Plantation Kingdom: The American South and Its Global Commodities. by Richard Follett, etal. (review)

This collection of four essays, with an introduction and conclusion by Richard Follett, brings together some of the best historians who study the history of the commodity crops made by enslaved labor in the U.S. South. The production and distribution of these crops—tobacco, rice, cotton, and sugar—shaped more than the slave society that attempted to destroy the United States by fission in 1861. These four crops not only made the United States and its globally hegemonic capitalist economy possible, but also played (especially if we add sugar's other adopted homelands to the account) a dispositive role in the historical emergence of modern global capitalism as a whole.

Each essay expresses some of the insights of its author. Thus the book is more than a survey of four commodities and their southern histories from slavery through emancipation and into sharecropping. Plantation Kingdom effectively reveals the impact of world markets on slavery's emergence and expansion in the U.S. South and, at the same time, the impact of slavery's products on global markets. As Peter Coclanis notes, few historians of capitalism "any longer view the plantation colonies established under British auspices in the Americas as anything but capitalist in economic nature" (29). But these essays certainly take us further in understanding that capitalism. Most important, they help us to see better the ways in which these societies moved from being the pumping engines to the crushed-down wheels of Western capitalism as that vast machine grew.

If the word "capitalism" can describe colonial Virginia, an Alabama cotton slave-labor camp whose bondpeople supplied Friedrich Engels's Manchester textile factory with raw materials, and the futures markets that today electronically trade the ownership of identical units of yet-to-be produced products in today's world, is the term too elastic? Too often this good question becomes the opportunity to offer a bad answer. Often that answer takes the form of an attempt to reimpose narrow orthodoxies cooked up in atmospheres where fanboys and theory monks have seen the categories of race and gender as transparent—which is to say that they have not seen them at all.

Gender plays little role in these essays. Race most certainly does, even if mostly implicitly. What is also significant is the emphasis on capitalism as a process of dynamic change. In this process, entrepreneurs—bound by few and ever-fewer social and cultural constraints on manipulation of people and things—make and take advantage of markets. Yet the day comes when those markets become tools through which other entrepreneurs gain power over the markets' makers. If they are lucky, local capitalists can continue to socialize costs imposed by global power onto the workers. The stories in Plantation Kingdom suggest that, like biology after evolution's intellectual impact, understandings of capitalism must focus on processes rather than states. The problematic of the book is a question that does exactly that: why did staple crops, each reaping revenue from a thriving export market available to U.S. producers, and each of which was shaped by the class of economic elites that it simultaneously generated, fall around the time of the Civil War into "commodity hell"? This term, as Coclanis defines it, means a condition in which the sellers of commodity crops "faced crowded markets, interchangeable products, and vigorous global competition" (13).

These same markets had shaped the rise of tobacco, rice, cotton, and sugar. Of course, at the same time, the United States shaped the globe's markets, in particular those for cotton and tobacco. Barbara Hahn's essay on tobacco brilliantly shows how even in the early twentieth century, capitalists, workers, and governments were re-creating tobacco demand through the contested codefinition of tobacco types. Rejecting simplistic and inaccurate stories in which seeds define production processes, she shows how struggles defined commodity types that...