Genovese argued that the Southern slaveholders were not rational economic actors and that slavery made the south unable to develop in the same way the Northern states would. This was seen as a restatement, albeit from the left, of
Ulrich B. Phillips' thesis that American slavery was a reciprocal if uneven relationship between the slaves and the slaveholders. Genovese's intellectual closeness to Phillips was shown by him quoting Phillips on the front of his first book.
The Political Economy of Slavery The Political Economy of Slavery was a collection of essays that examined the economic Southern slave economy through a
Marxist lens, arguing it was
pre-capitalist with a
paternalistic ideology that conflicted with the
capitalist norms of the industrial North, agreeing with the more conservative analysis of
Ulrich B. Phillips. Genovese contends that the economic logic of slavery was rational within its own context, but ultimately unsustainable due to its resistance to technological progress and
internal contradictions. By redefining scholarly debate on the relationship between capitalism and Southern slavery it remains one of Genovese's most influential works.
Materialism and Idealism in the History of Negro Slavery in the Americas In 1968, Genovese wrote a critical
historiography of the major studies of slavery in the Americas from a
hemispheric perspective. He considered the demand by
Marxist anthropologist Marvin Harris in
Patterns of Race in the Americas for a
materialist alternative to the idealistic framework of historians such as
Frank Tannenbaum,
Stanley Elkins, and
Gilberto Freyre. Tannenbaum had first introduced the hemispheric perspective by showing that the current status of blacks in various societies of the Western Hemisphere had roots in the attitude toward the black as a slave, which reflected the total religious, legal, and moral history of the enslaving whites. Tannenbaum ignored the material foundations of slave society, most particularly class relations. Later students have qualified his perspectives but have worked within the framework of an "idealistic" interpretation. Harris, on the other hand, insisted that material conditions determined social relations and necessarily prevailed over counter-tendencies in the historical tradition. Harris' work revealed him to be an economic determinist and, as such, ahistorical. By attempting to construct a materialism that bypassed ideological and psychological elements in the formation of social classes, he passed into a "variant of vulgar Marxism" and offered only soulless mechanism.
The World the Slaveholders Made In the 1960s, Genovese in his Marxist stage depicted the masters of the slaves as part of a "seigneurial" society that was anti-modern, pre-bourgeois and pre-capitalist in
The World the Slaveholders Made. In 1970 Stampp's review found fault with the quantity and quality of the evidence used to support the book's arguments. He took issue with the attempt to apply a Marxian interpretation to the Southern slave system.
Roll, Jordan, Roll In his best-known book,
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), Genovese examined the society of the slaves. This book won the
Bancroft Prize in 1975. Genovese viewed the antebellum South as a closed and organically united paternalist society that exploited and attempted to dehumanize the slaves. Genovese paid close attention to the role of religion as a form of resistance in the daily life of the slaves, because slaves used it to claim a sense of humanity. He redefined resistance to slavery as all efforts by which slaves rejected their status as slaves, including their religion, music, and the culture they built, as well as work slowdowns, periodic disappearances, and escapes and open rebellions. Genovese applied
Antonio Gramsci's theory of
cultural hegemony to the slave South, as well as to Caribbean case studies.
From Rebellion to Revolution In his 1979 book,
From Rebellion to Revolution, Genovese depicted a change in slave rebellions from attempts to win freedom to an effort to overthrow slavery as a social system.
Fruits of Merchant Capital In the 1983 book that he co-wrote with his wife,
The Fruits of Merchant Capital, Genovese underscored what he regarded as tensions between bourgeois property and slavery. In the view of the Genoveses, slavery was a "hybrid system" that was both pre-capitalist and capitalist.
The Slaveholders’ Dilemma In
The Slaveholders’ Dilemma, Genovese explores how antebellum slaveholders sought to reconcile their contradictory commitments to slavery with Enlightenment ideals of liberty and progress. He argued that they could neither fully abandon nor fully integrate the dominant
liberalism of the nineteenth century. It was seen as a turn to a greater concentration on
intellectual history.
The Mind of the Master Class The Mind of the Master Class, analyzes how antebellum Southern slaveholders, through a richly documented survey of their reading, religious beliefs, and political philosophy, constructed a deeply conservative, paternalistic intellectual worldview rooted in classical and Christian traditions to justify slavery while engaging with broader transatlantic and modern debates. == Shift to the right ==