TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 697 chia is skipped over entirely. In these enterprises and areas, develop ment assumed a different pattern from the one Wright spells out, but the difference is obscured, not explained. Again, though this work is concerned primarily with the functioning of the southern labor market, the influence of organized labor is all but dismissed. Wright’s long view, in sum, enables him to identify cause and consequence, but the complex dynamics of events tend to be oversimplified and homogenized, caveats notwithstanding. In examining issues such as child labor or the colonial economy, the author demonstrates a bootless liberal zeal in distributing “blame,” not in understanding events. The book’s conclusion especially favors Wright’s moralizing weakness over his analyzing strength, but the perspective it under girds is present throughout. Repeatedly, issues of politics and class are boiled down to individual choice in the marketplace. Ironically, however, this is a book written without people or the slightest hint of life’s texture, an analysis without events except on the most abstract level. What Wright has written, in clear but dishwater-dull prose, is economic history without the history. There is brilliant success here and, I think, sad failure. Old South, New South provides an insightful, contentious, gap-toothed perspective on a host of debates still very much open-ended. Lawrence T. McDonnell Dr. McDonnell, assistant professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan, is the author of “Money Knows No Master: Market Relations in the American Slave Community,” in Winifred B. Moore and Joseph F. Tripp, eds., Developing Dixie: Modernization in a Traditional Society (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988). The Modernization of the Louisiana Sugar Industry 1830-1910. By John Alfred Heitmann. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Pp. xii + 298; illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. John Heitmann maintains that, to understand the emergence of modern Louisiana, one must examine its industrial development. To that end, he explores the rise and transformation of the state’s sugar industry, taking care to identify its institutional elements as well as the relevant technical processes. It is the provision of this information that marks a real strength of the book. Historians of technology will be particularly interested in two of the many strands of Heitmann’s argument. He sees in the Louisiana experience a realization by an elite group—planters—that scientific knowledge and technical prowess were keys to power and he discusses the attempts of this group to seize both for itself so as to continue domination of the southern scene. To Heitmann, these events in cluded an effort to coopt the United States Department of Agricul 698 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ture, the appropriation of the state’s land-grant college, the begin nings of industrial research, and the blossoming of science-based technology. Heitmann also recognizes as a technological imperative of sugar production the origin of the discipline of chemical engineering and especially the formulation of the practice of unit operations. Indeed, he argues that competition from abroad led in Louisiana to the study of the everyday problems associated with sugar manufacture, which produced a new hybrid knowledge combining chemistry and mechanical engineering. This inevitably culminated in scientific investigations into the parameters of extraction, evaporation, crystal lization, and the like. These conclusions are challenging, but the book too often is less an analysis of the past than a conscious attempt to touch virtually every theme of the present. The work of recent historians more than informs the book; Heitmann is enslaved by it. The effort to employ or at least comment on seemingly every au courant historical convention, including modernization, professionalism, organizationalism, the for mation and persistence of class cleavages, and of course the influence of science done in Europe on science done in America, reduces the study from an examination of texts and events to a series of brief, not always related—or germane—historiographically based essays. While the lack of a clear analytical line certainly detracts significantly from it, The Modernization of the Louisiana Sugar Industry does have substantial merit. Heitmann has consulted numerous sources and gathered much material not commonly known. The result is a work with many virtues...