Cotton, Corn and Risk in the Nineteenth Century

1975 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 526-551 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Wright ◽  
Howard Kunreuther
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Civil War ◽  
World Cotton ◽  
The South ◽  
Satisfactory Explanation ◽  
Corn Production ◽  
Historical Literature ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Per Capita

Why Did “Uncle Remus” exhort the post-bellum South to reduce its cotton-growing in favor of corn? His complaint was prompted in the immediate sense by the low cotton prices of the early 1890's, but such comments reflected a continuing discontent over the region's abandonment of self-sufficiency in foods after the Civil War. The ratio of cotton output to com was probably at an antebellum peak in 1860, but this ratio had been easily exceeded by 1880, as Table 1 indicates. In the leading cotton states, per capita corn production and the per capita stock of hogs were only about half of what they had been twenty years earlier. Coinciding as it did with a major era of stagnation in world cotton demand, this shift into cotton is of great importance for the subsequent economic development of the South. Despite its size and significance, the shift lacks a satisfactory explanation in the historical literature.

scholarly journals Self-Sufficiency, Cotton, and Economic Development in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860

1985 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lacy K. Ford
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Local Market ◽  
Cotton Production ◽  
The South ◽  
Self Sufficiency

The expansion of short-staple cotton production into the southern backcountry during the nineteenth century opened opportunities for backcountry planters and yeomen alike. But contrary to the claims made by agricultural reformers, South Carolina upcountry farmers did not neglect the production of foodstuffs. The Upcountry as a whole was self-sufficient in foodstuffs though a significant minority of farms failed to achieve self-sufficiency. Thus a limited local market in foodstuffs developed, but it did little to stimulate the development of towns in the region.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
R. Scott Huffard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
New South ◽  
The South ◽  
Counter Narratives

The introduction starts by discussing how the railroad embodied nineteenth century capitalism and it notes how the book looks at the South’s railroads as a cohesive network that connected the South through a capitalist means. It also sets the scene by describing how the South was in transition after the Civil War and Reconstruction and how the white elites in the region were seeking to reconstruct capitalism. The railroad was a powerful symbol and an economic engine of change that allowed these boosters to proclaim that a New South had risen. But the railroad’s link with progress obscured the anxieties and monsters that it generated, and the introduction introduces counter narratives to the New South story that later chapters discuss. The book argues that railroads were uniquely destructive in the region and that white elites and railroad companies exploited the region’s racial tensions to obscure these anxieties.

Labor Contracting in Turn-of-the-Century California Agriculture

1980 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 757-776 ◽  
Author(s):  
William S. Hallagan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Wage Labor ◽  
Agricultural Labor ◽  
The South ◽  
Japanese Immigrants ◽  
Fruit Orchards ◽  
California Agriculture

During the course of U.S. economic development, the institutions used to organize agricultural labor have undergone interesting and sometimes puzzling transformations. The transitions from wage contracting to tenancy observed in the post-bellum South and in nineteenth-century Iowa have been studied extensively.2 This paper evaluates the relatively neglected transition from wage labor to tenancy that occurred in the California fruit orchards during the period 1900–1910.3 Before 1903 Chinese and Japanese orchard workers were organized via the padrone system of wage labor, but in an abrupt series of events there ensued a shift into tenancy so dramatic that by 1909 contemporary observers noted that virtually all orchards were under tenant control. The fact that the new tenants were recent Japanese immigrants prompted investigations by the Immigration Commission as well as other agencies so that this particular shift into tenancy is documented in greater detail than those occurring in the South and in Iowa.

When Canvassers Became Activists: Antislavery Petitioning and the Political Mobilization of American Women

2014 ◽  
Vol 108 (3) ◽  
pp. 479-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL CARPENTER ◽  
COLIN D. MOORE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Network Formation ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Present Evidence ◽  
American Women ◽  
Original Dataset ◽  
Network Building ◽  
Per Capita

Examining an original dataset of more than 8,500 antislavery petitions sent to Congress (1833–1845), we argue that American women's petition canvassing conferred skills and contacts that empowered their later activism. We find that women canvassers gathered 50% or more signatures (absolute and per capita) than men while circulating the same petition requests in the same locales. Supplementary evidence (mainly qualitative) points to women's persuasive capacity and network building as the most plausible mechanisms for this increased efficacy. We then present evidence that leaders in the women's rights and reform campaigns of the nineteenth century were previously active in antislavery canvassing. Pivotal signers of the Seneca Falls Declaration were antislavery petition canvassers, and in an independent sample of post–Civil War activists, women were four times more likely than men to have served as identifiable antislavery canvassers. For American women, petition canvassing—with its patterns of persuasion and networking—shaped legacies in political argument, network formation, and organizing.

