The whole point of the book, as I recall, was to rebut the claim (most famously
voiced by the young Frederick Law Olmsted) that slavery was incompatible with the
transition to mechanized production. Starobin pointed out that there were at
least isolated instances of industrial production in the South employing slavery
that were comparable to methods used in the North. He went into some detail to
explain how the requisite labor flexibility was engineered. I can't remember if
it was in this book that I first learned about the role of slave labor in building
the rail links across the South.
So you could say that the deeper question was whether slavery confined the South
to a plantation-based economy, whether cotton or sugar or tobacco.
Peter
Louis Proyect wrote:
> At 04:44 PM 10/19/00 -0700, you wrote:
> >
> > I don't know what the contemporary take on it is, or even to what extent it
> > can be considered Marxist, but when I was an undergrad eons ago, I read
> > Industrial Slavery in the Old South, 1790-1861: A Study in Political Economy
> > by Robin Starobin. It was quite an eye-opener to me at the time.
>
> Yeah, I noticed this today in the Barnard Library. It had two things going for
> it, the Starobin name which I assumed indicated that the author was the son or
> daughter of Joseph Starobin, the CP'er who left the party and wrote for
> American Socialist for awhile. The other thing was the title which promised to
> be what I was looking for at first blush. The only drawback--and I'll have to
> take a second look--is that it seemed to be focused on actual manufacturing
> such as tobacco mills using slavery as opposed to picking cotton on
> plantations. I have a sneaky suspicion, however, that the book I am looking
> for
> has never been written. It might be categorized as a Marxist/dependency theory
> study of American slavery. I'll probably post the query on the World Systems
> mailing list although they give me the heebie-jeebies over there.
>
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
