Does he tell how Irish workers were used when the work was too dangerous, since their
lives were worth less than the slaves?
Peter Dorman wrote:
> 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/
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
