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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 434-436



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The South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development. By David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Pp. 234. $49.50/$19.50.

In September 2003, two-thirds of the Alabama electorate rejected the Republican governor's $1.2 billion tax package that promised, among other things, to remedy the state's $675-million budget deficit and improve an educational system that ranks forty-sixth in the nation. The Education Trust Fund lost $60 million as a result. Plans to lengthen the school year, expand remedial reading programs, and offer scholarships were deferred. Hopes that better-educated citizens would attract technical industries with high-paying jobs were dashed.

David Carlton and Peter Coclanis eerily predicted as much in their new volume of essays on southern economic development, published just months before the vote took place: "State and local governments are reaching the limits of their revenues, and are encountering growing resistance to improving their services," they wrote in the introduction (p. 11). The ten essays that follow date from the late 1980s to the present and range [End Page 434] topically from rice plantations in colonial South Carolina to the Redstone Arsenal in twentieth-century Huntsville. They share a thesis that links them to the Alabama vote: the plantation system hobbled the South with weak institutions incapable then as now of mobilizing resources for sustained development.

The authors employ social science theory in several essays, adding structural clarity to complex issues. In the first essay, "The Paths before Us/ U.S.," Coclanis uses path dependence theory to explain the divergence of South and North from the seventeenth century to 1900. Once southerners introduced the plantation system, they were committed to large-scale agricultural production with appropriated labor, thereby concentrating wealth in the hands of a few and stifling entrepreneurial activity among the many. "Niggardly institutional development" resulted (p. 15). Stunted markets and commercial infrastructure, few and small cities without cultural entitlements, were in evidence by 1776. By 1860 the South trailed the nation in manufactured goods per capita. Yet the South and North had more in common in 1860 than in 1900. As the rest of the nation industrialized after the Civil War, the South became a case study in underdevelopment, for all the familiar reasons.

In "How the Low Country Was Taken to Task," Coclanis uses principle-agent theory to examine the choices made by South Carolina rice planters. Combining a comprehensive historiographic review with provocative critique, Coclanis concludes that the principals (rice planters) settled on tasking not as a philanthropic gesture but as a cunning compensation system, which rewarded the use of African rice technology by agents (the enslaved) with the appearance of relative independence. This essay ostensibly argues for astute entrepreneurship and secure institutions but actually substantiates the thesis because of their short-term effect.

Both Coclanis and Carleton use core/periphery theory to explain ultimate failure in rice production and manufacturing, respectively. In "Distant Thunder," Coclanis situates South Atlantic rice producers in a global context wherein they compete in a price-sensitive market that devalues quality, the southerners' edge. In "Revolution from Above," Carlton situates North Carolina manufacturers in a national context where the state is peripheral to the rust belt and in a state context where the hinterland is peripheral to the city. In both examples, underdevelopment results because southerners do not exploit economies of scale and cannot compete in integrated markets. Essays on urbanization, capital mobilization, patenting, industrialization, and deindustrialization scrutinize the sources, evaluate the contingencies, and recapitulate the thesis.

In another essay, "The American South and the U.S. Defense Economy," Carlton argues that defense investment reinforces historic institutional weaknesses by exploiting them. Local boosters lobbied successfully for defense contracts to invigorate local economies. Yet, with some exceptions— [End Page 435] particularly the Hampton Roads complex—southern assets consisted of exhausted land and low-skilled laborers. So the South got basic-training camps and contracts for cellulose (produced from cotton fiber and...

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