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UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS |
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Covering the late colonial age to World War I and beyond, this collection of essays places the economic history of the American South in an international light by establishing useful comparisons with the larger Atlantic and world economy. In an attempt to dispel long-lasting myths about the South, the essays analyze the economic evolution of the South since the slave era. From this perspective, the conception of a backward, wholly agricultural antebellum South occupied only by wealthy planters, poor whites, and contented slaves has finally given way to one of economic and social dynamism as well as regional prosperity.
In a coherent and cohesive progression of subjects, these essays show that the South had been deeply enmeshed in the Atlantic economy since the colonial period and, after the Civil War, retained distinctive needs that caused increasing departure from the course northerners adopted on matters of political economy. This comparative approach also helps explain the motivations behind the political choices made by the South as an eminently export-oriented region.
This book shows that the South was not slower to develop with respect to industrialization than either the majority of the northern states, especially in the West, or the countries of Western Europe. In fact, the apparently disappointing performance of the New South’s economy appears to be the result of more pervasive and largely uncontrollable trends that affected the national as well as the international economy. Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South makes an important contribution to the economic history of the South and to recent efforts to place American history in a more international context.
About the Editors
Susanna Delfino is Senior Researcher and Professor of American History at the University of Genoa in Italy. She is the author or editor of several books, including, along with Michele Gillespie, Neither Lady nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South.
Michele Gillespie is Kahle Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She is the author of Free Labor in an Unfree World: White Artisans in Slaveholding Georgia, 1789–1860 and coeditor of several books, including Taking Off the White Gloves: Southern Women and Women Historians (University of Missouri Press).
Contents
Introduction by Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie
Southern Industrialization: Myths and Realities by Stanley Engerman
Charleston and the British Industrial Revolution, 1750–1790 by Emma Hart
Alternatives to Dependence: The Lower
South's Antebellum Pursuit of Sectional Development
through Global Interdependence by Brian Schoen
Industrialization and Economic Development
in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. South: Some Interregional
and Intercontinental Comparative Perspectives by Shearer Davis Bowman
The Idea of Southern Backwardness: A Comparative View of the United States and Italy by Susanna Delfino
Markets and Manufacturing: Industry and Agriculture in the Antebellum
South and Midwest
by John Majewski and Viken Tchakerian
Southern Textiles in Global Context by David L. Carlton and Peter Coclanis
Beginnings of the Global Economy: Capital Mobility and the 1890s U.S. Textile Industry by Beth English
Black Workers, White Immigrants, and the Postemancipation Problem of
Labor: The New South
in Transnational Perspective by Erin Elizabeth Clune