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Before long, I'll be writing something about the debate taking place
between Alan Olmstead and Paul Rohde on one side and the new historians
of slavery like Edward Baptist, which rehashes many of the debates that
took place over Eric Williams's "Capitalism and Slavery". Baptist et al
generally come from a strong leftwing angle, paying their dues to
Williams. On the other hand, I have never heard of Olmstead and Rohde
whose main argument against Baptist is that it was new cotton seed
varieties rather than slave-master violence that explains a rise in
output in the years before the Civil War. Five minutes of googling shows
where they are coming from. Not very radical, in my view. They are
bourgeois techno-optimists apparently.
http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521673877
Creating Abundance
Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development
Alan L. Olmstead
University of California, Davis
Paul W. Rhode
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
This book demonstrates that American agricultural development was far
more dynamic than generally portrayed. In the two centuries before World
War II, a stream of biological innovations revolutionized the crop and
livestock sectors, increasing both land and labor productivity.
Biological innovations were essential for the movement of agriculture
onto new lands with more extreme climates, for maintaining production in
the face of evolving threats from pests, and for the creation of the
modern livestock sector. These innovations established the foundation
for the subsequent Green and Genetic Revolutions. The book challenges
the misconceptions that, before the advent of hybrid corn, American
farmers single-mindedly invested in laborsaving mechanical technologies
and that biological technologies were static.
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