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Plantation Kingdom: The American South and Its Global Commodities
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Plantation Kingdom: The American South and Its Global Commodities
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Overview
In 1850, America’s plantation economy reigned supreme. U.S. cotton dominated world markets, and American rice, sugarcane, and tobacco grew throughout a vast farming empire that stretched from Maryland to Texas. Four million enslaved African Americans toiled the fields, producing global commodities that enriched the most powerful class of slaveholders the world had ever known. But fifty years later—after emancipation demolished the plantation-labor system, Asian competition flooded world markets with cheap raw materials, and free trade eliminated protected markets—America’s plantations lay in ruins.
Plantation Kingdom traces the rise and fall of America’s plantation economy. Written by four renowned historians, the book demonstrates how an international capitalist system rose out of slave labor, indentured servitude, and the mass production of agricultural commodities for world markets. Vast estates continued to exist after emancipation, but tenancy and sharecropping replaced slavery’s work gangs across most of the plantation world. Poverty and forced labor haunted the region well into the twentieth century.
The book explores the importance of slavery to the Old South, the astounding profitability of plantation agriculture, and the legacy of emancipation. It also examines the place of American producers in world markets and considers the impact of globalization and international competition 150 years ago. Written for scholars and students alike, Plantation Kingdom is an accessible and fascinating study.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781421419398 |
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Publisher: | Johns Hopkins University Press |
Publication date: | 04/01/2016 |
Series: | The Marcus Cunliffe Lecture Series |
Pages: | 176 |
Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Sven Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of American History at Harvard University and the author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History.
Peter Coclanis is the Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920.
Barbara Hahn is an associate professor of history at Texas Tech University and the associate editor of Technology and Culture. She is the coauthor of The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans and Plantation Kingdom: The American South and Its Global Commodities.
Table of Contents
Introduction by Richard FollettThe Road to Commodity Hell: The Rise and Fall of the First American Rice IndustryCotton and the US South: A Short HistoryThe Rise and Fall of American SugarTobacco's Commodity RouteConclusionNotesGuide to Further ReadingIndexWhat People are Saying About This
Uniformly well-researched, well-written, and well-organized, these essays intelligently connect the Old South's foremost commodities to the world market and suggest similarities and differences between the crops and their rise and fall.—John David Smith, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, coauthor of Soldiering for Freedom: How the Union Army Recruited, Trained, and Deployed the U.S. Colored Troops
Uniformly well-researched, well-written, and well-organized, these essays intelligently connect the Old South's foremost commodities to the world market and suggest similarities and differences between the crops and their rise and fall.