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The Planter-Capitalism

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Slavery was a deeply embedded part of the American South and its economy, both socially and politically. For many years, most historians argued that the American South was not operating under a system of capitalism, and they believed that the South’s use of slavery in terms of unpaid wages was not that of capitalism due to Marxist thought. But a group of economic historians dubbed the “cliometricians” (Lyons, John S., Louis P. Cain, and Samuel H. Williamson, eds. Reflections on the Cliometrics Revolution: Conversations with Economic Historians. Routledge, 2013.) used an economic analysis to argue that slavery was indeed capitalistic. This group challenged the previous notions that historians overlooked: slavery was not unproductive, rather …show more content…

The main thesis of the ‘planter-capitalism’ model is that the Southern plantations of the New World were exceedingly proficient, industrious and cost-effective organizations manufacturing products for an aggressive world-market. The ‘planter-capitalism’ model recognizes, correctly, that the slaveholding planters of the Americas faced what Ellen Meiksins Wood calls ‘market imperatives’. (Post, Charles. The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620–1877. Chicago, Ill.: Historical Materialism, 2012.) Post argues that “For the proponents of the ‘planter-capitalism’ model, the master-classes of the Americas responded to this ‘market-coercion’ in the same ways other capitalists responded through - productive specialization and technical innovation. According to Lewis Gray, ‘the plantation was a capitalistic type of agricultural organization in which a considerable number of unfreelabourers were employed under unified direction and control in the production of a staple crop’. The planters, ‘hard, calculating businessmen’ committed to individual effort, upward social mobility, and the accumulation of wealth, successfully utilized command of slave-labor in the pursuit of profits on the world-market.” (Post, Charles. The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620–1877. Chicago, Ill.: Historical Materialism, 2012.) The coercion Post references is debt amassed when a planter created and maintained a plantation. These planters did this by evading the loss of their land and their property, i.e. slaves by “protecting their position” in the global markets by using their cash crops: tobacco, sugar, rice, rice, coffee, indigo, and cotton through cost reduction. The power they had within the global economy was astounding, and they attained this power not with some old or

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He also shows how they took something like slavery and blew the other forms of providing revenue out of the water! The slave revenue exceeded well over the industrial, mechanical, and farming numbers and even though it was a southern dominated aspect of life, it even funded the northern part of the country. Baptist drives home his thoughts and provides facts in key areas such as: economic thought when it comes to production output, transportation of slaves and its impact on the local and national economies, and the interaction of the northern and southern economies. Baptist demonstrates very soundly that both wage capitalism in the North and slave capitalism in the South interacted

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The nineteenth century was one the most remarkable period in American history. For it was the century of the Market Revolution as well as the Civil War. The war took millions of lives of innocent people, who either tried to eliminate or defend slavery. The Civil War seemed to be revolved around slavery. However, slavery was not the only causation.

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Senator James Henry Hammond delivered a speech to reflect on the hard work slaves and slaveholders they have done which was beneficial to countries in Europe. Their increasingly amount of cotton was very serviceable and that it should be credited to all the slaves and to the slaveholder who helped other country save a lot of money on cotton and giving the last of the money to charity. “That cotton, but for the bursting of your speculative bubbles in the North, which produced the whole of this convulsion, would have brought us $100,000,000. We have sold it for $65,000,000 and saved you. Thirty-five million dollars we, the slaveholders of the South, have put into the charity box for your magnificent financiers, your "cotton lords," your "merchant princes."

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In George Reid Andrew’s journal entry entitled “Black Workers in the Export Years: Latin America,” Andrews poses the challenging question, “What were the impacts of the export years on racial dynamics and “racial orders” in Latin America?” Andrew replies with a complex answer: why owning land, racializing labor migrations, and unionizing ethnics groups produced a vast amount of racial conflict and provided space for negotiation in the workforce of multiracial Latin American regions. Andrews starts his claim stating the crucial relevance of owning an efficient amount of land to grow crops during the time period of the late 1800’s in Latin America. Andrews confesses, “Rural workers who hold sufficient amount land to feed themselves and their

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“The South grew, but it did not develop,” is the way one historian described the South during the beginning of the nineteenth century because it failed to move from an agrarian to an industrial economy. This was primarily due to the fact that the South’s agricultural economy was skyrocketing, which caused little incentive for ambitious capitalists to look elsewhere for profit. Slavery played a major role in the prosperity of the South’s economy, as well as impacting it politically and socially. However, despite the common assumption that the majority of whites in the South were slave owners, in actuality only a small minority of southern whites did in fact own slaves. With a population of just above 8 million, the number of slaveholders was only 383,637.

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