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Southern Tenancy, Machines, and Production Scale on the Eve of the Cotton Picker’s Arrival

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Craig Heinicke
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A fundamental characteristic of the southern United States before World War II was the separate, and lagging, economic path taken by that region relative to the rest of the nation. The South was particularly slow to advance in agricultural science and technology. Both contemporary investigators and recent scholarship have indicted southern institutions for delaying development in southern agriculture (Street 1957; Whatley 1985, 1987). Were sharecropping and tenancy, institutional arrangements that characterized the southern plantation system, responsible for retarding southern economic development? Despite the large amount of scholarly attention that has been focused on these issues, this question remains unanswered.

Type
Articles
Information
Social Science History , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , Fall 1999 , pp. 435 - 458
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1999

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