Old South/new South

by Gavin Wright

Book Overview

In this provocative and intricate analysis of the postbellum southern economy, Gavin Wright finds in the South's peculiar labor market the answer to the perennial question of why the region remained... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465051944
• Release Date: October 1987
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.8" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

An economic history of the South

Gavin Wright in Old South, New South, applies an economic interpretation to the southern condition. Wright's analysis is an economic history of the American South since the Civil War. The South, he argues, was an economy within a larger economy. The basic theme of his study is how the South related to national and international economies in different times. Wright argues that the South was a "colonial economy"(vii) whose most important feature was a "separate regional labor market, outside the scope of national and international labor markets that were active and effective during the same era."(7) The agricultural low-wage basis of the labor market Wright hypothesizes, is the key to understanding the Old South. But in the New South, wages are on a par with the rest of the nation. Old South, New South is an economist's explanation of this transition. Because he relies strictly on economic theory, much of Gavin Wright's interpretation contradicts traditional historiography. Slavery was the root cause of how the north and south developed economically different. "The incentives of slave property tended to disperse population across the land, reduce investments in transportation and in cities, and limit exploration of southern natural resources."(11) Because slave labor was so mobile, Wright argues that before the Civil War, there was little incentive for local investment. Two other economists support this contention. Bateman and Weiss (1981) argue that an unrealized potential for industrialization existed in the south, but that the attitude and behavior of the planter class inhibited its development. (20) This "deplorable scarcity" of manufacturing capacity contributed to a common theme of industrial backwardness among writers of southern history. Northerners who came south saw the region as "backward and stagnant" because they did not see signs of progress apparent in the north (31) but Wright states "by no conventional measures of performance was the south stagnant or declining, nor was slavery unviable economically."(33) The northern visitors were simply not seeing what they expected from their northern perspective. After the war, when the investment value of slaves was lost, entrepreneurial incentives were redirected toward investment in land. The potential return from the productivity and value of land was the new method of creating wealth. (19) In Wright's words southern "laborlords" became "landlords." Whereas historians argue about the "continuities" or "discontinuities," of the South before and after the Civil War, economists see a striking change in the South following the war. After the war the output per acre of land was paramount. Labor was now a variable cost which had to be covered by the value of the crops grown. Cotton became the most valuable crop and more cotton was grown following the Civil War than before. (34) As a consequence of the value of land, towns, railroads, and manufacturing developed. Wright revalidates Broadus Mi