Cotton and Race in the Making of America ─ The Human Costs of Economic Power

The fundamental paradox of the United States, "the simultaneous story of dynamic economic growth and the prolonged devastation of the African-American experience," was at its core the story of cotton, contends this book, echoing Karl Marx, who wrote in 1846 that "without cotton you have no modern industry" and "[w]ithout slavery, you have no cotton." The author describes the role of cotton in spurring economic growth in both the South and the North, while arguing that it gave economic incentive to both Northerners and Southerners to maintain slavery and, after the civil war, racial discrimination. He further argues that the advent of the mechanical cotton picker, by reducing the need for black farm labor, laid the ground for the successful campaign against legal segregation. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Gene Dattel grew up in the cotton country of the Mississippi Delta and studied history at Yale and law at Vanderbilt. He then embarked on a twenty-year career in financial capital markets as a managing director at Salomon Brothers and at Morgan Stanley. A consultant to major financial institutions and to the Pentagon, he established a reputation as a foremost authority on Asian economies. His The Sun That Never Rose remains the definitive work on Japanese financial institutions in the 1980s. Mr. Dattel is now an independent scholar who lectures widely and has served as an adviser to the New York Historical Society and the B. B. King Museum. He lives in New York City. For more information, see http://genedattel.com.