The Southern Economic History Project was established in 1968 when the authors of this volume were both in Berkeley, California. Supported that year by funds from the Institute of Business and Economic Research at the University of California, Berkeley, we began an investigation into the post–Civil War economic history of the American South. We were intrigued, first, by the fact that while economists had given considerable attention to the institution of slavery and the economic exploitation of blacks before the Civil War, they had virtually ignored black history in the post–Civil War period. It seemed obvious to us that the economic institutions that replaced slavery and the conditions under which ex-slaves were allowed to enter the economic life of the United States for the first time as free agents were of crucial importance to an understanding of the Afro-American experience.

We were intrigued, also, by an as yet unresolved paradox in American economic history. The period between the Civil War and World War I was one of unparalleled economic growth and development for the United States as a whole. Yet the South did not share equally in this expansion. Southern agriculture stagnated while an agricultural revolution transformed the rest of rural America. The South's industrial sector remained small and backward during the age of American industrial growth. And southern people – white as well as black – were among the poorest, least educated, and most deprived of all Americans at a time when America was becoming the richest, best educated, most advantaged nation in the world.