HISTORIANS HAVE LONG REGARDED the postwar American South as a society of poverty and racial oppression, but, with some outstanding exceptions, few have attempted to analyze its economic and social development in a systematic and comprehensive way. Several recent publications indicate that this period of neglect has come to an end. Inevitably, the intense debate over the slave South has raised questions about the relationship of slavery to postwar development; it has also presented historians of the postwar period with well-developed alternative theories that help provide answers. Among studies of the antebellum South, those of Eugene D. Genovese and of Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman stand out for their self-conscious theoretical clarity. The new works on postwar development similarly divide into two basic theoretical approaches: those historians who follow Fogel and Engerman apply neoclassical economic theory and analyze Southern development according to the laws of the market; those who follow Genovese and C. Vann Woodward analyze the South in terms of its constituent classes and see its development as the outcome of conflicts among them. Although these schools by no means exhaust the ways of viewing the problem, they represent much of the important new work. Of the two, class analysis, par-ticularly as represented by Harold D. Woodman's recent studies, provides a more satisfactory basis for understanding the postwar South than neoclassical economics. What is lacking in the existing debate, however, is an appreciation of the labor-repressive character of class relations in the postwar South, which made its development qualitatively different from that of the North.