Lyle--
If time permits (its the silly season here at JMU right now, and I am overwhelmed with exams and papers) I will expand my comments to your thoughtful and thought-provoking post. For right now though: my commentary on early 20th century agricultural technology, and the disparate timing of its adaption in the United States, and the importance of federal government policy in ending share-cropping--draws heavily from the work of Smithsonian technological historian Pete Daniel, and in particular his book BREAKING THE LAND: THE TRANSFORMATION OF COTTON, TOBACCO, AND RICE CULTURES SINCE 1880 (University of Illinois, 1985). Daniel's argument is nuanced--much more so than my summary suggested. Its a very fine piece of historical work--just my .02, but it might well repay the work of tracking it down.
All best,
Kevin
---- Original message ----
>Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:27:53 -0500
>From: "Lyle E. Browning" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Technological Change and the Collapse of Slavery
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>On Nov 13, 2008, at 2:44 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
>> Lyle Browning argues that technological change would have inevitably
>> killed slavery.
>I knew someone would take exception to that when I wrote it;) I also
>saw that typos garbled the message. What the last sentence should have
>said is this: Mechanized farm equipment evolved from equalling human
>output to steadily topping it in the late 19th century and was able to
>top that by 200 times in the 1990's.
>
>> The implication is that the Civil War was a tragic mistake
>That's the part that muddies the waters. Techno-change is in fits and
>starts but takes off during times of extreme stress, such as wars. The
>Civil War brought about enormous change in technologies, that were
>adapted and continued in the civilian arena after the Civil War. WWI
>mass production technologies adapted for peacetime use resulted in the
>explosion of truck farming and tractor usage on farms. One can also
>argue that without the impetus of warfare, techno-change wouldn't have
>been able to make much of a difference. The Romans had the most
>advanced technologies but where slaves were usable, technologies not
>applied and progress stagnated.
>
>> --that the politics of the slave debate, which culminated of course
>> in war and bloodshed, was unnecessary.
>Not by my thinking at all.
>>
>>
>> This turns out, however, to be at best a partial truth. Without
>> developing this claim to any large degree, let me point out two
>> facts which complicate the picture of technological determinism.
>>
>> First: agriculture in the United States mechanized at differing
>> rates.
>Absolutely agree.
>
>> Share cropping (the post-emancipation form of racial and economic
>> control) died not because of mechanized agriculture, but because of
>> the policies of the federal government in the New Deal.
>How so?
>
>> California, where agriculture was most capitalized, mechanized
>> agriculture in the first decades of the 20th century.
>You also saw mid-west farms becoming increasingly mechanized by the
>introduction of the steam tractor, later supplanted by the IC engined
>tractor. Ever larger acreages could be worked by machines, replacing
>the roughly 1/3 that had to be set aside for animal fodder. Before
>mechanization, a farm was as big as your family could work with the
>cooperative effort of neighbors.
>
>> You can chart this by looking at the distribution of mule ownership
>> in the United States--in the 1940s, the only part of the US in which
>> most farmers still owned mules was the South. By contrast, the only
>> part of the US in which most farmers did not own tractors was the
>> same region--the South.
>Sure, because you had your share-cropping and the same labor force as
>before, namely African-Americans to do it and because a mechanized
>cotton picker, and the combine harvester for corn or cereal crops
>hadn't been invented yet, and undoubtedly because tractors were way
>too expensive for southern farmers to afford, and probably because the
>South hadn't emerged from the financial straits it found itself within
>after the Civil War. Mechanized farming did not come to parts of
>Virginia until well into the 20th century.
>>
>>
>> Second: Slavery proved quite adaptable to factory manufacturing.
>> Charles Dew has written two very fine books on Virginia iron
>> foundries which demonstrate that under the right conditions, slaves
>> could be quite profitably used in heavy manufacturing industry.
