Planting a Capitalist South: Masters, Merchants, and Manufacturers in the Southern Interior, 1790-1860

Abstract

Debate over the nature of the antebellum southern economy—whether it was capitalist or precapitalist or something else again—has raged among historians of the South for many years. Indeed, some wearied scholars have wished the question a quiet and timely death, but it refuses to go away—in large part because it continues to generate new insights into the nature of antebellum southern life and society. Into the fray steps Tom Downey, whose new book, Planting a Capitalist South, attempts to circumvent the central question by borrowing from historians of the Northeast the notion of a “transition to capitalism” (p. 3). Downey argues that by the 1840s the region—or more specifically (and surprisingly) the Edgefield and Barnwell districts in South Carolina— was, like the antebellum Northeast, in the midst of a capitalist transition, but one that moved more slowly and was far less complete by the Civil War. Only by recognizing such a transition, Downey argues, can historians account for both the region's attachment to an agrarian and presumably precapitalist economy, and its expanding commercial and industrial sector.