By J. Harris
Read or Download Society and Culture in the Slave South (Re-Writing Histories) PDF
Similar history_1 books
Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse
This quantity consists of chosen papers from the most strand, ? Time and Eternity? , on the 7th foreign Medieval Congress held in July 2000 at Leeds. It attests to the truth that the medieval event of time and eternity was once wealthy and complicated, and that its research is open to varied techniques and strategies.
- Focke Wulf Fw 190D ('97)
- Kamov - Ka 50 / 52
- Crisis and Development: An Ecological Case Study of the Forest of Arden 1570-1674
- Stadt und Wald: Vom stadtplanerischen Umgang mit dem stadtnahen Wald dargestellt am Beispiel der Stadtentwicklung Karlsruhe 1870-2000
- V. I. Lenin : Collected Works : Volume 33 : August 1921 - March 1923
- AerMacchi MC-202 Folgore 1941-42
Extra resources for Society and Culture in the Slave South (Re-Writing Histories)
Example text
When they are perceived as a social class, having discrete material interests, 24 THE FRUITS OF MERCHANT CAPITAL moral sensibility, ideological commitment, and social psychology, then the question of the economic viability of their system takes on an entirely different meaning. Since their interests, material and ideological, clashed with those of the dominant class of the larger capitalist world, the question of viability reduces to one of military and political power: was their economy strong enough and flexible enough to support their pretensions and guarantee their safety as a ruling class?
But the South undoubtedly did enjoy an impressive growth in total and per capita wealth from colonial times to secession. No one, not even those classical political economists who attacked slavery as an inefficient system, could reasonably deny that it could generate high profits and attendant growth rates under three conditions: fresh land, a steady supply of cheap labor, and a high level of demand on the world market. The economic indictment of slavery has focused on structural consequences. * He makes a good point, so far as it goes, and we hardly wish to quarrel with his insistence on the dependent nature of the southern economy.
Those who wish to construct abstract models of growth and 29 SOCIETY AND CULTURE IN THE SLAVE SOUTH development could doubtless show that a concerted attack on these and related problems remained a theoretical possibility. Historically, the slaveholders had no such option. They had a common stake in slave labor as an investment, as a fountainhead of material interest, and as the basis of their social system, ideology, and social psychology. They could solve none of these problems without falling upon each other in a war of conflicting particular interests, but their class roots in slave labor set them off from the outside world and threw them collectively on the defensive.