| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Angela Lakwete. Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America. (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 232. $45.00.
One of the most enduring myths in American history concerns Eli Whitney. Countless textbooks recount how slaves cleaned the seeds from cotton by hand until Whitney miraculously invented the cotton gin in 1794. Central to this myth is the old dichotomy of the industrial (and industrious) North versus the agricultural (and lazy) South: it was Whitney, the Yankee inventor, who brought mechanical progress to technologically inept southern planters and slaves. Thanks to Whitney's invention, planters began growing huge cotton crops and slavery became economically viable. Following the simple causality found in too many textbooks, Whitney's gin sustained slavery and led inevitably to the Civil War.	1
Remarkably, while American historians have overturned similar myths, Angela Lakwete is the first to probe the connections among the cotton gin, slavery, and innovation in the antebellum South. By examining how cotton was cleaned—or ginned—Lakwete reveals that Whitney did not invent the cotton gin and that southerners could be quite innovative.	2
Lakwete traces ginning from the fifth century C.E., when women in Africa, Asia, and the American Southwest cleaned cotton using a long thin roller on a flat surface. By the seventeenth century, artisans in India had developed a hand-cranked churka with two rollers. Seeing cotton as a potential cash crop, British colonizers transferred the churka to the Caribbean and North America. Since there was a shortage of labor and a strong demand for cotton, Lakwete shows how white mechanics and enslaved Africans in the Caribbean built larger, foot-powered models.	. . .

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