The Slave Economy of the Old South Review

Marking Yard. Smith. Debating Slavery: Economy and Order in the Antebellum American Due south. Cambridge: Cambridge University Printing, 1998. xii + 117 pp. $39.95 (material), ISBN 978-0-521-57158-six.

Reviewed by Eric Tscheschlok (Department of History, Auburn University)
Published on H-Due south (October, 2000)

Interpreting the Slave S

Interpreting the Slave South

This slim book -- spanning just ninety-4 pages of text --represents the second book-length effort by Marker Thousand. Smith, whose Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (1997) is one of the well-nigh original works on slavery and the Old South to accept appeared in contempo years. By its nature Debating Slavery lacks the same kind of ingenuity and freshness, though Smith does present a well-written and thoughtful narrative in the nowadays work. Debating Slavery is substantially an extended historiographical synopsis of the major scholarly interpretations of the economy and gild of the slave Southward.

The book forms role the Economical History Society'due south serial, "New Studies in Economic and Social History." This series is designed to provide "a concise and administrative guide to the current interpretations of key themes in economic and social history," and the books in the series "are intended for students approaching a topic for the first fourth dimension, and for their teachers" (back embrace). In Debating Slavery Smith aims to "outline the contours of the debates, summarize the contending viewpoints, and weigh upward the relative importance, merits, and shortcomings of [the] diverse and competing interpretations" of the slave-plantation South (p. i). In the chief, he succeeds in this mission. Simultaneously, Smith demonstrates an awe-inspiring grasp of the literature on slavery and the antebellum S.

Smith divides the text into seven chapters, sandwiched between a thoughtful preface and an outstanding, comprehensive bibliography. The first chapter provides a basic introduction to the book by sketching the predominant themes in the history and historiography of slave Southward from colonial times to emancipation. Here Smith advances, past implication at least, the questionable assertion that all major works of this genre fall into ii dogmatic schools. One, headed by Eugene Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Raimondo Luraghi, sees southern club as anti-commercial, precapitalist, and economically inefficient. The other, represented mainly past Robert Fogel, Stanley Engerman, and James Oakes, contends that the plantation South was (much like the industrializing North) profit-driven, marketplace-oriented, and economically efficient.

In truth, a great a deal of literature on the slave South cannot be pigeonholed then neatly into this oversimplified dichotomy. Affiliate 2 on "Slaveholders and Plantations" reprises the capitalism debate. Co-ordinate to Genovese and his school, southern planters had a prebourgeois mentality. They did not cherish wealth or profit for its own sake, but instead valued their slaveholdings equally social clout, every bit a badge of laurels that certified their cultural hegemony. What was most important to slaveowners was membership in the ruling class, not just the attainment of riches. Appropriately, the planter worldview did not conceive of social order in capitalistic terms such every bit gain, thrift, or exploitation of labor. Rather, planters viewed their earth through the premodern lens of the ethic of paternalism. The South-as-backer schoolhouse, contrarily, finds southern slaveholders far more entrepreneurial than seigneurial. Historians in this group portray planters as acquisitive, market-savvy businessmen who employed mill-like management techniques in order to maximize the profits of their commercial operations.

Chapter Three, concerning "Yeomen and Not-Slaveowners," treats the swell mass of white Southerners who owned fewer than 6 slaves and in most cases held none. Here Smith surveys a wide array of literature, while laying detail stress upon the writings of Genovese, Lacy One thousand. Ford, and Steven Hahn. The main questions examined in this segment involve the place of the "manifestly folk" in the wide web of southern social relations and the extent to which yeoman farmers embraced or rejected market activity. Did the yeomanry constitute an independent rank of order that resented the master-class hauteur of the planter patriciate, or did the common folk admire the planters' political and economic ability because they aspired to move upward the southern social ladder themselves? Did yeomen demonstrate a "safety-first" mentality, which emphasized subsistence production for household consumption and permitted only sporadic participation in the market economy (p. 33)? Or, did they display an "aggregating-first" attitude, which celebrated market activity as a fairway to socioeconomic advocacy (p. 38)? The answer to these questions appears to be "a lilliputian of both." Recent works on these topics reveal both "precommercial and market place-oriented characteristics" among the yeomanry, while indicating that geographic variations played a key office in determining whether yeomen became heavily involved in the market economy or whether they retained a "traditional, premarket mentality" (pp. 31, 41).

