Introduction: Imagining a Confederate economy -- Shifting cultivation, slavery, and economic development -- Agricultural reform and state activism -- Explaining Lieber's paradox : railroads, state building, and slavery -- Redefining free trade to modernize the South -- Economic nationalism and the growth of the Confederate state -- Statistical appendix: The origins and impact of shifting cultivation
Summary
What would separate Union and Confederate countries look like if the South had won the Civil War? This was something that southern seccessionists actively debated. Imagining themselves as nation builders, they understood the importance of a plan for the economic structure of the Confederacy. The traditional view assumes that Confederate slave-based agrarianism went hand in hand with a natural hostility toward industry and commerce. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, this book's analysis finds that secessionists strongly believed in industrial development and state-led modernisation
