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  • Between Slavery and Capitalism: The Legacy of Emancipation in the American South by Martin Ruef
  • Melinda C. Miller
Between Slavery and Capitalism: The Legacy of Emancipation in the American South. By Martin Ruef. (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014. Pp. [xviii], 285. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-691-16277-5.)

Following the Civil War, the South experienced a profound transformation in its economic institutions. Martin Ruef, the Jack and Pamela Egan Professor of Entrepreneurship at Duke University, argues that the postbellum economy left behind its precapitalist roots and emerged as “a more capitalist and market-driven society” (p. 2). In this comparative study, Ruef considers how “institutional flux” contributed to a “categorical uncertainty” that beset the South during Reconstruction (p. 7). Economic actors were uncertain not simply about the probability that a given outcome would occur; they were uncertain about what outcomes were actually possible.

To analyze how this uncertainty shaped the South, Ruef draws on a wide variety of both qualitative and quantitative sources. Some, like the Works Progress Administration slave narratives and decennial censuses, will be familiar to those who study Reconstruction. Recently collected data on labor contracts from the Freedmen’s Bureau archives and credit reports from R. G. Dun and Company allow Ruef to make quantitative comparisons of the economic structure of the South before and after the Civil War. These analyses are a highlight of Ruef’s work and provide new insight into the impact of emancipation on the southern economy.

The first chapter introduces the work’s theme. Chapter 2 considers how emancipation affected the market valuation of black labor, demonstrating that labor contracts and sales prices under slavery placed relatively higher values on younger workers than did wage contracts after emancipation. Chapter 3 shows that migration and education provided channels for some freedpeople to improve their postemancipation status. However, those who were older when slavery ended were less likely to experience advancement. Emancipation’s influence on the southern middle class is the focus of chapter 4. The size of the entrepreneurial middle class fell after the war for both whites and blacks, but more whites entered into the bureaucratic middle class in the wake of emancipation.

Ruef next turns to the organization of the southern economy. Chapter 5 concentrates on the plantation system and discounts that its demise was due [End Page 459] to the end of slavery or damage from the Civil War. Instead, the mobility of former slaves played a major role, providing “perhaps one of the clearest historical examples where the actions of an otherwise disenfranchised and subjugated minority could have far-reaching consequences for the decline of a form of social organization” (p. 129). Merchants, their suppliers, and credit markets take center stage in chapter 6. Considerable uncertainty characterized these relationships due to distance and difficulties classifying complex southern business enterprises. While R. G. Dun attempted to remedy some of these problems, its inability to neatly classify many southern businesses into standardized lines of trade may have actually increased uncertainty.

The book finishes by considering economic development more broadly. Chapter 7 explores the variance in local development throughout the South. Counties that “deviate[d] from taken-for-granted sequences of business emergence” tended to experience lower levels of economic growth than did those that followed regional norms (p. 179). Chapter 8 considers the uncertainties engendered by emancipation throughout the Americas.

This work will appeal to sociologists and historians interested in the application of sociological theories to emancipation. Ruef clearly explicates multiple theoretical approaches throughout and considers the extent to which they are consistent with the available data. Economic historians will likely wish that the appendix on data sources and sampling also included more details on the underlying data analysis and regression results.

Melinda C. Miller
United States Naval Academy
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