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Overview
Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Keri Leigh Merritt reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton - and thus, slaves - in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete - for jobs or living wages - with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socio-economic consequences as a result of living in a slave society. Merritt examines how these 'masterless' men and women threatened the existing Southern hierarchy and ultimately helped push Southern slaveholders toward secession and civil war.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9781316635438
- ISBN-10: 1316635430
- Publisher: Cambridge University Press
- Publish Date: December 2017
- Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
- Page Count: 371
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