Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the Reconstruction Era by Michael R. Cohen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the Reconstruction Era by Michael R. Cohen David S. Koffman Michael R. Cohen. Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the Reconstruction Era. New York: New York University Press, 2017. Pp. 288, 29 b&w illus. Hardcover $40. ISBN 9781479879700. Cotton Capitalists is a significant contribution to the growing scholarship on the relationship between economy and ethnicity, in the context of the American South, in American Jewish history, and certainly more broadly. It contributes to literatures that explore Jewish economic behavior, ethnic niche economy networks, the intersections of global finance, investment giants and small businesses, and social history's much deserved a ention to money and business. The work is finely nuanced, clearly articulated, and brings a wealth of new detail and data to the dramatically changing realities of the co on industry during Reconstruction, and the American Jews who shaped and were shaped by it. It argues that Jewish entrepreneurs' ability to thrive in the co on south was owed to the credit relations they forged among one another as Jews, all the while as structural forces—economic, climactic, and geographic—shaped the realities of the co on industry for all who found a place within it. Cohen offers a detailed rendering of the fates and fortunes, rises and falls, of Jewish co on businesses from roughly 1850 to 1890, and simultaneously, a broad analysis of the industry as a whole in its local, southern context, connected as it was to a broader national and global market. The book is an ethnic niche market case study of the ways that smaller and larger Jewish co on outfits managed the changing dynamics and circumstances of the industry—from the ecological and technological, to the geopolitical and corporate/finance—forces that were largely determinative of these firms' abilities to succeed or fail. While the book is not wholly convincing that this case study, in and of itself, can shed light on any other ethnic niche economy—Korean grocers, Greek restauranteurs, Filipino health care workers, or for that ma er Jews in any number of other economic niches in the United States—there is li le doubt that a similar bundle of elements mixed to shape the possibilities for individuals, families, and firms to enter a given market, succeed in it, or fail, and that there would be much to gain if and when these histories of niche economies began comparing their findings. Cohen's oft-repeated phrase "right place, right time" (and its inverse) is convenient shorthand for his broad observation that a swirl of competing forces bear down upon all parties in this and any industry. The book consists of an introductory chapter, six substantive chapters, and a conclusion, and draws from an impressively wide range of sources, including R.G. Dun credit reports, private corporate records, newspapers, family and private papers, and government and private sector analyses of the co on industry. Cohen uses these different sorts of traces scrupulously, and carefully considers the sorts of conclusions that can be drawn from credit reporters who held Jewish merchants in low regard and with distrust. The first chapter deals with the late 1850s and early 1860s, when Jewish peddler-cum-shopkeepers entered the co on market and challenged the [End Page 255] factorage system upon which the industry rested. Ethnic ties, and the credit and trust relationships they facilitated, helped Jewish success in the decade before the Civil War. Chapter 2 focuses on Jewish co on merchants during the war years. It shows how Jews navigated northern trade blockades by smuggling co on to markets, avoided Confederate currency, stockpiled the commodity to survive tenuous years, and began building the new business networks that would prove essential after the war. Chapter 3 studies the immediate postwar business ecology when local credit networks gave way to larger financial structures centered in places like New York and Liverpool. Chapters 4 and 5 use a telephoto lens to show how credit flowed between Jewish and non-Jewish firms of varying sizes to finance the co on industry on two "tiers" of the ethnic network—the larger credit-supplying filial network of Jewish financiers in New York, New...