Gene Dattel will be signing his new book, Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power, today, November 4, at 5 pm.
Dattel grew up in the cotton country of the Mississippi Delta and studied history at Yale and law at Vanderbilt. He then embarked on a twenty-year career in financial capital markets as a managing director at Salomon Brothers and at Morgan Stanley. Mr. Dattel is now an independent scholar who lectures widely. He lives in New York City.
For more than 130 years, from the early nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth, cotton was the leading export crop of the United States. And the connection between cotton and the African-American experience became central to the history of the republic. American’s most serious social tragedy, slavery and its legacy, spread only where cotton could be grown. Both before and after the Civil War, and well into the twentieth century, blacks were relegated to work the cotton fields. Their social and economic situation was aggravated by a pervasive racial animosity and fear of a black migratory invasion that caused white Northerners to contain blacks in the South.
Gene Dattel’s pioneering study explores the historical roots of these central social issues. In telling detail, Mr. Dattel shows why the vastly unappreciated story of cotton is a key to understanding America’s rise to economic power. Cotton production became a driving force in U.S territorial expansion and sectional economic integration and fostered independent trade between Europe and the United States. Without slave-produced cotton, the South could have never initiated the Civil War. Cotton continued to exert a powerful influence on both the American economy and race relations in the years after the Civil War.
This story has never been told in quite the same way before, related here with the authority of a historian with a profound knowledge of international finance.
A few reviews:
“This is a book not just for those who grew up in the cotton fields of Mississippi as I did, but a challenging and compelling account of the complex role that cotton has played in the economic, racial, and political history of our nation.”–William F. Winter, former governor of Mississippi
“Two themes, one explicit, one implicit, compete in this exploration of the link between the development of American capitalism and the devastation of the African-American community. The price of cotton as the determinant of America’s destiny, influencing and even overcoming individual will and ethical behavior’ is the fully explicit one . . . The secondary and competing theme is Northern complicity in the slave trade, the cotton economy, segregation, racism and the development of the `black underclass in the North and South, with its destructive behavioral characteristics.” –Publishers Weekly
“Gene Dattel has written a very important and necessary book, by locating the expansion of cotton production as a driving force not only in the antebellum South, but in the economy at large. He exposes slave-produced cotton’s central role in causing the Civil War and as the global economic engine that prolonged slavery. Cotton was coveted by New York merchants and the textile barons of England and New England. He shows that after the Civil War cotton and race remained linked until technology finally displaced black labor. He devastatingly critiques the complicit role of the racist North in containing African Americans in the cotton fields. The legacy of this vital crop was economic growth and the social tragedy of slavery and segregation. No examination of American heritage is complete without an understanding of the force that cotton wrought upon its economic and social landscape. America’s racial dilemma cannot be sequestered to one part of the country.” –Roger Wilkins, Clarence J. Robinson Professor Emeritus, George Mason University
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