Chapter Four on "Slaves" is disappointing. Although the affiliate looks at scholarship on slave work and culture, it does and then mainly to assess the affect of these forces upon the plantation economy. Revisiting the backer-versus-precapitalist debate (yet again), Smith devotes fully one-half this chapter to cataloging both the conservative and preindustrial elements of slave culture. Unfortunately, he as well ignores nearly cultural elements with no direct relation to this dichotomy, skirting such issues equally slave religion, the black family, and the persistence of Africanism in African-American culture. These omissions are indicative of the almost egregious one of the book: the absence of a substantive discussion of race -- which U. B. Phillips once identified as the "fundamental theme" of southern history -- as a prime number mover in the history of the slave South. For a work purporting to address both the economy and club of the antebellum South, this book is long on economics only far too curt on social aspects, at least when these aspects take no palpable economic connotations. As a result, themes such as race (which do not fit squarely into the capitalist/non-capitalist framework) are shunted aside or appear only every bit sidelights.

Capacity Five and Half-dozen deal with the profitability of slavery, both as a business and as a system. Though scholars still quibble over details, they seem to agree that slaveholders usually profited from their bondsmen's labor, and that the rate of render on investments in slaves was comparable to that of well-nigh uppercase investments available to northern industrial entrepreneurs. Yet, in gauging the economical bear upon of slavery as a system, Smith notes, historians accept reached no overarching consensus. Some scholars claim slavery retarded urbanization, industrialization, and overall economical development. Others debate factors besides slavery accounted for these weather. Still others reject altogether the thought that the antebellum South was industrially starved or economically underdeveloped. Smith himself seems inclined toward the position that "the South'southward peculiar institution was deleterious to the region'south economy overall" (p. 86).

In Chapter Vii ("New Directions, Toward Consensus") Smith attempts to synthesize the myriad and ostensibly incompatible interpretations of the slave S. He finds considerable room for "historiographical convergence" (p. 87). He insists, however, such convergence will not come up from further "historical exploration of new subjects and sub-themes" (p. 89). Rather, he maintains, "the fashion to reconcile the obviously competing schools of thought is probably best achieved not through more than empirical research but through greater theoretical consideration" (p. 89). Readers volition have to judge for themselves whether or not this is an appropriate note on which to end a work that targets as its avowed audience students tackling a discipline for the get-go time.

The volume's brevity is at in one case a source of forcefulness and weakness. Unquestionably, Smith's power to digest, in so curt a space, the massive volume of literature on the economy and lodge of the slave Southward serves as testimony to his laudable mastery of this topic. On the other hand, the book sacrifices dash and complexity for the sake of concision. Often this results in a highly generalized presentation of the arguments of the major works in this field. In the final assay the utility of this volume depends upon its application. If used equally intended past its author and publishers, Debating Slavery tin provide a valuable overview of some of the almost salient historiographical questions about the nature of the slave-plantation South and, hopefully, volition stimulate further historical inquiry into the important subjects it addresses. At the aforementioned time, however, at that place is a danger that books of this type will become substitutes for actually reading the of import works they talk over. If used merely equally a class of "Cliff's Notes," this book can offering but a modicum of intellectual do good.

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Citation: Eric Tscheschlok. Review of Smith, Mark M., Debating Slavery: Economy and Lodge in the Antebellum American South. H-South, H-Cyberspace Reviews. October, 2000.
URL: http://world wide web.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4598

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