| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Conquest of Labor: Daniel Pratt and Southern Industrialization. By Curtis J. Evans. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. xvi, 337 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8071-2695-0.)

Most historians of the antebellum South, focusing on slavery, planters, and plantations, have too readily dismissed successful southern entrepreneurs as an unimportant aberration. Curtis J. Evans's fine biography of Daniel Pratt, a transplanted New Englander who became a remarkably successful manufacturer of cotton gins in antebellum Alabama, helps redress this imbalance. Evans marshals an impressive array of primary sources to reconstruct Pratt's life and provide a detailed social history of the town of Prattsville. Along the way, he makes an important historiographical point. Far from being a lone voice in the wilderness, Pratt the manufacturing entrepreneur became a "cultural hero in Alabama . . . who preached his industrial gospel to a largely sympathetic audience." While Evans is sometimes too limited in his analysis of broader issues of southern development, his book is nevertheless an important addition to the economic history of the South. . . .

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