Gavin Wright is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History Emeritus at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1982. He has a longstanding interest in the economy of the American South, traceable to his participation in a voting rights project in North Carolina in 1963. In 2006, he published Slavery and American Economic Development, an interpretation of the role of slavery and abolition in the rise of the U.S. economy. His most recent book is Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South. The book argues that the Civil Rights movement launched a genuine revolution in the South, in economic as well as moral and political life. Sharing the Prize was awarded the Alice Hanson Jones Prize as the best book in North American Economic History during 2013-14. He received his BA from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. from Yale University.
The question that has been strenuously debated is whether slavery, integral to commerce during colonial times, was also central to the acceleration of national economic growth during the first half of the nineteenth century.