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-Great Cultural Revolution

‘Sloppy scholarship': New book refutes claim early U.S. economy was built on slavery

2025-08-24

[CollegeFix] A new book "The 1619 Project Myth," written by historian Phillip Magness, makes the case that The New York Times’ award-winning historical series about America’s founding is largely inaccurate and politically motivated.

Magness (pictured), told The College Fix in a recent phone interview that he was initially excited when he first heard about The 1619 Project, a series of articles in 2019 that delved into the founding of America.

However, "within about two articles, I realized there were some serious errors," he said. An economic historian, Magness serves as the David J. Theroux Chair in political economy at the Independent Institute and an adjunct professor at George Mason University.

A major focus of his new book, published in mid-July, is debunking the project’s economic claims about slavery.

The 1619 Project is a historical series created by New York Times staff writer Nikole Hannah-Jones. The project focuses on the history of slavery and race relations in early America, arguing that the country’s true founding was in 1619, when the first slaves arrived in America, not 1776. Hannah-Jones also teaches journalism at Howard University.

Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for the series, despite critiques from a number of historians and other prominent scholars, and the project continues to impact historic conversations today.

Magness said the authors "basically didn’t know the economic literature of slavery. This is one of the most heavily studied areas in the subfield of economic history for, I think, pretty obvious reasons."

"Matthew Desmond, the author of the chapter on capitalism and economics seemed to be oblivious to the existence of this," Magness told The Fix.

In Desmond’s chapter, he argued that slavery was at the heart of the American economy. A sociologist at Princeton University, he wrote: "Cotton planters, millers and consumers were fashioning a new economy, one that was global in scope and required the movement of capital, labor and products across long distances. In other words, they were fashioning a capitalist economy."

Magness said Desmond didn’t do his homework, because "he missed major research findings of the existing literature including pretty clear, conclusive evidence that slavery was not the driving mechanism of the entire American economy.

"Cotton was not the dominant industry of the American economy. If anything it was about 5 or 6 percent of GDP in that era," Magness said.

The book also critiques the project for inserting modern-day politics into historical scholarship.

Magness told The Fix that the authors "take that claim about American wealth being rooted in slavery up into the present day and use it to argue for income redistribution and massive reparations programs." He described it as "a current, modern day political agenda premised on what essentially comes down to an arithmetic error at the core of the original 1619 Project."

"Even though they’re talking about historical events and framing it as if we’re contextualizing the past, they very, very quickly move into political prescriptions that look and sound a lot like the Green New Deal," he said.

These programs, he said, would be disastrous for the U.S. economy. "The estimated dollar amount of the reparations-style program that they advocate for is $13 trillion. It would essentially bankrupt the United States."

Magness continued, "It’s just not economically possible to do what they claim they want to do, and, rather than having a serious answer to that, they just brush it aside."

He said these policy proposals and 1619 Project’s economic component are "co-dependent" on each other.

"In order to make the arguments for wealth redistribution or tearing down capitalism in the present day...they do need certain claims that they’ve made about the past to be true, one of which is that the cotton sector and plantation slavery more broadly were the engines of American wealth in the 19th century."

Magness said that claim is "statistically" and "patently untrue."

"But again, they are not interested in getting to the truth of these questions—these are straightforward empirical questions—they’re interested in making a political argument in the present day, so as a result, the narrative of history they tell becomes completely subordinated to that," he said.

Instead of reparations, Magness is in favor of "breaking down economic restrictions on mobility." He explained that "this is everything from tax cuts for people that are under the burden of the federal government, it’s deregulation of businesses, especially small businesses."

"The notion here is if you free up the economy, remove obstacles to accumulating wealth and remove obstacles to economic self-betterment, that’s the most equitable and just way of addressing problems of the past," he said.

In his book, he also argues that the 1619 Project could have been salvaged if its authors had listened to criticism and corrected errors.

However, "rather than engaging in an honest debate with them and answering the criticisms or correcting the factual errors, they just dug their heels in and took it in an even more overtly political direction," he said.

Neither Hannah-Jones nor Desmond responded to The Fix’s emails seeking comment on the new book’s critiques of their work.

Posted by:Grom the Affective

#1 Most of that cotton based economy was destroyed by 1865, the period afterward was marked by significant economic growth in the rest of the country. Britain had switched to India for its cotton source. The regional economy of the South would remain moribund till the WW2.

Posted by: Procopius2k 2025-08-24 07:32

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