. According to The New York Times, a panel about the book hosted by Engerman and Fogel at Rochester, and attended by about 100 academics, turned so contentious that it the local press termed it "scholarly warfare".

In a 1989 edition of the book, Engerman and Fogel acknowledge that they could have done more to emphasize the evils of slavery.