One of the more interesting and positive developments in the historiography of the American South in recent years has been the uptick in works dealing with the region's industrialization, particularly in its early phases. Much of the credit for this development is due to scholars associated with the organization known as the Southern Industrialization Project (SIP), enthusiastically and indefatigably promoted by Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, the co-editors of the volume under review. The volume, second to appear in the series “New Currents in the History of Southern Economy and Society,” attempts, as its title suggests, to assess and contextualize the roles of technology and innovation in the South's industrial experience. Since technology and innovation have long been considered “dogs that did not bark” in southern history, the volume is as welcome as it is overdue.

Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization begins with a lively and provocative foreword by Gavin Wright, who, after explaining why the early industrial history of the South has often been subject to polemics, lays out the arguments and contributions of each of the individual essays in the volume and the contributions of the volume as a whole. Wright's foreword is followed by a very useful introduction by the co-editors, the central take away from which is the sensible point that, contrary to much of the conventional wisdom on the subjects, technology and innovation were never absent from the South's indigenous industrial history, but must always be considered in the context (and within the limits) of the region's political economy and social structure.

The heart of Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization—as Wright quite properly points out—consists of seven detailed case studies, four of which deal primarily with aspects of the industrialization process in the region during the antebellum period. The remaining three cases range more broadly across space and time, treating in turn textiles in the Carolinas between about 1890 and 1925, the evolution of the TVA from its origins in the early 1930s to the 1980s, and—in somewhat of a stretch—telemedicine in Arizona from the 1990s to the present day.

In many ways, the antebellum cases constitute the core (or, to be consistent, the heart of hearts) of the volume, just as that period constitutes the principal or at least the original interest of the SIP. In the first of the antebellum cases, Robert H. Gudmestad details the important role the steamboat played in the economic development of the “Old Southwest.” In this well-researched piece, the author argues that, despite its importance and its productivity-enhancing effects, this transportation innovation did not transform the region, but at the end of the day “reinforced the hegemony of the plantation system” (p. 40). In the next essay, “Pits of Frustration: The Failed Transplant of British Mining Methods in Antebellum Virginia,” Sean Patrick Adams argues that it was the political economy of the Old Dominion, most notably, the desire to protect and promote plantation slavery, that impeded and ultimately derailed efforts by colliers and other industrialists to develop the coal deposits in the Richmond Basin into a viable and sustainable industry. According to Richard Follett, this same political economy, particularly the individualism and the lack of broad community support for industrial development, goes a long way in explaining the inability of Louisiana sugar manufacturers to modernize the refining process as fully or rapidly as did refiners in the North, where important technological innovations, particularly vacuum processing, were adopted and diffused well before they were in the South. All three of these authors, then, suggest that there was something or, more properly, a number of things about the political economy of slavery that rendered it difficult for entrepreneurs and industrialists to respond creatively and successfully to the entrepreneurial problems and opportunities in their paths.

In her thickly described and richly textured essay on textile manufacturer Henry Merrell, co-editor Michele Gillespie shows at once how difficult it was to build viable technological communities and innovation networks in the antebellum South and how Merrell—a transplanted Yankee and determined entrepreneur if ever there was one—was eventually able to overcome such difficulties and establish a profitable textile operation in the wilds of southwestern Arkansas. Pamela C. Edwards's focus is also on entrepreneurial networks in the textile industry, but in her case in the Carolinas in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The main contribution of Edwards's fascinating essay—on the differential ways in which three large textile concerns emerged and evolved in Columbia, S.C., Spartanburg, S.C., and Carrboro, N.C.—is to disabuse us of the notion that there was a single southern path to (or style of) industrialization. In the penultimate piece in the collection, Stephen Wallace Tyler traces the evolving purpose, strategy, operation, and effects of the Tennessee Valley Authority over the course of the first half century of its existence, and in the last essay Yoneyuki Sugita writes on the place, promise, and pitfalls of telemedicine in Arizona, one of the economic epicenters of the Sunbelt today. Sugita's essay is nothing if not interesting, but it does stand one or two standard deviations away from the volume's mean. Not that this fact is totally surprising, for Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization, like most such collections, hasn't totally succeeded at the e pluribus unum thing. This said, each of the individual cases is stimulating and informative in its own right, and the co-editors' overall goal—to contextualize southern industrial innovation and technology—is achieved in spades.