I'd like to open up a question to any slavery historians out there.

My girlfriend (who's taking an economic history class) showed me a paper (which is apparently just an excerpt of the book Time on the Cross) that talked all about how slaves weren't really treated that badly, including some statistics on how they weren't really whipped that often. When she told me that the writer won an nobel prize in economics, I was... surprised.

So I went in and talked to my Latin American Colonialism professor, who told me that a lot of the work (particularly that one chapter) was incredibly misguided, and even inaccurate, but that the work as a whole was a foundational part of the debate over whether or not slavery was a profitable economic institution.

So, slavery scholars, how do you feel about Fogel and Engerman's Time on the Cross?

Could anyone explain to me some things:

• An overview of what Marxist historiography is
• Advantages and disadvantages of Marxist historiography
• What do people who employ Marxist historiography focus on?

A side note:People in /r/india think that 'Marxist historiography'=Denying that Muslim rulers of India were fundies whose goal was to make the entire population Muslim and speak in terms of an 'Islamic Colonization' of India. What would /r/askhistorians think about this 'Islamic Colonization' thing?

Another question: Does anybody have any idea about historiography being used for political purposes in South Asia?

Could someone explain the debate aout the Aryan Invasion theory. All I can gather is that it's heavily politicised in India and scientific evidence hasn't helped because apparently scholars like Romilla Thappar have written off the evidence, (but I can't find that source only references to it.)

An overview would be nice.