>That's very true, but the number of skilled workers is far smaller
>than the numbers of folks who hadn't those skills. Black migration out
>of the south to the West, the Rust Belt and the Northeast in the
>various waves bespoke volumes as well. The oppressive political
>climate was as much as factor as the higher wages as causes of those
>movements.
>>
>>
>> Together, these two facts suggest that technological change is
>> thoroughly mediated by cultural, legal, and institutional factors.
>> Over very long periods of time it may well be determinitive--
>> although even this is debated by historians of technology. Over
>> shorter periods of time--the 20-30 year span that Lyle Browning
>> suggests--technological change is far more ambiguous--and politics
>> far more important.
>I wasn't perhaps clear in my time-span. The invention of the various
>mechanized equipment types was within a small time period, but their
>effective wide-spread use was far longer, depending upon the invention
>and modification of equipment that eliminated the need for cheap labor
>that had been previously supplied by African-Americans. The 30 period
>I referred to was from 1865-1895 which did see mechanized advances
>outside the South. One can argue that McCormick's reaper and Whitney's
>gin were pivotal but did not increase production so drastically as to
>overwhelm the labor force. The wide-spread use of the traction engine,
>first in steam and then in IC mode was able to overwhelm. The first
>reaper simply cut grain. To move it from the reaper required people
>and then it was back to people doing what they'd done for eons to
>process it. But once processing technology caught up, the net result
>to was to surpass what a gang of people could do. The surplus people
>either had to be put to work elsewhere or not used.
>
>The what-if bogs down into whether uses would have been found
>elsewhere for the ag workers if they'd been slaves or whether a cost-
>benefit ratio analysis would have shown the system to be broken. Too
>many variables outside of reality for that one to compute.
>
>I would also think that with the second-half 19th century onward
>influx of Europeans that the economies that made slavery attractive
>would tend to disappear. By that I mean if one could hire people in
>the model of amoral capitalism as in "kill a mule, hire a mule where
>you substitute your ethnic preference for mule" it would ultimately be
>less expensive to hire than to buy and maintain with all the problems
>that ownership had been shown to have. In urban areas, one traditional
>means of earning money before marriage for young women was for them to
>enter into the domestic service arena. Masses of immigrants followed
>this path.
>>
>> Slavery ended because of political processes. This is true not just
>> for the United States, but (to my knowledge anyway) everywhere that
>> plantation slavery died. Its death was political, and certainly not
>> inevitable.
>If necessity is the mother of invention, a continued plantation system
>by another means would certainly have slowed mechanization, but in
>order to achieve the productivity gains that agriculture has made
>since mechanization, cheap labor would, I think, have inevitably
>disappeared. Whether it would have been channeled other directions
>once there was no need, I think not.
>
>Lyle Browning
>
>
>>
>> All best,
>> Kevin
>>
>> ---- Original message ----
>>> Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:29:06 -0500
>>> From: "Lyle E. Browning" <[log in to unmask]>
>>> Subject: Re: And Now Nat Turner in a Politically Correct Light
>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>
>>> Mechanization is to me the death
>>> knell of slavery. Boulton & Watt's steam engine, Eli Whitney's cotton
>>> gin and Cyrus McCormick's reaper were the nails in the coffin of an
>>> institution that didn't know it was dead. Maybe it would have lasted
>>> another 30 years but eventually the economic reason for it, which
>>> seems to have been the driving force, would have disappeared. The
>>> steam engine, once it was set on wheels, and then once it had an
>>> adapted mill technology for auto-motion, was the device that would be
>>> the major determinant. Why? because one slave could tend about 10
>>> acres per year in the "system" and that was a driven efficiency.
>>> Mechanized farm equipment evolved from equalling human output to
>>> steadily stopping it in the late 29th century and was able to top
>>> that
>>> by 200 times in the 1990's.
>>>
>>> Lyle Browning
>> Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
>> Department of History
>> James Madison University
>>
>> ______________________________________
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Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University
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