In this short response I will confine myself to rebutting Brown’s uses and interpretations of Smith rather than addressing the wider argument of the paper. I would note however that it is not uncontroversial whether slavery was economically more productive than employing ‘freemen’ (Smith certainly thought not), even though there was certainly profit to be made in the slavery business. This refl...

Background This study aims to characterize the role of county-specific legacy of slavery in patterning temporal (i.e., 1968-2014), and geographic (i.e., Southern counties) declines in heart disease mortality. In this context, the U.S. has witnessed dramatic declines in heart disease mortality since the 1960's, which have benefitted place and race groups unevenly, with slower declines in the Sou...

David Levy and Sandra Peart mean to revise the history of nineteenth-century British political economy. And more. In their latest, fascinating installment, The Vanity of the Philosopher, Peart and Levy argue that the transition from classical to post-classical economics is best understood as a sea change in the way political economists regarded human nature. What happened? Well, in the beginnin...

morrison’s song of solomon could be viewed as a paragon of trauma fiction. since no narrative of trauma can be told in a linear way, morrison tries to depict the overwhelming power of trauma through a non-linear narrative, episodic delivery, and flashbacks. accordingly, the readers are compelled to concoct the disjointed and fragmented memories in order to solve the riddle of the text, in which...

As we turn to the New Testament we confront many problems associated with its attitude to slavery. There is no programme for a new social order, as we might have expected: no suggestion that slaves ought to be freed. Indeed, we could be forgiven for believing that throughout the New Testament the institution is bolstered up by the apostolic exhortations to masters and slaves (Eph 6:5-9; Col 3:2...