Peter wrote,
> 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.
Bateman, Fred and Thomas Weiss, ”A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of
Industrialization Industrialization in the Slave South• (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1981) argues for cultural forces
restricting the growth of manufacturing in the south.
In an article titled something like, "Empirical evidence that the social
relations of production matter: the case of the US antebellum south" in the
Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1989, I presented econometric evidence
consistent with the claim that because the US south was part of a world system
(e.g., linked to the US north and other manufacturing areas) the US South might
have been locked into specializing in cotton and rice. And, the econometric
evidence in this article also indirectly suggests that industrialization
outside the US south might have been partially due to slavery in the south.
Eric
