by Sven Beckert
First published 2016
Sven Beckert chronicles how America's plantation system created a global economic powerhouse between 1800 and 1900. In 1850, cotton plantations controlled world markets while rice, sugarcane, and tobacco operations stretched across a farming empire from Maryland to Texas. Four million enslaved African Americans labored in fields that generated unprecedented wealth for slaveholders. The author traces how this agricultural economy connected to international capitalism through slave labor, indentured servitude, and mass commodity production. After emancipation destroyed the plantation labor system, Asian competitors flooded markets with cheaper raw materials. Free trade policies eliminated protected markets. The plantation world collapsed within fifty years. Beckert examines how vast estates survived through tenancy and sharecropping systems that replaced slave work gangs. He shows how poverty and forced labor persisted into the twentieth century. The book analyzes slavery's role in the Old South, plantation agriculture's profits, and emancipation's consequences for global markets.
Genres: historical-fiction, 20th-century, american, non-fiction, 19th-century, american-history
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: historical-drama, social-change
Setting: America, Maryland, Texas
Period: 1800-1900, 1850, 20th-Century
176 pages · Kindle Edition · Johns Hopkins University Press
Content warnings: slavery, violence