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.
Produkteigenschaften
- Artikelnummer: 9781316635438
- Medium: Buch
- ISBN: 978-1-316-63543-8
- Verlag: Cambridge University Press
- Erscheinungstermin: 22.09.2017
- Sprache(n): Englisch
- Auflage: Erscheinungsjahr 2017
- Serie: Cambridge Studies on the American South
- Produktform: Kartoniert, Paperback
- Gewicht: 538 g
- Seiten: 371
- Format (B x H x T): 152 x 229 x 20 mm
- Ausgabetyp: Kein, Unbekannt