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  • The Nature of Economic Development
  • Tore C. Olsson (bio)
William Boyd. The Slain Wood: Papermaking and Its Environmental Consequences in the American South. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. xvii + 350 pp. Notes, essay on sources, and index. $55.00.
Matthew L. Downs. Transforming the South: Federal Development in the Tennessee Valley, 1915–1960. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. 331 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $47.50.
Christopher Sneddon. Concrete Revolution: Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. xii + 270 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00.

The twentieth century witnessed the dramatic acceleration of two trends. First was the increased scale and scope of human intervention in the nonhuman world, whether through—to name just a handful of developments—the capture and utilization of stored solar energy in the form of fossil fuels, plant and animal breeding, reorientation of waterways, or anthropogenic climate change. Second was the astronomical growth of global GDP and its increasingly uneven distribution between the “West” (Europe and North America) and the “rest” (Asia, Africa, and Latin America). Neither trend was new, but their astounding intensification during the twentieth century would result in an unprecedented transformation of our planet and its population.

In the past generation, historians have probed the intersections between those two trends, often finding close entanglement between asymmetrical economic growth and humanity’s conquest of nature. Kenneth Pomeranz’s provocative and influential The Great Divergence (2000) argued that it was precisely the nineteenth-century’s fossil fuel revolution that, alongside the coerced enlistment of New World landscapes, enabled England to surpass China in economic growth after centuries of parity. In U.S. history, William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (1991) pursued a similar task, demonstrating how Chicago, the industrial behemoth that many understood as the antithesis of the natural world, indeed represented a distillation of the American West’s ecological wealth. Today, it is nearly impossible to think of environmental [End Page 120] history and economic history as separate fields, and most scholars would reject the nature/culture dichotomy that has structured so much of Western thinking. Natural resources and environmental change were not peripheral to industrialization and economic growth, but lay at their very core.

The three books under review here interrogate the economic impact of twentieth-century campaigns to harness natural systems of soil, water, and energy to human desires and needs. All of them underscore the deeply political motivations of such efforts. Rather than neutral and economically rational encounters between “man and nature,” interventions in the nonhuman world were fueled by social divisions along the lines of geopolitics, race, gender, and class. William Boyd’s and Matthew Downs’ books are rooted in the U.S. South’s path from economic stagnation to vibrancy during the twentieth century; Christopher Sneddon’s book explores how precedents in the South and West shaped the U.S. global campaign to conquer the nature of the so-called “Third World.” Read together, the three testify to the value of marrying environmental, political, and economic history.

William Boyd’s The Slain Wood—a book beautifully written, richly textured, and tightly argued—narrates the growth of the U.S. Southern papermaking industry during the twentieth century. Few other regional industries witnessed as dizzying or as rapid an ascent. From virtual nonexistence before the 1930s, the Southern pulp and paper industry claimed a majority of U.S. wood-pulp production by 1950. By the 1990s, the South led not just the United States but the world in production of pulp and paper, alongside acreage in industrial timberland. Ultimately employing thousands and generating vast revenue, it was undeniably “one of the region’s more impressive industrial success stories” (p. 8).

Boosters in business and politics have therefore been eager to champion papermaking’s success as evocative of a “New South,” a reinvented and dynamic region distant from the slave cabins and cotton fields of yore. In their triumphal account, the South’s postwar industrial boom marked a neat and redemptive break with a difficult past. The Slain Wood, on the contrary, argues that the pulp and paper industry succeeded because of, not in spite...

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