Cambridge Studies on the American South: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge Studies on the American South)
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- Synopsis
- Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Keri Leigh Merritt reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton - and thus, slaves - in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete - for jobs or living wages - with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socio-economic consequences as a result of living in a slave society. Merritt examines how these 'masterless' men and women threatened the existing Southern hierarchy and ultimately helped push Southern slaveholders toward secession and civil war.
- Copyright:
- 2017
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9781316877586
- Related ISBNs:
- 9781107184244, 9781107184244
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Date of Addition:
- 06/16/18
- Copyrighted By:
- Keri Leigh Merritt
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- History, Nonfiction, Business and Finance, Sociology
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.
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