Merchants and the Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana: New Orleans and Its Hinterlands
研究了19世纪新奥尔良商人群体在棉花经济中的角色，分析其商业资本主义模式如何因基础设施落后和北方工业竞争而衰落，并探讨战后“乡村商店”对南方经济的长期影响。
As the locus of cotton production shifted toward the newer southwestern states\nover the first half of the nineteenth century, the city of New Orleans became increasingly\nimportant to the slave-plantation economy of the U.S. South. Moreover, because of its\nlocation near the base of the enormous Mississippi River system, the city also thrived on\nthe export of agricultural commodities from western states farther upriver. Handling this\nwide-ranging commerce was the city's business community: bankers, factors, and\nwholesalers, among others. This globally oriented community represented an older and\nqualitatively unique form of wealth accumulation, merchant capitalism, which was based\non the extraction of profit from exchange processes. However, like the slave-based mode\nof production to which it was closely allied, the New Orleans merchant community faced\nincreasing pressure during the antebellum decades even while its fortunes seemed\notherwise secure. The city lost most of its market share in western grain products to\nrailroads and other routes linked directly to northeastern urban centers, and its merchants'\nfailure to maintain port infrastructure or create a viable manufacturing sector reflected\ntheir complacency and left them vulnerable to competition from the fast-developing\nindustrially-based economy of the North. These and other weaknesses were fatally\nexposed during the Civil War and Reconstruction. As a result of many changes to the\nregional and national political economy after northern victory in the war, the New\nOrleans merchant community was never able to recover its previous commercial\ndominance, and the former first-rank American city quickly became a site of notorious\npolitical corruption and endemic poverty. Much the same can be said of the postbellum\nsouthern economy in which it was embedded, where the practices of merchant capitalism\nnevertheless managed to persist by becoming dispersed throughout the agricultural\ninterior in the form of "country stores." Under the sharecropping system that became\nprevalent in cotton production, rural merchants furnished seasonal credit to the small\nfarming households that had replaced plantation slavery. Although these stores played\ndifferent roles in Louisiana cotton and sugar parishes, the culture of merchant capitalism\nhampered economic development in the South for many decades to come.