As the locus of cotton production shifted toward the newer southwestern states
over the first half of the nineteenth century, the city of New Orleans became increasingly
important to the slave-plantation economy of the U.S. South. Moreover, because of its
location near the base of the enormous Mississippi River system, the city also thrived on
the export of agricultural commodities from western states farther upriver. Handling this
wide-ranging commerce was the city's business community: bankers, factors, and
wholesalers, among others. This globally oriented community represented an older and
qualitatively unique form of wealth accumulation, merchant capitalism, which was based
on the extraction of profit from exchange processes. However, like the slave-based mode
of production to which it was closely allied, the New Orleans merchant community faced
increasing pressure during the antebellum decades even while its fortunes seemed
otherwise secure. The city lost most of its market share in western grain products to
railroads and other routes linked directly to northeastern urban centers, and its merchants'
failure to maintain port infrastructure or create a viable manufacturing sector reflected
their complacency and left them vulnerable to competition from the fast-developing
industrially-based economy of the North. These and other weaknesses were fatally
exposed during the Civil War and Reconstruction. As a result of many changes to the
regional and national political economy after northern victory in the war, the New
Orleans merchant community was never able to recover its previous commercial
dominance, and the former first-rank American city quickly became a site of notorious
political corruption and endemic poverty. Much the same can be said of the postbellum
southern economy in which it was embedded, where the practices of merchant capitalism
nevertheless managed to persist by becoming dispersed throughout the agricultural
interior in the form of "country stores." Under the sharecropping system that became
prevalent in cotton production, rural merchants furnished seasonal credit to the small
farming households that had replaced plantation slavery. Although these stores played
different roles in Louisiana cotton and sugar parishes, the culture of merchant capitalism
hampered economic development in the South for many decades to come.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:RICE/oai:scholarship.rice.edu:1911/27489 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Marler, Scott P. |
| Contributors | Boles, John B. |
| Source Sets | Rice University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Text |
| Format | 565 p., application/pdf |
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