The Re-Establishment of the Plantation Economy in the South 1865-1910

C h a r l e s Wagley has included the U.S. South in his definition of "Plantation America," a region which extends".. .from about midway up the coast of Brazil into the Guianas, along the Caribbean coast throughout the Caribbean itself and into the United States."lThroughout this geographic expanse, the technological and organizational characteristics of plantations have decisively influenced the pattern of change and development which was experienced. Seen in this way, the American South, because of the dominant presence of plantation agriculture, differed significantly from other regions of the country in the years covered by this study. Specifically, our focus in this paper is to examine the relationship between the structure of the plantation economy of the South and that region's failure to keep pace with the economic development experienced in the nation as a whole in the period between the Civil War and World War I. To do so, the paper is divided into two parts: in the first, we define what we mean by a plantation economy, and chronicle how it was that plantations reestablished themselves in the aftermath of slave emancipation, and in the second, we argue analytically that there are grounds to believe that the pace of economic development in plantation economies will he relatively slow and we offer some empirical data relevant to our hypothesis.