The American Peasantry: Southern Agricultural Labor and Its Legacy, 1850-1995, A Study in Political Economy

by Ronald E. Seavoy

Overview

A sweeping overview of the American peasantry: the largely sharecrop cultivators who, in Seavoy's analysis, rejected the labor norms of commercial agriculture. About equal numbers of black and white sharecroppers chose to practice subsistence cultivation in order to minimize agricultural labor. The study begins with pre-Civil War slave plantations and the landless white peasants who migrated to North America to escape full-time paid labor in Britain. Seavoy then describes and analyzes the operation of the postbellum sharecrop system and related Back Caste System; the different origins of southern and northern Populism; the massive displacement of southern peasants (after 1950) when cotton cultivation was fully mechanized, and how the voluntary joblessness of the urban underclass has been perpetuated by the welfare entitlements of the Great Society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780313275111
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/30/1998
Series:	Contributions in Economics and Economic History , #200
Pages:	616
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d)
Lexile:	1300L (what's this?)

About the Author

RONALD E. SEAVOY is with the Department of Business Economics and Public Policy, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, Bloomington. Previous books by the author include The Origins of the American Business Corporation, 1784-1855 (Greenwood, 1982), Famine in Peasant Societies (Greenwood, 1986), and Famine in East Africa (Greenwood, 1989).

Table of Contents

Subsistence and Commercial Labor
The Slave Plantation
Cultivation Practices
The First Emancipation
The Labor Question
Sharecrop Tenure in Omsration
White Peasants
Populism
Black Caste System
Peasants and Farmers
New Deal Agricultural Policies
Urban Migration
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Challenging the nearly universal view that the US has not had peasants, Seavoy (business economics and public policy, Indiana U., Bloomington) applies the term to a high percentage of pre-1950 southern farmers and employs an Adam Smith-based labor theory of value to his analysis of the evolution of agriculture in the South: from the slave plantation through New Deal agricultural policies to the impact of recent urban migration. Illustrated with 45 data tables highlighting such variables as slavery in 1860, cotton and other crop yields, changing demographics, and the labor status of underclass Chicago residents in 1987. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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