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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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