Abstract

In the late nineteenth century two forms of non-cash payments existed on the Louisiana cotton plantations Lakeview and Theoda: non-cash payments associated with sharecropping, and payments in token money, which could only be redeemed at the company store. Such payments seem to confirm the reputation of the U.S. South as being economically and socially less developed than the Northern states after the American Civil War. The one-crop economy, sharecropping, and token money have been linked to the lack of economic development of Southern agriculture, and to ‘re-enslavement’. This study analyses non-cash payments on Lakeview and Theoda in the same way as similar practices in the Netherlands have been analyzed. It suggests a reinterpretation of the historical economic literature, in which non-cash payments in post-emancipation Southern U.S. agriculture are described as a pre-modern and re-enslaving method. 1 This contribution was created thanks to the Stichting Professor Van Winter Fonds – research project Truck system in transatlantic perspective: Louisiana and the Netherlands, ca. 1865-1920. I would like to thank Karel Davids, Hans Krabbendam, Ronald Kroeze, Jan Lucassen, Damian Pargas, Charles Postel, Wybren Verstegen, Jaco Zuijderduijn, and the referees of this journal for their comments and additions to earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank Michael Strange for her language editing. AUP – 156 x 234 – 3B2-APP flow Pag. 0123 123 VOL. 11, NO. 3, 2014

Highlights

  • In the late nineteenth century two forms of non-cash payments existed on the Louisiana cotton plantations Lakeview and Theoda: non-cash payments associated with sharecropping, and payments in token money, which could only be redeemed at the company store

  • The one-crop economy, sharecropping, and token money have been linked to the lack of economic development of Southern agriculture, and to ‘re-enslavement’

  • Non-cash payments associated with sharecropping and payments in token money have been linked to the lack of economic development of the Southern agriculture, and to the ‘re-enslavement’ of African American labour

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Summary

Introduction

Non-cash payments associated with sharecropping and payments in token money have been linked to the lack of economic development of the Southern agriculture, and to the ‘re-enslavement’ of African American labour. Dutch agricultural historiography can shed new light on the economic arguments about the modernity, or lack thereof, of sharecropping and Southern agriculture in general, in the nineteenth century. The goal of this article is to examine these two forms of non-cash payments and to determine whether they were examples of an underdeveloped Southern economy To achieve this I will unravel the practices of two Louisiana cotton sharecrop plantations using insights from Dutch historiography to offer a new perspective on non-cash payments and the theories about the economic development of the U.S South. I will formulate a reinterpretation of the American economic literature on non-cash payments in post-emancipation Southern agriculture

Pre-modernity and re-enslavement
Lakeview and Theoda
Conclusion
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