Antebellum New Orleans was a city of merchants. Factors (commission merchants) shipped through its port half of the cotton produced in the United States while nearby, in the slave pens, traders conducted one-fifth of the domestic slave trade. The book tells the story of the forecasted yet staggering decline of a great city—a city built by merchant capital, “a qualitatively distinct form of wealth and investment” (p. 9). Merchant capitalists, whose main goal was to buy cheap and sell high, are presented in this book as a “community” and not as a “unified class.” They were, from the top down, bankers, factors, commission agents, wholesalers, and retailers. These men were no modernizers, closeted Unionists, or would-be industrialists. They supported plantation slavery, since in a southern economy, described here as not yet capitalist, they largely benefited from it. Scott Marler, an associate professor at the University of Memphis, takes an original approach: to consider New Orleans within its agricultural context. City factors had the upper hand in distribution networks as long as the organization of production relied on gang labor in large plantations, but they were supplanted by country retailers after the Civil War when decentralized sharecropping prevailed.

Divided into three parts, the book spans seven decades of the history of Louisiana, a state whose per capita wealth ranked second in the Union in 1860. Already in the antebellum period, prosperity was undermined by the conservatism of what contemporaries perceived as a parasitic group of merchants that lacked cohesion. Instead of taking advantage of its strategic position to diversify its trade westward, reforming questionable practices such as cotton “plating” (surrounding lower-grade cotton bales with a thin layer of superior-grade cotton), or improving infrastructures and railroads, the mercantile community focused on slave-produced crops and planters' supplies. Preoccupied with the cultivation of social standing, southern merchants distinguished themselves from their northern counterparts by engaging in conspicuous consumption in a manner reminiscent of the planters. New Orleans merchants dominated their sector of activities before the war, but field reports of the credit-reporting firm R. G. Dun & Co. reveal the presence throughout the countryside of general stores run by Anglo, Creole, and Jewish shopkeepers who displayed a certain amount of independence toward city wholesalers. According to Marler, merchants failed “to exploit the transformative potential of the wealth they controlled” (p. 17). How could it have been otherwise? Many of the leading characters in this study—including Judah Benjamin, John Slidell, and W. N. Mercer—were married to plantation women. These men might have been living in the region's largest city, yet the city itself was never removed from a rural society defined by plantation slavery.

The narrative becomes more political in the second part of the book. Secession and the Civil War marked the turning point in the economic deterioration of New Orleans as the merchants' capital. Due to their northern connections, merchants' loyalty to the Confederacy was questioned at first. By the summer of 1861, however, they were among the stronger proponents of a cotton embargo, encouraging bales storage in the interior of the state. Some of the most prominent businessmen of the city would lead in Europe the ill-fated King Cotton Diplomacy. The political leadership of the merchant community—a novelty—was soon undercut by General Benjamin Butler's occupation of the city. Butler, a populist, attacked bankers and alienated merchants, pushing them toward reactionary politics. Marler ultimately blames Abraham Lincoln for this mess, since the president chose Butler not because he was qualified to reconstruct New Orleans, but because he was a disturbing political opponent to be kept away from Washington.

For the Queen City of the South, there would be no New South. The third part of the book is dedicated to Reconstruction, which started in occupied New Orleans. Marler insists on the eastern dynamism of the movement. In spite of reformist attempts such as the Committee of One Hundred, the business community chose over and over again to support white extremism. The postbellum demotion of New Orleans within the American urban system was brought about by a series of economic developments: regional capital shortage, weakness of the banking sector, competition from other cities, and most importantly, the dispersal of plantation production. Surprisingly, although the state might have dramatically fallen in terms of per capita wealth (dropping to thirty-seventh in 1880), cotton production remained relatively stable between 1860 and 1900, thanks to rural merchants who played a major role in reconstructing Louisiana agriculture. If some of their credit practices were dubious, country stores were not the exploitative territorial monopolies often portrayed in the historiography. In fact, specialization and increased competition were at work in the rural parishes where wage labor was commonplace. Southern merchant capital was thus exiled to the country after the Civil War.

In the epilogue, Marler reaffirms the transitional nature of capitalism in the cotton South, following in the footsteps of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese and their Fruits of Merchant Capital (1983). In a fascinating essay published last year in the Journal of Southern History, J. William Harris acutely remarks that Eugene Genovese's ideas have been much debated, but seldom believed. Marler courageously addresses one of the most enduring debates of southern historiography with a voice unique among the historians of his generation, but fails to convince, with an overly restrictive definition of capitalism. In New Orleans, hundreds of slaves were engaged in a form of wage labor, renting their services to a floating population of merchants in search of domestic comfort. Capitalism is a complex beast that does not fit even the best theoretical formulations.  This book is nonetheless one of the most important contributions to the rich historiography of New Orleans published in the last decades.