King Cotton's Long Shadow (1 Viewer)

[jazzeum]

Walter Johnson, who wrote Soul by Soul, about the slave market (focusing on New Orleans), one of the more important books about slavery in the last 10 years, has written an article worth well reading about the importance of slavery in the US economic system, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/30/king-cottons-long-shadow/

The article is based on his new book, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom.

As with Soul by Soul, this book is sure to garner several prizes.

 

[PolarBear]

Brad

I got River of Dark Dreams a couple of weeks ago and it is both enlightening and riveting. Now I am waiting for Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton due out this year.
Both books are critical to my current research.

Here is a link to a short video of Professor Johnson discussing his new book. Like the forthcoming Beckert book it looks beyond America's borders.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674045552

Randy

When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an “empire for liberty” populated by self-sufficient white farmers. Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labor of slaves. River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reaccounting dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War.

Walter Johnson deftly traces the connections between the planters’ pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets, and Southern schemes for global ascendency. Using slave narratives, popular literature, legal records, and personal correspondence, he recreates the harrowing details of daily life under cotton’s dark dominion. We meet the confidence men and gamblers who made the Valley shimmer with promise, the slave dealers, steamboat captains, and merchants who supplied the markets, the planters who wrung their civilization out of the minds and bodies of their human property, and the true believers who threatened the Union by trying to expand the Cotton Kingdom on a global scale.

But at the center of the story Johnson tells are the enslaved people who pulled down the forests, planted the fields, picked the cotton—who labored, suffered, and resisted on the dark underside of the American dream.

 

[jazzeum]

I'm reading the book now, about a third way through it. I find the book a little unusual, particularly the steamboat section; I think it could have been a little smaller. Not that it's not interesting -- you'll certainly find out a lot about steam boats -- but I think it's done to a little excess.

 

[PolarBear]

I'm reading the book now, about a third way through it. I find the book a little unusual, particularly the steamboat section; I think it could have been a little smaller. Not that it's not interesting -- you'll certainly find out a lot about steam boats -- but I think it's done to a little excess.

Maritime & Riverine history is a very significant element in history and American studies at the moment. I have a friend at Texas A&M who is writing a book on Maritime Blackface Minstrelsy aboard U.S. ships and how it became a part of America's image around the globe as a result of sailor's performances in places like Japan during Perry's visit in the 1850s. Here is an article by him

Brian Rouleau
In the Wake of Jim Crow
Maritime Minstrelsy Along the Transoceanic Frontier

http://www.common-place.org/vol-12/no-04/rouleau/

 

[jazzeum]

Thanks. I will give it a read. One of my primary interests is slavery. Several observations he makes about whiteness of steamboat travelers was illuminating.

What are your research interests? Don't know if this falls within them but have you read Freedom National about the development of anti-slavery policy. A fascinating book.