We have attacked the traditional interpretation of the economics of slavery not in order to resurrect a defunct system, but in order to correct the perversion of the history of blacks — in order to strike down the view that black Americans were without culture, without achievement, and without development for their first two hundred and fifty years on American soil.

Robert William Fogel, Stanley L. Engerman (1974). Time on the cross: the economics of American Negro slavery. p. 258