Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850. By Andrew J. Torget

Abstract

Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850 . David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History. By Andrew J. Torget. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xiii + 353 pp. Illustrations, maps, charts, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.) As Andrew J. Torget accurately insists, Anglo-American historians of Texas have long resisted laying the republic’s independence at the feet of the slavery-driven cotton economy that bloomed in what he calls the “Texas borderlands” of the 1820s and 1830s. To the contrary, he argues, cotton is at the root of Spanish-Indian relations in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Tejano (Mexican Texans) support for Anglo-American immigration in the 1820s and 1830s, the growing hostility between Texas and both Mexico City and Coahuila, the protracted failure of the Republic of Texas, … delateja{at}txstate.edu