Cotton and race in the making of America : the human costs of economic power / Gene Dattel.

ISBN:

9781442210196

Title:

Author:

Dattel, Eugene R.

Personal Author:

Dattel, Eugene R.

Publication Information:

Chicago : Ivan R. Dee, 2009.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiv, 416 pages) : illustrations

Contents:

pt. 1: Slavery in the making of the Constitution. The silent issue at the Constitutional Convention -- pt. 2: The engine of American growth, 1787-1861. Birth of an obsession -- Land expansion and white migration to the Old Southwest -- The movement of slaves to the cotton states -- The business of cotton -- The roots of war -- pt. 3: The north: for whites only, 1800-1865. Being free and black in the North -- The colonial North -- Race moves west -- Tocqueville on slavery, race, and money in America -- pt. 4: King Cotton buys a war. Cultivating a crop, cultivating a strategy -- Great Britain and the Civil War -- Cotton and Confederate finance -- Procuring arms -- Cotton trading in the United States -- Cotton and the freedman -- pt. 5: The racial divide and cotton labor, 1865-1930. New era, old problems -- Ruling the freedmen in the cotton fields -- Reconstruction meets reality -- The black hand on the cotton boll -- From cotton field to urban ghetto : the Chicago experience -- pt. 6: Cotton without slaves, 1865-1930. King Cotton expands -- The controlling laws of cotton finance -- The delta plantation : labor and land -- The planter experience in the twentieth century -- The long-awaited mechanical cotton picker -- The abdication of King Cotton.

Local Note:

eBooks on EBSCOhost

Subject Term:

Slavery -- Economic aspects -- Southern States -- History.

Cotton growing -- Economic aspects -- Southern States -- History.

Cotton growing -- Social aspects -- Southern States -- History.

Plantation life -- Southern States -- History.

African Americans -- Southern States -- Social conditions.

Slavery -- Political aspects -- United States.

BUSINESS & ECONOMICS -- Industries -- Agribusiness.

TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING -- Agriculture -- Sustainable Agriculture.

African Americans -- Social conditions. (OCoLC)fst00799698

Cotton growing -- Economic aspects. (OCoLC)fst00880990

Cotton growing -- Social aspects. (OCoLC)fst00881002

Economic history. (OCoLC)fst00901974

Plantation life. (OCoLC)fst01065779

Politics and government (OCoLC)fst01919741

Race relations. (OCoLC)fst01086509

Slavery -- Economic aspects. (OCoLC)fst01120438

Slavery -- Political aspects. (OCoLC)fst01120480

Electronic books.

Geographic Term:

United States -- Race relations.

United States -- Economic conditions.

United States -- Politics and government -- 1783-1865.

United States -- Politics and government -- 1865-1933.

Southern States. (OCoLC)fst01244550

United States. (OCoLC)fst01204155

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

http://ezproxy.angliss.edu.au/login?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&AN=393733

Publication Date:

2009

Publication Information:

Chicago : Ivan R. Dee, 2009.

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
338.173510975 22	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Since the earliest days of colonial America, the relationship between cotton and the African-American experience has been central to the history of the republic. America's most serious social tragedy, slavery and its legacy, spread only where cotton could be grown. Both before and after the Civil War, blacks were assigned to the cotton fields while a pervasive racial animosity and fear of a black migratory invasion caused white Northerners to contain blacks in the South.

Gene Dattel's pioneering study explores the historical roots of these most central social issues. In telling detail Mr. Dattel shows why the vastly underappreciated story of cotton is a key to understanding America's rise to economic power. When cotton production exploded to satiate the nineteenth-century textile industry's enormous appetite, it became the first truly complex global business and thereby a major driving force in U.S. territorial expansion and sectional economic integration. It propelled New York City to commercial preeminence and fostered independent trade between Europe and the United States, providing export capital for the new nation to gain its financial "sea legs" in the world economy. Without slave-produced cotton, the South could never have initiated the Civil War, America's bloodiest conflict at home.

Mr. Dattel's skillful historical analysis identifies the commercial forces that cotton unleashed and the pervasive nature of racial antipathy it produced. This is a story that has never been told in quite the same way before, related here with the authority of a historian with a profound knowledge of the history of international finance. With 23 black-and-white illustrations.

Author Notes

Gene Dattel grew up in the cotton country of the Mississippi Delta and studied history at Yale and law at Vanderbilt. He then embarked on a twenty-year career in financial capital markets as a managing director at Salomon Brothers and at Morgan Stanley. A consultant to major financial institutions and to the Pentagon, he established a reputation as a foremost authority on Asian economies. His The Sun That Never Rose remains the definitive work on Japanese financial institutions in the 1980s. Mr. Dattel is now an independent scholar who lectures widely and has served as an adviser to the New York Historical Society and the B. B. King Museum. He lives in New York City. For more information, see www.genedattel.com .

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Two themes, one explicit, one implicit, compete in this exploration of the link between the development of American capitalism and the devastation of the African-American community. The price of cotton as the "determinant of America's destiny, influencing and even overcoming individual will and ethical behavior" is the fully explicit one. In treating it, Dattel (The Sun Never Rose), formerly a managing director at Salomon Brothers and Morgan Stanley, offers an economic history of cotton. The book's chronological path absorbs the creation of the Confederacy, the waging of the Civil War, Reconstruction, the rise of the Klan, the development of sharecropping, the displacement of black labor by machine and the falling price of cotton. The secondary and competing theme is Northern complicity in the slave trade, the cotton economy, segregation, racism and the development of the "black underclass in the North and South, with its destructive behavioral characteristics." The economic slant leads to interesting tables and statistics concerning fluctuations in the price of cotton, but for serious readers, the usefulness of Dattel's work is diminished by his heavy reliance on secondary sources and casual documentation. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Choice Review

Independent scholar Dattel provides a thoughtful analysis of cotton's economic power and the ways in which it helped shape race relations in the US. He examines cotton from an economic and financial viewpoint, noting that the confluence of westward land expansion and the need for inexpensive cotton textiles in the early 19th century generated a global economic juggernaut that was primarily responsible for reviving and expanding slavery in the US. Slave-produced cotton became the country's largest export commodity, generating wealth and commercially and financially connecting the North, the South, and Europe. Cotton's importance helped shape the political and legal defense of slavery, while the economic bond of cotton and slavery pushed the country into the Civil War. Even with the end of slavery, cotton influenced the economy and race relations, as cotton production continued under sharecropping and racial antagonism persisted. Dattel argues that northern racial animosity deterred black mobility, containing African Americans in the cotton South until well into the 20th century. The advent of the mechanical cotton picker and the Great Depression ended the economic might of cotton, yet the residue of racial antipathy continued. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. R. M. Hyser James Madison University