Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization: From the Antebellum Era to the Computer Age (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 304 Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization: From the Antebellum Era to the Computer Age. Edited by Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. xiii, 215 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-8262-1795-0. In their introduction, editors Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie declare that “southerners from the early nineteenth century onward were as eager to embrace technology and innovation as any other Americans; they, too, viewed technology as a path to profit and modernity” (p.17). Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization is a collection of essays that, the editors correctly believe, will help bring what has been deficient in the history of technology—scholarship about the South. During the region’s transformation from agriculture to manufacturing (and beyond ), southern entrepreneurs were, and are, technological innovators and adaptors, not merely consumers dominated by northern technology. This second volume in the New Currents in the History of the Southern Economy and Society series—a product of the Southern Industrialization Project—addresses some of the South’s unique challenges during industrialization , including chronic capital shortages, the creation of northern and southern economic networks, and the political and economic implications of a society based on slavery and agriculture. In his foreword, Gavin Wright laments that “the inclination to hype or denigrate antebellum southern industry has carried over into modern scholarship,” and applauds the case studies in this book as the cure to such “macro generalizations” about the South and technology (pp. viii– ix). He notes that these essays “contribute to a broader transformation in the field of economic history” and towards integrating history and economics (p. xi). Delfino and Gillespie provide a solid introduction for the four antebellum and three twentieth-century case studies. They observe that although recent historians of early American technology have found diverse regional characteristics, most of the new scholarship pertains to the North. The slave South, many scholars still assume, never modernized enough to become a significant user of technology. The editors argue, however, that southerners weighed the costs and benefits of technology for their particular situation. Most importantly the essays “explain the multiple contexts in which innovation and the adoption of new technologies could occur in the South, and the technologies’ varying degrees of success in specific time periods, industries, and places” (p. 2). Wright, Delfino, and Gillespie place strong emphasis on the antebellum period. O C T O B E R 2 0 0 9 305 In the first chapter, Robert H. Gudmestad contends that the steamboat ’s introduction into the Old Southwest “strengthened and diversi- fied the southern economy” not only by accelerating development of the plantation and slavery, but also spurring commerce and the establishment of trade and communication networks (p. 38). Not surprisingly, antebellum southerners eagerly adopted, and invested in, the new technology . Sean Patrick Adams finds that in the Richmond coal basin of Virginia, “the interests of the plantation trumped the interests of the mine,” despite great potential in terms of demand, entrepreneurship, and a British technological model of mineral extraction (p. 60). Whether it was steam engines, immigrants, labor, corporate charters, or railroads, Harry Heth found that slavery, in various indirect ways, limited his mine’s competitiveness. Richard Follett argues that Louisiana sugar planters readily adopted steam-powered milling, invested heavily in other technologies , and sought to create a factorylike system, but their identities as slave owners held back the industry. Theirs was “an industry and region rooted not in collective progress, associationalism, or collaboration, but rather focused on individual self-sufficiency, independence, and private investment” (pp.75–76). Curiously, Follett undercuts this argument by providing examples of planters acting communally. Gillespie’s chapter investigates Henry Merrell, a mechanic, mill manager, and textile manufacturer in Georgia and Arkansas, whose career embodied lessons of “building networks of knowledge within and across regional lines to encourage technological innovation” (p. 99). Merrell sought to combine Protestant revivalism, the most advanced machinery, a local community of shared technological knowledge, and a regional cooperative network to spur southern industrialization. The first four essays fit so well...