AHA Session 208
Labor and Working Class History Association 3
Labor and Working Class History Association 3
Saturday, January 8, 2022: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Grand Ballroom D (Sheraton New Orleans, 5th Floor)
Chair:
John Majewski, University of California, Santa Barbara
Papers:
Comment:
John Majewski, University of California, Santa Barbara
Session Abstract
Industrialization and industrial labor are subjects that are often overlooked in the historiography of the pre-Civil War South. This is despite evidence that a considerable amount of industrial development had taken place in the South in the decades before the American Civil War and that many southern leaders had a vision for the region which emphasized diversification of the southern economy. The politics of slavery and the pastoral ideal of antebellum southern rhetoric and ideology has worked to mask the importance of industry to southern society and its economy and labor system. Our panel explores the boundaries of southern industry and industrial labor in order to better understand the ways in which southern laborers, industrialists, and intellectuals both engaged with and were affected by industrialization. Slavery was always at the center of southern industry and debates about its development. From the beginning, southern industrialists adapted slave labor to their needs. However, as industry expanded, the growing population of working-class white southerners were driven towards this type of work. Southern ideas about race and class complicated this process, a tension that lives at the center of our research. Overlooking these developments hides the importance of southern labor relations and ideological concerns related to the politics of race, class, and gender in the slave South. Industrialization was transforming the lives of both black and white laborers in the South and was a major point of contention between elites before the American Civil War. Viewing these developments from a variety of angles, including the perspectives of southern elites, male and female industrialists, enslaved laborers, white laborers, and antislavery northerners, allows us to begin the process of mapping the boundaries of southern industrial development and the ways in which it shaped American history in the nineteenth century. Our research joins a growing effort to better understand American capitalist development and, more specifically, the role of southern slavery in shaping it. Exploring the connection between southern industry and such topics as the state, labor relations, race relations, and proslavery ideology, our research will help to shed some much needed light on what southern industry can tell us about the nature of slavery and the antebellum southern labor system and its racial, class, and gendered dimensions.
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