| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, editors. Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South. (New Currents in the History of Southern Economy and Society.) Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2005. Pp. x, 240. $24.95.
This collection of essays is the first volume in a series produced by the Southern Industrialization Project under the rubric of "New Currents in the History of Southern Economy and Society." Determined to transcend the image of the antebellum American South as "a backward, wholly agricultural" region, the series "endeavors to place southern economic development in a dynamic and expanding context" (p. ix) while examining the southern economy in a comparative and transatlantic mode. While this approach may not be as novel as the editors contend—after all, two decades ago Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese made much the same argument in The Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (1983)—the book joins a growing rank of recent works seeking to "globalize" southern history, including at least two other collections of essays published in 2005, The American South in a Global World, edited by James L. Peacock, Harry L. Watson, and Carrie Matthews, and Globalization and the American South, edited by James C. Cobb and William Stueck. Where those works emphasize the place of the Sunbelt in post-World War II international political economy, the volume under review focuses primarily on the previous era of globalization, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, emphasizing especially the place of southern slavery, emancipation, and industrialization in the emerging contours of the Atlantic economy.	1
The volume opens appropriately with an essay by Stanley Engerman, a pioneer of the comparative approach to the intertwined dynamics of slavery and capitalism in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Engerman's essay, in an argument now almost congruent with his name, punctures the "myth" of a "stagnant southern economy" (p. 17). Summarizing many of the arguments made in the volume's subsequent chapters about the vitality of antebellum southern capitalism, Engerman contends that the antebellum South stood out as an advanced part of the nineteenth-century world—perhaps because of, rather than in spite of, chattel slavery. Noting that "the South was probably among the most productive economies in the world at the time" (p. 22), Engerman shows that only by invidious comparison to the North or to Great Britain could it be considered an economic laggard. If anything, he concludes, even though "the strength of the agricultural sector held back industrial change" (p. 21), the region still "ranked among the world's leading industrial producers" (p. 23).	2
Engerman's insistence on the economic dynamism of the South sets the tone for the rest of the volume. The second essay, by Emma Hart, argues that Charleston, South Carolina's eighteenth-century "diverse urban domestic economy" (p. 29) should be regarded as akin to the evolving proto-industrial entrepôts elsewhere in the Atlantic world, rather than as an outpost of the "drowsy plantation society" (p. 8) surrounding it. Despite the existence of "production networks, professionalization, waged working weeks, and diversified firms with dozens of employees" (p. 48), one balks at Hart's insistence that the widespread presence of urban slaves "did not fundamentally reshape the urban economy" (p. 29) in late eighteenth-century Charleston. Similarly, economic historian Brian Schoen makes the case that antebellum southerners actively pursued free trade and integration into the global economy in order to avoid dependence on the North. But, just because many southern entrepreneurs maintained a "faith that, within the context of global interdependence and international free trade, a slave-based, cotton economy could modernize" (p. 67) did not make it so, as the beleaguered Confederacy discovered.	. . .

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