TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 695 health of the textile enterprise, they continued to control the Boston & Lowell Railroad for several decades. In sharp contrast, their involvement with the Western Railroad (which extended the line from Boston to Albany) was short-lived. By mid-century, the world of the Boston Associates—textile firms supplying handsome profits; transportation and banking structures designed to maintain those profits; and, finally, cultural, political, and educational institutions to preserve control—was fast disappearing. The caution of the Associates and their imperative avoidance of unnecessary risks caused the Bostonians to miss new economic opportunities; the eventual decline of the textile industry signaled the passing of an era. Dalzell’s account of the varying fortunes of the Boston Associates, his subtle analysis of their control of the secondary industries, and his careful consideration of the spheres of culture and politics all combine to make an ultimately persuasive and powerful argument. Our understanding of the process of industrialization during the 19th century is greatly enriched by this detailed examina tion of one of the most significant elites in American history. Simon Baatz Dr. Baatz studied the history of technology at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is Knowledge, Culture, and Science in the Metropolis: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1817-1970. Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War. By Gavin Wright. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Pp. x + 321; figures, notes, index. $19.95. Gavin Wright’s Old South, New South offers a powerful, contentious explanation of continuity and change in southern economic life since the Civil War. Aimed at a lay readership, this sequel to Wright’s 1978 study of the antebellum southern economy is wide-ranging and eagle-eyed, synthesizing a large, uneven, rapidly growing body of literature. The acclaim it has already won, however, derives not so much from the author’s judicious selection and linkage of others’ theories or from the temperate chastisement he metes out to scholars on both Left and Right. Rather, his adeptness at retrieving “grains of truth” in shopworn ideas, his success in giving accepted arguments a new, insightful twist make this book at once cumulative and path breaking. Until recently, Wright contends, the South’s economy has been isolated and regionalized, primarily because of an insulated labor market. In the antebellum period, the South’s reliance on slavery precluded development of labor-market links with the North and West, maintaining a regime of high-priced labor. Plantations flour ished, but town, railroad, and manufacturing development lagged 696 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE behind national trends. With slavery’s demise, however, planters shifted from a “laborlord” to a landlord status, using their power to hold down wages and share out economic risk. The consequence was a system in agriculture and manufacturing which rested on backward technology, educational neglect, and the harnessing of workers to oppressive family labor schemes. The economic fruit of this benighted strategy, the author shows, was both impressive and flawed. Agricultural productivity and per capita income figures equaled or exceeded national averages between 1880 and 1920, largely because of the strong demand for cotton. Industrially, too, development leaped ahead—if less quickly than population trends—with the “spectacular” success stories of textile manufacturing leading the way. Reliance on northern technological development, however, held back progress. Attempts to diversify southern industry were similarly hampered by insufficient capital, underskilled labor, and outmoded processes and equipment. Despite southern fears of northern domination, Wright argues, the “colonial economy” remained largely a cultural construct, a by-product of the separate labor market. Both the growth and the limits to growth of the period 1880-1920 were distinctly southern achievements. With out a “massive flow of outside capital,” better results could hardly have been achieved. The collapse of world cotton demand after 1920 turned the cornerstones of economic expansion into grievous millstones, and here the traditional grinding southern poverty took its most dismal form. Only the deus ex machina of federal New Deal programs and the Second World War drove up wages and integrated regional labor markets. After 1945, a New South—essentially a non-South—was rescued from the ashes of the old...