Southern Agrarian Labor Contracts as Impediments to Cotton Mechanization

The Journal of Economic History

Volumn 47, Issue 1, 1987, Pages 45-70

  Whatley, Warren C ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0023479833     PISSN: 00220507     EISSN: 14716372     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022050700047410     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. Paul David, “The Mechanization of Reaping in the Ante-Bellum Midwest,” in Paul David, Technical Choice, Innovation and Economic Growth: Essays on the American and British Experiences in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975).
2. James H. Street, The New Revolution in the Cotton Economy: Mechanization and its Consequences (Chapel Hill, 1957).
3. Moses S. Musoke and Alan L. Olmstead, “The Rise of the Cotton Industry in California: A Comparative Perspective,” this journal, 42 (June 1982), pp. 405–406.
4. Paul David, “A Contribution to the Theory of Diffusion,” CREG Memorandum No. 71 (Stanford University, 1969).
5. Warren C. Whatley, “Institutional Change and Mechanization in the Cotton South,” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1983), chap. 3.
6. Nicholas Sargen, “Tractorization” in the United States and its Relevance for Developing Countries (New York, 1979).
7. Moses S. Musoke, “Mechanizing Cotton Production in the American South: The Tractor, 1915–1960.,” Explorations in Economic History, 18 (Apr. 1981).
8. Robert E. Ankli, “Horses vs. Tractors on the Corn Belt,” Agricultural History, 54 (Jan. 1980).
9. Robert E. Ankli, H. Dan Heiberg, and John H. Thompson, “The Adoption of the Tractor in Western Canada,” Canadian Studies in Rural History, 2 (Apr. 1979), pp. 244–61.
10. U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Plantation Organization and Operation in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta Area,” Technical Bulletin No. 1269 (Oct. 1924).
11. Harald Pedersen and Arthur Raper, “The Cotton Plantation in Transition,” Mississippi Agricultural Experimental Station, Bulletin No. 508 (Jan. 1954).
12. Frank Welch, “The Plantation Land Tenure System in Mississippi,” Mississippi Agricultural Experimental Station, Bulletin No. 385 (June 1943).
13. U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Utilization and Cost of Power on Mississippi and Arkansas Plantations,” Technical Bulletin No. 497 (Dec. 1935).
14. Mississippi Agricultural Experimental Station, “Farm Power in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta,” Bulletin No. 295 (Nov. 1931).
15. The National Research Project, “Changes in Technology and Labor Requirements in Crop Production: Cotton,” Report No. A-7 (Philadelphia, 1938).
16. Gilbert Fite, “Mechanization of Cotton Production Since World War II,” Agricultural History, 55 (Jan. 1980), pp. 190–207.
17. Gilbert Fite, “Recent Progress in the Mechanization of Cotton Production in the U.S.,” Agricultural History, 24 (Jan. 1950).
18. Street, The New Revolution, p. 34.
19. Heywood Fleisig, “Mechanizing the Cotton Harvest in the Nineteenth-Century South,” this journal, 25 (Dec. 1965) p. 706.
20. Jay Mandle, The Roots of Black Poverty: The Southern Plantation Economy After the Civil War (Durham, 1978), chap. 5.
21. Richard H. Day, “The Economics of Technological Change and the Demise of the Sharecropper,” American Economic Review, 57 (June 1967), pp. 427–49.
22. Lee Alston, “Tenure Choice in Southern Agriculture, 1930–1960.,” Explorations in Economic History, 18 (Apr. 1981), pp. 211–32.
23. Musoke and Olmstead, “The Rise of the Cotton Industry,” p. 411.
24. U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Farming Practices in the Cultivation of Cotton,” Technical Bulletin No. 511 (Mar. 1917).
25. Prenab K. Bardhan, “Wages and Unemployment in a Poor Agrarian Economy: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis,” Journal of Political Economy, 87 (June 1979), pp. 479–500.
26. Welch, “The Plantation Land Tenure System in Mississippi,” p. 35.
27. Mississippi Agricultural Experimental Station, “Farm Power in the Yazoo,” pp. 28–29.
28. U.S. Department of Agriculture, “The Relation of Tenure to Plantation Organization,” Department Bulletin No. 682 (May 1939), p. 26.
29. U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Plantation Organization and Operation,” pp. 59–60.
30. Pedersen and Raper, “The Cotton Plantation in Transition,” pp. 15–18, 24—26.
31. U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Plantation Organization and Operation,” pp. 59–60.
32. Gerald Jaynes, Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class (Oxford, 1986).
33. Bardhan, “Wages and Unemployment.” The literature on the share aspect of the contract is voluminous. For a sample see Steven Cheung, The Theory of Share Tenancy (Chicago, 1969).
34. Lee Alston and Robert Higgs, “Contractual Mix in Southern Agriculture since the Civil War: Facts, Hypotheses and Tests,” this journal, 42 (June 1982), pp. 327–53.
35. David M., G. Newberry and J. E. Stiglitz, “Risk Sharing, Sharecropping and Uncertain Labor Markets,” in James A. Roumasset et al., eds., Risk, Uncertainty and Agricultural Development (1980).
36. Franklin Allen, “On the Fixed Nature of Sharecropping Contracts,” The Economic Journal, 95 (Mar. 1985), pp. 30–48.
37. Gavin Wright, “Postbellum Southern Labor Markets,” in Peter Kilby, ed., Quantity and Quiddity: Essays in Honor of Stanley Lebergott (Middletown, 1987).
38. Whatley, “A History of Mechanization,” pp. 1204–7.
39. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Plantation Farming in the United States (Washington, D.C., 1916), p. 13.
40. Jan Kmenta, Elements of Econometrics (New York, 1971), pp. 425–28.
41. Pedersen and Raper, “The Cotton Plantation in Transition,” p. 26.
42. Musoke and Olmstead, “The Rise of the Cotton Industry in California,” p. 407.
43. Willis Peterson and Yoav Kislev, “The Cotton Harvester in Retrospect: Labor Displacement or Labor Replacement?” this journal, 46 (Mar. 1986), pp. 199–216.
44. Flora Gill, “The Economics of the Black Exodus,” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1974).
45. Robert Higgs, “The Boll Weevil, the Cotton Economy and Black Migration, 1910–1930.,” Agricultural History, 50 (Apr. 1972), pp. 335–50.
46. William Vickery, “The Economics of the Negro Migration, 1900–1960.,” (Ph.D. diss., Chicago University, 1969).
47. Alston, “Tenure Choice,” pp. 221–30.
48. Warren Whatley, “Labor for the Picking: The New Deal in the South,” this journal, 43 (Dec. 1983), pp. 905–29.
49. Fite, “Mechanization of Cotton,” pp. 190–91.
50. Street, The New Revolution, pp. 107–29.
51. Gilbert Fite, “Recent Progress,” p. 25.
52. Street, The New Revolution, pp. 117–18, 120–23.
53. “New Works Reports,” meeting no. 604, Oct. 22, 1924.
54. Ibid., subcommittee report no. 495, Apr. 11, 1932.
55. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agricultural Statistics, “Statistics on Cotton and Related Data,” Statistical Bulletin No. 99 (June 1951).
56. Street, The New Revolution, pp. 107–29.
57. Gavin Wright and Howard Kunreuther, “Cotton, Corn and Risk in the Nineteenth Century,” this journal, 35 (Sept. 1975), pp. 526–51.
58. Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, “The ‘Lock-in’ Mechanism and Overproduction of Cotton in the Postbellum South,” Agricultural History, 49 (Apr. 1975), pp. 405–25.