Before the Great Divergence? Comparing the Yangzi Delta and the Netherlands at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 956-989 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bozhong Li ◽  
Jan Luiten van Zanden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Labor Productivity ◽  
Detailed Comparison ◽  
Gdp Per Capita ◽  
Great Divergence ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
Yangzi Delta

This article tests recent ideas about the long-term economic development of China compared with Europe on the basis of a detailed comparison of structure and level of GDP in part of the Yangzi delta and the Netherlands in the 1820s. We find that Dutch GDP per capita was almost twice as high as in the Yangzi delta. Agricultural productivity there was at about the same level as in the Netherlands (and England), but large productivity gaps existed in industry and services. We attempt to explain this concluding that differences in factor costs are probably behind disparities in labor productivity.

Large-Scale Manufacturing in the South and West, 1850–1860

1971 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Bateman ◽  
James D. Foust ◽  
Thomas J. Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Industrial Development ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Industrial Structure ◽  
Perfect Competition ◽  
The South

An examination of the manuscript censuses of manufacturing in 1850 and 1860 indicates the forthcoming revision of many traditional interpretations of American industrial development. This study suggests that large-scale manufacturing in the South and West was quite similar in the decade before the Civil War and that antebellum manufacturing was sufficiently concentrated to imply that the model of perfect competition is as inappropriate a description of mid-nineteenth century industrial structure as it is of twentieth century industry.

World Demand for Cotton during the Nineteenth Century: Wright's Estimates Re-examined

1979 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 1015-1021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Hanson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The South ◽  
Rate Of Growth ◽  
World Demand ◽  
Regression Techniques ◽  
Low Rate

A low rate of growth of world demand for cotton figures prominently in recent attempts to understand the post-bellum retardation of the southern economy. Gavin Wright, especially, stresses this factor in several articles and a recent book.1 Using-sophisticated regression techniques to estimate the rate of growth of demand for American cotton during both the ante- and post-bellum eras and the magnitude of the change in the rate between them, Wright finds a decline of more than two thirds. Such an occurrence could hardly have helped the South make a prompt recovery from the Civil War.

scholarly journals The Post-Bellum Recovery of the South and the Cost of the Civil War

1976 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 898-907 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Temin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Labor Supply ◽  
American South ◽  
The South ◽  
Rate Of Growth ◽  
Lasting Effect ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Cost

In the last half of the nineteenth century the economy of the American South experienced three separate shocks which have been analyzed separately by different authors. This note synthesizes the literature and presents an integrated story in which the decline in the rate of growth of the demand for cotton (noted by Wright) and the results of emancipation on the southern labor supply (noted by Ransom and Sutch) had equal impacts on measured income in the post-bellum South. The Civil War itself had a much smaller and less lasting effect on southern income than Coldin and Lewis assumed; in the long run, it was the least important of the three shocks.

Flexible Exchange Rates, Northern Expansion, and the Market for Southern Cotton: 1866–1879

1973 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Aldrich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Exchange Rates ◽  
Economic Decline ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The North ◽  
Flexible Exchange Rates

Anumber of economic historians, including Charles Beard, C. Vann Woodward, and others have argued that southern economic development during the nineteenth century may have been significantly hindered by the South's political and economic relations with the North. Certainly the best known of such arguments is that of Charles Beard. Beard thought that the “normal” workings of the pre-Civil War political economy would have resulted in the relative eclipse of the southern economy even in the absence of the Civil War. Wartime devastation plus such northern policies as the tariff, the Homestead Law, the National Banking Act, and emancipation of the slaves, merely hastened and worsened the South's economic decline.

Representative Mann: Horace Mann, the Republican Experiment and the South

1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-123
Author(s):  
SUSAN-MARY C. GRANT
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
The South ◽  
Political Expression ◽  
The North ◽  
The Future ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
North And South

Northern reactions to the antebellum South can only be fully understood in the context of northern concerns for the future of the American republican experiment, which was at base the search for an American national identity. Central to antebellum concerns in this regard was the issue of freedom in a nation which yet retained slave labour. In the nineteenth century, the belief in freedom was, in Fred Somkin's words, “the res Americana, the matter of America.” In the decades preceding the Civil War, however, North and South came to hold very different ideas of what freedom meant, and what it entailed. In time, northern concerns over slavery and the society that relied upon it found political expression in what Eric Foner termed the “Republican critique of the South.” This critique was not focussed on slavery alone but on the South as a whole; its society, culture, industry, and intellectual achievements. It was both an attack on the South and an affirmation of northern superiority. Ultimately, it was a sectional message with national ambitions. The “matter of America” became the matter of the North. How this happened, however, has never been adequately explained.This essay seeks to shed some light on the background to the “Republican critique” by looking in particular at the career of Horace Mann of Massachusetts, specifically at his brief period in Congress (1848–52) during which he adopted an increasingly confrontational stand toward slavery and the South.

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