An Investigation of the Agricultural Reform Movement

Genovese (1967) drew upon principal sources as well as secondary analyses to generate a synthesis of these disparate sources. Each from the chapters of this book is extensively footnoted and the author includes both a bibliographical note plus a thorough index of the book's contents. These additions towards the text not just offer substantiation for Genovese's (1967) conclusions and interpretations, they also serve the student of history as an good resource for additional study.

The book is also well written and logically organized. Genovese (1967, p. 3) announces his purpose early inside the text, stating that "these studies fall under the rubric of 'the political economy of slavery,' not the 'economics of slavery,' since they are concerned much less with economies or even economic history as commonly understood than with the economic aspect of the society in crisis." Genovese (1967) argues in essence, that slavery produced inside the American South a stratified class system as well as a particular political community, economy, ideology, and set of psychological patterns.

In his first essay, Genovese (1967) interprets the slave South as being a hegemonic social order dominated by slaveholders who constituted an elite aristocracy that was very resistant to industrialization and change. Planter capitalism is described as being a doomed method because it had particular irrational elements. Genovese (1967, p. 16) says that "slave economies commonly manifest irrational tendencies that inhibit economic development and endanger social stability.

This is an essential understand of slavery and its results which must be required reading for any student of this specific subject. Genovese's (1967) primary achievement is that he does not digress from his central thesis and focuses his efforts entirely on the political economy of slavery. He demonstrates how the South did not survive the crisis on the nineteenth century because it represented the manifestation of a fundamental antagonism among contemporary and premodern worlds. The premodern quality on the Southern world emerges as the creation from the dominant slaveholding class that was extremely reluctant to surrender its way of life even inside face of that lifestyle's inability to sustain itself. From this perspective, the American Civil War becomes an inevitable clash between the premodern and also the modern. As tragic as that conflict was, it forced the South to join the modern era.

That there have been some urban industrial or mercantile capitalists within the slave South is another theme addressed by Genovese (1967). It's this author's belief that the dominant rural slaveholders needed some regional industrial expansion to assist their plantation economy and political power, but could not sustain economically or tolerate politically a general industrialization. The slaveholders, from a political perspective, are depicted as afraid of an urban bourgeoisie with its very own interests as well as the money to defend them.

 

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