Plantation Kingdom: The American South and its Global Commodities by Richard Follett, et al.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Plantation Kingdom: The American South and its Global Commodities by Richard Follett, et al. Robert Gudmestad (bio) Plantation Kingdom: The American South and its Global Commodities. By Richard Follett, Sven Beckert, Peter Coclanis, and Barbara Hahn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Pp. 176. $19.95. The American South ascended to amazing heights of economic glory in the first half of the nineteenth century. By any measure, the region produced large quantities of rice, cotton, sugar, and tobacco. Along the way, it created supremely wealthy individuals. Such production, of course, was based upon the exploitation of slave labor and an ability to connect to global markets. By the start of the twentieth century, the South had fallen into “commodity hell” (p. 5). Its enslaved labor was no more, and the global system that southern planters exploited now led to a glut of cheap imports. This collection of essays explores this stunning transformation. An expert in each of the four commodities—Peter Coclanis for rice, Sven Beckert for cotton, Richard Follett for sugar, and Barbara Hahn for tobacco—chart each commodity’s trajectory. The result is an interesting book that serves as a useful encapsulation of the latest scholarship of the southern plantation economy. In some ways, the chapters in this book are distillations of earlier scholarship, [End Page 176] and readers who have read the authors’ monographs will find much that is familiar. What these essays do, though, is to make it easy for readers to line up the commodities against one another and search for points of comparison and difference. For instance, rice is the only foodstuff in the book and the demand for it in the Atlantic World remains opaque. Cotton was the only crop that broke past regional bounds and was one of the earliest globally integrated industries. Sugar needed a fresh infusion of young workers and a federal tariff to survive. Tobacco underwent an early industrialization and probably did not endure as steep a decline as the other commodities. All of the crops depended on the exploitation of enslaved Americans and favorable federal policies. The essays also push past the traditional boundary of 1865. At first, globalization was a blessing, but after the war it became a curse because the American commodities had difficulty competing, particularly when it came to price. American slavery, it is clear after reading these essays, held down the costs of production in the South, but at the human price of long hours and brutal corporal punishment. The four commodities also depended on technological advancement for their success, a point that might intrigue and frustrate readers of this journal. Coclanis brushes past technology that improved antebellum rice production, but then inserts a useful discussion of the technology that helped bring down the U.S. rice industry. He notes that intercontinental steam shipping, the Suez Canal, the trans-oceanic cable, and steel-hulled vessels created conditions where foreign rice could flood the domestic market. Beckert and Follett briefly mention the importance of technology for cotton and rice, but don’t provide a comprehensive discussion of its role in commodity production. Hahn’s incorporation of technology is the most useful in this short book. She argues that the various types of tobacco are a product of technological innovation, and her discussion of bright leaf tobacco is an interesting case in point. Planters used technology to create bright leaf technology, but how they did so is a matter of dispute. Hahn has an interesting discussion of how planters created a myth where a slave fell asleep and allowed the curing fires in a tobacco barn to burn too hot. This story “valorized the plantation past” by replacing the exploitative nature of tobacco production with a vision of happy, contented slaves (p. 115). These thought-provoking essays are a useful starting point for anyone wishing a greater understanding of the South’s four great commodities. They would be appropriate to assign in undergraduate or graduate classes that study southern history or American economic history. [End Page 177] Robert Gudmestad Robert Gudmestad is a professor of history at Colorado State University and the author of Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom (LSU Press...