Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War / Edition 1

by Gavin Wright

Overview

In this provocative and intricate analysis of the postbellum southern economy, Gavin Wright finds in the South’s peculiar labor market the answer to the perennial question of why the region remained backward for so long. After the Civil War, Wright explains, the South continued to be a low-wage regional market embedded in a high-wage national economy. He vividly details the origins, workings, and ultimate demise of that distinct system. The post-World War II southern economy, which created today’s Sunbelt, Wright shows, is not the result of the evolution of the old system, but the product of a revolution brought on by the New Deal and World War II that shattered the South’s stagnant structure and created a genuinely new, thriving order.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807120989
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	01/01/1997
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Gavin Wright is William Robertson Coe Professor in American Economic History at Stanford University and the author of The Political Economy of the Cotton South and Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War, winner of the Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award of the Southern Historical Association. He is a past president of the Economic History Association and the Agricultural History Society.

Editorial Reviews

If you can read only one book about how history happened to the post-Civil War economy, read this one.

New York Review of Books

Gavin Wright's book emancipates southern history from many traditional bonds and outworn concepts. I enjoyed reading it and take pleasure in recommending it.

C. Vann Woodward

Mr. Wright . . . has given us economic history at its best—comprehensive, stimulating, readable.

New York Times Book Review

Wright's earlier work established him as the most literate and thoughtful of the ``new economic historians''; this new book can only enhance his reputation. In it he argues that Southern poverty after the Civil War is best understood as a function of a separate, low-wage labor market. The advantage of lower labor costs did not bring prosperity but instead kept the South impoverished. Wright argues that market forces alone could not transform the South onto a level comparable to the North. Rather, the market economy perversely keep the South racist and poor. Only the undermining of the Southern plantation economy by federal New Deal policies changed the South in the post-war decades into part of the ``Sun Belt.'' Wright's book will interest scholars, but it is also accessible to laypersons. Strongly recommended for academic and larger public libraries. James W. Oberly, History Dept., Univ. of WisconsinEau Claire

Library Journal