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 economistRobert Fogel. His first major book, co-authored with Robert Fogel in 1974, wasTime on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. This significant work, winner of theBancroft Prize in American history, challenged readers to think critically about the economics ofslavery. Engerman has also published over 100 articles and has authored, co-authored or edited 16 book-length studies.

Engerman served as president of theSocial Science History Association as well as president of theEconomic History Association. He was professor of Economics and Professor of History at theUniversity 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 theHarvard University Economics Department, where he taught the economics of sports and entertainment.

Engerman's students includedEvelyn Brooks Higginbotham,David Eltis,Gary Gorton,Art Laffer,Jeremy Lin^{[citation needed]}, andRobert L. Paquette.

Engerman was born inBrooklyn in 1936. His father, Irving Engerman, was a wholesale furniture salesman while his mother, Edith (Kaplan) Engerman, was a homemaker.^[1] He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in accounting fromNew York University in 1956 and 1958 before earning a PhD in economics in 1962 fromJohns Hopkins University.^[1]

After completing his PhD, he taught at Yale University for a year.^[1] He started working at the University of Rochester in 1963 where he was a professor of economics until his retirement in 2017.^[1]

The critical reception of Engerman's most widely read work,Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (co-authored withRobert Fogel) was unique in its public visibility. Reminiscent ofCharles A. Beard's economic analysis of the Constitution in its longevity,Time on the Cross made a variety of politically charged claims based oncliometric 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."^{[2][non-primary source needed]}

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 theProtestant 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."^[3]

The book was controversial, with critics saying that it presented a "relatively benign" depiction of slavery.^[1] According toThe 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".^[1]

In a 1989 edition of the book, Engerman and Fogel acknowledge that they could have done more to emphasize the evils of slavery.^[1]

Engerman co-authored an article entitled "History Lessons: Institutions, Factor Endowments, and Paths of Development in the New World" withKenneth Sokoloff, which can be found inThe Journal of Economic Perspectives. Sokoloff and Engerman go in-depth and argue that the economic trajectory of former New World colonies over the past 300 years was largely determined by various facets of their natural environments. Sokoloff and Engerman focus mainly on the effects of the colonies' soil qualities. Sokoloff and Engerman claim that in areas such as Cuba which possessed land suitable for sugar and coffee, thesoil quality led to economies of scale and plantation agriculture and slave labor. This in turn led to a guarded franchise, high tax rates, and limits on education. In areas such as the United States which possessed land suitable for wheat, the soil quality led to small scale farming and relatively equal distributions of wealth. This in turn led to an open franchise and broad public education. Sokoloff and Engerman conclude that areas such as the United States, which emphasized equality and access to public education, were able to progress faster economically than areas such as Cuba which did not allow such opportunities to its residents.

He was married to Judith Rader Engerman until she died in 2019.^[4] They had three sons.^[4]

Engerman died frommyelodysplastic syndrome at his home inWatertown, Massachusetts, on May 11, 2023, at the age of 87.^[1][4]

• Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (with Robert Fogel), 1974
• Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies by Eugene D. Genovese and Stanley L. Engerman, 1975
• A Historical Guide to World Slavery bySeymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman (1998)
• Slavery, Emancipation, and Freedom: Comparative Perspectives (Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History) by Stanley L. Engerman (2007)
• Slavery (Oxford Readers) by Stanley Engerman, Seymour Drescher, and Robert Paquette (2001)
• The Evolution of Suffrage Institutions in the New World SL ENGERMAN, KL SOKOLOFF - The Journal of Economic History, 2005 - Cambridge Univ Press
• Institutional and Non-Institutional Explanations of Economic Differences SL ENGERMAN, KL SOKOLOFF - NBER Working Paper, 2003
• Economic Development in the Americas since 1500: Endowments and Institutions by Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, 2011

• Boles, John; Nolen, Elelyn Thomas, eds. (1987).Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honour of Sanford W. Higginbotham. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.ISBN 0-8071-1318-2.

• Thomas Weiss review essay on Fogel and Engerman'sTime on the Cross
• Roberts, Russ (November 21, 2006)."Engerman on Slavery".EconTalk.Library of Economics and Liberty.