Global Perspectives is an edited volume on a very old topic, the history of industrialization in the American South. In keeping with current fashion, the contributors generally work hard (and sometimes succeed) at embedding their analyses in a “global” context.

After a brief introduction by the editors, Stanley Engerman concisely offers his thoughts on “Southern Industrialization: Myths and Realities.” Readers of this JOURNAL will find this essay to be familiar terrain. The antebellum South's low level of industrialization compared with the Northeast was not due to a failure of markets or policy but rather, was due to the relatively high productivity of its agriculture, particularly that of slave labor. If the South had been a separate economy, it would have been among the richest and most industrialized in the world at the time. Emancipation and the Civil War were jarring, and the postwar economic adjustment was difficult, causing a once and for all decline in income. Allowing for this adjustment, the southern per capita growth rate was about the same before and after the war as in the North. The South failed to catch up to the North after the War primarily because the latter was a rapidly moving target.

Emma Hart analyzes the economic structure of Colonial Charleston. Rather than just a sleepy backwater serving as a way station for plantation crops, there were striking similarities in economic structure between Charleston and various provincial towns in England. In particular, Charleston possessed a nascent manufacturing industry specializing in artisan production of consumer goods for wealthy white households. Some of these artisan shops, notably in furniture, appear to be as complex in organization as any in England. Bruce Schoen examines how cotton producers in the South sought “independence” from the northern dominance in capital markets and commerce by, perhaps paradoxically, believing in free trade. Southern cotton, the theory goes, would eventually become so important to British and European economic interests that they would be useful allies to southern causes. Cotton, too, could generate wealth that eventually could be used to fuel industrial development.

The next two chapters make explicit two-way comparisons between the American South and “backward” regions in other countries. After briefly summarizing the views of this reviewer (among others) on southern backwardness, Shearer Davis Bowman compares the southern experience with that of East Elbian provinces in Prussia, which also relied on bound labor, albeit of a different kind, in agriculture. Instead of drawing sharp comparisons between “backward” and “advanced” regions within countries to the detriment of the former, Bowman argues for a nuanced interpretation that sees complementarities as nation-states in the nineteenth century strived to confront the economic pressures on existing institutions brought by an ever widening global economy in the wake of declining international transport costs and growing international trade. An essay by one of the editors, Susanna Delfino, investigates how ideas of backwardness became central to the perceptions of the economic experience of the southern United States and of southern Italy. In both cases, there were cataclysmic events—the Civil War and Italian Unification—that constitute a “bright line” after which North-South divergence became increasingly obvious and therefore a matter of public commentary and public policy.

Somewhat in opposition to the global thrust of the volume, John Majewski and Viken Tchakerian maintain a within-country framework but rather than using the entire North as the “control” group, they limit comparisons of the South to the Midwest. Majewski and Tchakerian argue that the primary reasons why the South appeared to lag behind in industrialization had nothing to do with a failure to respond to market incentives but rather was a consequence of low market density, particularly in rural areas. Here they place the blame largely on soil and climate, with slavery playing a supporting role. Southern climate and, especially it seems, soil quality made it optimal to hold more farmland in an unimproved state; the lower the ratio of improved to unimproved acreage, the lower the population density, and hence the lesser the ability to sustained greater levels of industrialization.

Two chapters focus on southern textiles. True to the book's objectives, David Carlton and Peter Cochlanis offer a concise treatment of the growth of global textile industry and the South's place—or rather, lack thereof—in it. Although southern textiles began to growth rapidly after 1880, the industry's market remained domestic. Eventually, as global transport costs and barriers to trade eroded, the South, which had a comparative advantage within the United States, lost out to the rest of the world where costs were much lower. Beth Daniels continues the analysis of southern textiles in her chapter, offering further insights into the growth of that industry. She argues that textile capital was attracted to the South in the late nineteenth century by a confluence of factors: low wages, the absence of labor agitation and state labor legislation, and the willingness of southern legislatures to offer tax and other incentives to attract industry. The final chapter, by Erin Elizabeth Clune, draws on the recent spate of “whiteness” studies to examine the racial ideology behind the New South's largely unsuccessful attempt to expand immigration in the early twentieth century.

Like many edited volumes, Global Perspectives is a mixed bag. The “globalization” metaphor that attempts to link the various chapters is never really defended at length and, as a result, seems strained at times. Certain chapters, particularly Majewski and Tcharkerian's, would have benefited from some rudimentary econometric analysis. Other the other hand, it is good to see a new generation of scholars, particularly historians, grappling with some of the grander questions of American economic history in a manner that does not disparage out of hand the work of cliometricians. One cannot help but smile (in gratitude) when the editors write “[d]uring the past half century the traditional understanding and interpretation of the history of the American South … have undergone major … revisions. This season of reappraisals and revisitations owe[s] much to the economic historians of the cliometrics school, to whom all historians of the South should be indebted[.] (p. 1)”