Shepherd McKinley's Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold provides a concise but comprehensive study of the phosphate and fertilizer industries in the postbellum South Carolina low country. The monograph places the rise of these industries in the context of the struggle for southern economic leadership in the years following the Civil War. McKinley argues that three related industries—land mining and river mining of phosphate rock, along with fertilizer manufacture—complicate prevailing views of Reconstruction South Carolina as region without significant industrial development. In the wake of the Civil War, Charleston-area planters and businessmen saw an opportunity to rebuild their economic prospects in the form of phosphate-rich rocks that could be turned into valuable fertilizer for depleted cotton fields. Over the course of a few short years, former slaveowners employed hundreds, possibly thousands, of freedmen to dig these rocks out of riverfront land. In the 1870s, South Carolinian entrepreneurs took to the rivers to scoop and dredge more rocks from the riverbeds, by the 1880s they added a thriving fertilizer manufacturing industry, and by the 1890s Florida phosphate put the industry in South Carolina into decline.

The slim volume begins its chronicle of the industries in the antebellum period with an overview of the limited state of improved agriculture on slave plantations, setting up a contrast with the modernization of the postbellum fertilizer boom. McKinley draws heavily on older scholarship on slavery and modernization, leaning on Eugene Genovese's interpretations, while omitting the wave of scholarship in recent years that has forcefully argued for planters’ interests in modernizing their agricultural enterprises (pp. 15–18). Inclusion of work by Max Edelson (Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), Benjamin Cohen (Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil & Society in the American Countryside. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), and others might have suggested even more continuity in economic practices than McKinley already presents.

The core of the book is the final four elegantly structured chapters, each of which explains the complexities of the intertwined industries, while also addressing a larger connection to low country and South Carolina society and economy. The second chapter outlines the land mining industry, from the discovery of the value of phosphate rocks to the strip-mining of riverine plantation lands. Most impressively, McKinley guides the reader clearly through the labyrinthine structures and business dealings of the companies that dominated the land mining industry while simultaneously revealing the conflicted attitudes that southern economic elites had about northern capital. Philadelphians provided the majority of the capital for the largest of these companies, but this investment had to be carefully funneled through South Carolinian front men to avoid the stigma of collaborating with Yankees. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the political debates surrounding river mining and the vertical integration of fertilizer manufacturing on the outskirts of Charleston.

Chapter 3, covering the social and work world of the freedmen who mined phosphate rock from the ground, reveals the limits of available source bases. The book tries valiantly to illuminate the daily lives of the African American land miners, drawing on sources ranging from novels to census records, but is not able to realize its ambitions. An insightful reading of census records allows McKinley to improve upon contemporary estimates of the number of freedmen who worked in the mining and fertilizer; the value of the census material is mitigated, as he does not provide his data in tables, making it difficult to fully comprehend.

Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold provides a well-written, engaging history of the individuals and companies that led South Carolina's phosphate and fertilizer industries. This book provides a cogent guide to a convoluted and understudied set of businesses. McKinley convincingly argues that the tripartite industry was more significant than historians have previously allowed and that scholarship would benefit from more such studies of lesser-known industries across the agricultural South. While the book sometimes overstates the extent of existing historians’ commitment to an economically pre-modern South, it provides a fascinating glimpse of a neglected industrial Charleston. The author's concluding suggestion that phosphate was the “midwife to Charleston's peculiar industrialization” and a foundational step in the development of Charleston's present-day industrial zones and environmental issues ties up the book's themes neatly serves as a reminder of the perceptive business history that characterizes the book (p. 166).