Pecularities of the Rural South: The Legacy of Slavery and Cotton Production

Abstract

Pecularities of the Rural South: The Legacy of Slavery and Cotton ProductionEMPIRE OF COTTON: A Global History. By Sven Beckert. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2014.RAISED UP DOWN YONDER: Growing up Black in Rural Alabama. By Angela McMillan Howell. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 2013.ONE PLACE: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia. Edited by Tom Rankin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2013.Popular understandings of the rural South have historically been permeated with romanticism. Even texts are critical in some respect tend to quite easily lapse into a sordid opportunity for unearned redemption. As Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1929) and Kathryn Stockett's The Help (2009) demonstrate, even the noble quest of Southern white women to break free from the shackles of patriarchy can morph into a thinly veiled homage to slavery and capitalism. In tandem, slavery and capitalism produced the human grist for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' industrial mills of Europe and North America. Three books, Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014); Angela McMillan Howell's Raised Up Down Yonder: Growing Up Black in Rural Alabama (2013) and Tom Rankin's One Place: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia (2013) capture the peculiarities of Southern rurality, and to varying degrees articulate why poverty continues to persist across large swaths of the rural South well into the twentyfirst century.African Americans in the rural South were essential to the development of capitalism globally. Sven Beckert, the recipient of the Bancroft Award for Empire of Cotton, argues the expansion of capitalism went hand-in-hand with the enslavement of Africans and cotton production in the South. So crucial was slave labor, wrote Beckert, that the Liverpool Chronicle and Times warned if slaves ever should be emancipated, cotton cloth prices might double or triple, with devastating consequences for Britain (110).Empire of Cotton examines the relationship between cotton production in the rural South and the distribution and manufacturing of cotton globally. Cotton manufacturing is an ancient cultural practice remained a cottage industry globally for thousands of years before Europeans began cultivating it in the western hemisphere. This subtropical plant flourished in areas where the temperature remained above fifty degrees Fahrenheit and the annual rainfall was at least twenty inches. It grew [f]rom Gujarat to Sulawesi, along the banks of the Upper Volta to the Rio Grande, from the valleys of Nubia to the plains of Yucatan (4). People planted cotton along with other crops, nursed it to maturity, and harvested it as they did the crops they ate. For thousands of years, the cotton goods manufactured in the homes of peasants rarely circulated beyond the plant's natural growing zone. According to Beckert, India and China were the centers of the cotton industry while Indian weavers dominated intercontinental trade. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the balance of power in the cotton industry shifted. As Beckert notes, European trade in cotton textiles tied together Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe in a complex commercial web (36). Unable to get a stronghold on the industry through technological innovation, argues Beckert, Europeans used brutality to insert themselves into the worlds of cotton and to dominate global cotton networks. Textiles from Indian weavers paid for millions of enslaved Africans who toiled on Southern cotton plantations. The cotton enslaved Africans harvested went to factories in Europe and New England where poor white women and children constituted close to 90 percent of the workforce.Empire of Cotton shows how cotton production and slavery catapulted the rural South onto the center stage of the world economy. …