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.
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". They had three sons.