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Rethinking the Postbellum Southern Political Economy

The four books under review, from two prolific Southern University presses, are a fair sampling of recent attempts to come to grips with economic, social, and political history in the South between the Civil War and World War II. None of the writers is an economic or business historian, nor does any of them have any heavy commitment to social science or quantitative methods; but they all mix statistics with traditional research in variations on the sort of holistic class analysis now in vogue. They all limit their scope to small to modest-sized areas, from individual counties (Crandall ShifHett), to geographic sections like Southern Appalachia (Ronald Eller) or the Natchez District bordering Mississippi and Louisiana (Michael Wayne), to entire states (David Carlton). As a rule, the books are best when they offer closely documented interpretations of the thoughts and behavior of particular economic groups—planters, millhands, miners, tenant farmers—and worst when they reach for far-flung academic abstractions. Though the four geographic areas cover nowhere near the entire South, one can identify certain common issues and problems that relate to Southern regional history more generally. For this reason, it is instructive to discuss them in pairs, two on agriculture and two on industrialization.