According to Cotton Capitalists, the two decades after the Civil War was a golden age for American Jewish business. This period was when Jewish-owned wholesalers, retailers, and banks played a dominant role in the U.S cotton trade. The rise of Jews within the sector was tightly bound up with the decline of the cotton factors, a development that Harold D. Woodman traced in King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800–1925 (1968). As the telegraph made information more available to everyone and railroad lines multiplied, interior merchants were able to compete with the factors, most of whom were based in port cities such as New Orleans. In time, the interior merchants took over the functions that factors had performed, such as extending credit to cotton farmers and marketing the farmers’ crops. Jews had begun settling in the interior towns of the Gulf South prior to the Civil War, especially along waterways. By collecting and aggregating the information on specific establishments, Cohen discovered that Jewish-owned businesses eventually made up a disproportionate number of the towns’ mercantile enterprises. They were, he argues, serendipitously placed to participate in the region’s (and nation’s) growing cotton trade. He estimates that in 1860 Jews operated between 35 to 45 percent of firms in the cotton economy.

Cohen explains how Jewish businesses went from being marginal enterprises in the South before the Civil War to occupying a central role in the U.S. cotton trade by the later 1860s. He focuses above all on the role of networks, the linked clusters of family members and fellow Jews who supplied capital and labor to each other’s businesses. Using the R.G. Dun collection of nineteenth-century credit reports and other sources, Cohen was able to estimate the proportion of businesses involved in the cotton economy that were Jewish-owned, identify their geographical locations, and uncover the links among them. The book demonstrates how Jewish merchants and bankers obtained capital from abroad and distributed it to other Jewish-owned businesses, who then dispersed the capital even more widely in the form of trade credit. Cohen also gives a starring role to luck—or, as he puts it, “timing.” Indeed, one of the chapters bears the title “Timing is Everything,” referring to the fact that a number of Jewish businesses in the Gulf South accumulated significant capital just before and during the Civil War. They quickly re-established their prewar networks, including with the Jewish banks in New York. Access to capital was especially critical because funding became less available from southern banks. The superior resources of many Jewish-owned businesses allowed them to survive the downturn of 1866–1867 and the recession that followed the panic of 1873.

The Lehman family provides a case study of the blend of skill, serendipity, and family networks that Cohen believes best explain the path to success of Jewish businesses. The outlines of the Lehmans’ story are fairly well known. Members of the family first settled in Alabama, operating a mercantile business in Montgomery in the 1840s. In the 1850s, cotton trading became the most important part of their business, and when New York City began to eclipse the South as the center of cotton brokerage, the family opened a branch in the city. They lost heavily during the Civil War when the retreating Confederate army burned their warehouses, but once the Union government lifted the ban on cotton trading the family worked successfully with the state of Alabama to profit from the trade. In 1865, they moved their primary businesses to New York and in 1870 helped to found the New York Cotton Exchange. The book confirms that the Lehmans were a key node in the networks of Jewish businesses, attracting capital from Europe and then distributing it through New York to numerous businesses in the Gulf states, including their own branches. By the 1880s, the Lehmans appeared in business directories as large “cotton commission merchants” and received stellar ratings from the credit reporting firms. Until 1924, only family members were accepted as partners of the firm.

There are a number of intriguing elements in the book that I wish Cohen had pursued in more detail. One is the nature of the relationship between Jewish furnishing merchants and freedman, including sharecroppers. Cohen argues that serving freedmen “made sense” economically but does not explore the racial and ethnic dimensions of the commercial relationship. Jews, after all, were among the merchants who contributed to so-called debt peonage by advancing credit to sharecroppers and placing liens on their crops. Another question, and more germane to Cohen’s study, involves the disadvantages inherent in family and ethnic networks. Although tight relationships engender trust and compel adherence to contracts, they can also induce suspicion from outsiders. Such was the case with the credit reporting firms, who for self-interested reasons pushed for more transparency and looked with distrust on what they perceived to be secretive dealings.

The golden age of the Jewish cotton economy was brief, Cohen writes. By the late nineteenth century, the structures of credit had changed, diminishing the importance of the networks the Jewish merchants and bankers had created. In the same way that Jewish businesses had supplanted the factors of old, so the new world of cotton exchanges and investment banks eventually diminished the influence of Jews in the cotton economy. Cohen tells this important but under-appreciated story well, especially given the limited sources available on the smaller businesses he covers—or, more accurately, uncovers. Names and geographical locations abound in his narrative because the credit reports allow him to glimpse who supplied credit and goods to whom. This is the book’s strength. By turning previously abstract networks into specific historical relationships, Cotton Capitalists contributes to the multiplying narratives of global capitalism, and to their growing complexity.