The Political Economy of the Cotton South

The Political Economy of the Cotton South

Author: Gavin Wright

Publisher: W. W. Norton

Published: 1978

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 9780393090383

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The impact of cotton and slavery in the nineteenth century American South was so dramatic and enduring that neither the region nor the nation has yet escaped from the influence of that era of regional prominence.


The Political Economy of Slavery

The Political Economy of Slavery

Author: Eugene D. Genovese

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780819562081

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A stimulating analysis of the society and economy in the slave south.


Slavery and American Economic Development

Slavery and American Economic Development

Author: Gavin Wright

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2013-02-18

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0807152285

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Through an analysis of slavery as an economic institution, Gavin Wright presents an innovative look at the economic divergence between North and South in the antebellum era. He draws a distinction between slavery as a form of work organization—the aspect that has dominated historical debates—and slavery as a set of property rights. Slave-based commerce remained central to the eighteenth-century rise of the Atlantic economy, not because slave plantations were superior as a method of organizing production, but because slaves could be put to work on sugar plantations that could not have attracted free labor on economically viable terms.


Old South, New South

Old South, New South

Author: Gavin Wright

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0807120987

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In this provocative and intricate analysis of the postbellum southern economy, Gavin Wright finds in the South’s peculiar labor market the answer to the perennial question of why the region remained backward for so long. After the Civil War, Wright explains, the South continued to be a low-wage regional market embedded in a high-wage national economy. He vividly details the origins, workings, and ultimate demise of that distinct system. The post-World War II southern economy, which created today’s Sunbelt, Wright shows, is not the result of the evolution of the old system, but the product of a revolution brought on by the New Deal and World War II that shattered the South’s stagnant structure and created a genuinely new, thriving order.


The Merchants' Capital

The Merchants' Capital

Author: Scott P. Marler

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-04-29

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1107354722

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As cotton production shifted toward the southwestern states during the first half of the nineteenth century, New Orleans became increasingly important to the South's plantation economy. Handling the city's wide-ranging commerce was a globally oriented business community that represented a qualitatively unique form of wealth accumulation - merchant capital - that was based on the extraction of profit from exchange processes. However, like the slave-based mode of production with which they were allied, New Orleans merchants faced growing pressures during the antebellum era. Their complacent failure to improve the port's infrastructure or invest in manufacturing left them vulnerable to competition from the fast-developing industrial economy of the North, weaknesses that were fatally exposed during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Changes to regional and national economic structures after the Union victory prevented New Orleans from recovering its commercial dominance, and the former first-rank American city quickly devolved into a notorious site of political corruption and endemic poverty.


Empire of Cotton

Empire of Cotton

Author: Sven Beckert

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2015-11-10

Total Pages: 642

ISBN-13: 0375713964

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WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE • A Pulitzer Prize finalist that's as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist. “Masterly … An astonishing achievement.” —The New York Times The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Sven Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. In a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful politicians recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to make and remake global capitalism.


The Fragile Fabric of Union

The Fragile Fabric of Union

Author: Brian D. Schoen

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2009-10-01

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0801897815

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Winner, 2010 Bennett H. Wall Award, Southern Historical Association In this fresh study Brian Schoen views the Deep South and its cotton industry from a global perspective, revisiting old assumptions and providing new insights into the region, the political history of the United States, and the causes of the Civil War. Schoen takes a unique and broad approach. Rather than seeing the Deep South and its planters as isolated from larger intellectual, economic, and political developments, he places the region firmly within them. In doing so, he demonstrates that the region’s prominence within the modern world—and not its opposition to it—indelibly shaped Southern history. The place of “King Cotton” in the sectional thinking and budding nationalism of the Lower South seems obvious enough, but Schoen reexamines the ever-shifting landscape of international trade from the 1780s through the eve of the Civil War. He argues that the Southern cotton trade was essential to the European economy, seemingly worth any price for Europeans to protect and maintain, and something to defend aggressively in the halls of Congress. This powerful association gave the Deep South the confidence to ultimately secede from the Union. By integrating the history of the region with global events, Schoen reveals how white farmers, planters, and merchants created a “Cotton South,” preserved its profitability for many years, and ensured its dominance in the international raw cotton markets. The story he tells reveals the opportunities and costs of cotton production for the Lower South and the United States.


Becoming Free in the Cotton South

Becoming Free in the Cotton South

Author: Susan Eva O'Donovan

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2010-04-10

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 0674041607

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Becoming Free in the Cotton South challenges our most basic ideas about slavery and freedom in America. Instead of seeing emancipation as the beginning or the ending of the story, as most histories do, Susan Eva O’Donovan explores the perilous transition between these two conditions, offering a unique vision of both the enormous changes and the profound continuities in black life before and after the Civil War.This boldly argued work focuses on a small place—the southwest corner of Georgia—in order to explicate a big question: how did black men and black women’s experiences in slavery shape their lives in freedom? The reality of slavery’s demise is harsh: in this land where cotton was king, the promise of Reconstruction passed quickly, even as radicalism crested and swept the rest of the South. Ultimately, the lives former slaves made for themselves were conditioned and often constrained by what they had endured in bondage. O’Donovan’s significant scholarship does not diminish the heroic efforts of black Americans to make their world anew; rather, it offers troubling but necessary insight into the astounding challenges they faced.Becoming Free in the Cotton South is a moving and intimate narrative, drawing upon a multiplicity of sources and individual stories to provide new understanding of the forces that shaped both slavery and freedom, and of the generation of African Americans who tackled the passage that lay between.


Governing Cotton

Governing Cotton

Author: A. Sneyd

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-01-28

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0230299458

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This book traces the historic relationships between cotton production, the international cotton trade and poverty south of the Sahara, and assesses various approaches to corporate social responsibility and nongovernmental policy advocacy in this area.


The Cotton Plantation South Since the Civil War

The Cotton Plantation South Since the Civil War

Author: Charles S. Aiken

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2003-04-28

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 9780801873096

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Tracing the geographical changes in plantation agriculture and the plantation regions after 1865, Aiken shows how the altered landscape of the South has led many to the false conclusion that the plantation has vanished. In fact, he explains, while certain regions of the South have reverted to other uses, the cotton plantation survives in a form that is, in many ways, remarkably similar to that of its antebellum predecessors.