In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Southern Cultures 10.3 (2004) 104-106



[Access article in PDF]
The South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development. By David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis. University of Virginia Press, 2003. 234 pp. Cloth $49.50; paper $19.50

"Economics? That was my worst subject." How often those of us in the field have heard this lament. Or is it a reprimand? "Worst subject" probably means the speaker did not do well in the course, but it also often implies that they didn't much like economics anyway. Too dry, too unsentimental, too short on appreciation for the finer things in life (that is, culture). People who feel this way often [End Page 104] drift into the study of history as an alternative. Which means that scholars who set out to write economic history start with one strike against them; two, if, like David Carlton and Peter Coclanis, they openly reject cultural interpretations of the American South.

However uninviting it may appear, economic history is necessary if we want to understand the South. Those slave traders and slave drivers, after all, were not in it for their health, and slavery continues to cast a long shadow over the region as well as the nation. What forces, motives, and circumstances led southerners to make these choices, and what were the implications?

If these questions engage you, and you are open to giving economic history a try, a good place to start might be this collection of essays. From the slave plantation to the mill village to the sunbelt, Carlton and Coclanis reject cultural explanations for southern distinctiveness, in favor of interpretations emphasizing "structural, institutional and geo-historical variables." They have a good command of economics, yet, surprisingly enough, they write accessibly, knowledgeably and persuasively. (In case you are wondering, Carlton is an authentic southerner, from a mill town near Spartanburg; Coclanis is from Chicago.)

Here are a few examples of the Carlton-Coclanis approach. On the core question of southern exceptionalism, the authors trace regional divergence to the prevalence of the slave plantation in colonial times, attributable in turn not to differences in culture but to profit opportunities in a handful of staple crops. Plantations, the authors argue, were "the most numerous large-scale business enterprises in the United States" as late as 1860, and their masters were "as fully entrepreneurial as any Boston Associate or Midwestern booster." Because the plantation supplied most of its needs internally, however, and maintained primary credit and marketing relationships long-distance, the economic legacy of the antebellum era was an underdeveloped economy, with limited transportation facilities, few cities and towns, and weak educational institutions. Regional prosperity was thus dependent on foreign-demand conditions, which often proved volatile. For example, the competitive position of Georgia and South Carolina rice planters was undermined by war—not the war you are thinking of, but the Second Anglo-Burmese War (1852), which opened up the Burma Delta to the West.

These economic chickens came home to roost after the Civil War and the collapse of slavery, when southern industries found themselves poorly placed to compete with their dynamic, technologically sophisticated counterparts in the North. In many ways chapters six through eight are the core of the book, articulating an original perspective on the struggles of postbellum southern industries trying to compete in national markets. According to Carlton and Coclanis, slow regional development was not due to "class persistence," lack of entrepreneurship, or political repression, but to poorly developed infrastructure (such as marketing networks and stock exchanges) and a full generation's lag in industrial [End Page 105] skills, from engineers to manual workers. Southern firms were thus dependent on outside sources of technology and capital, restricting their scope for innovation and growth.

The book has a few drawbacks that should be noted. It is not a unified historical synthesis, but a collection of essays, either previously published or written for earlier occasions. Perhaps this feature is an advantage for those dipping their toes into economic history for the first time, but it does mean that...

pdf