Bateman and Weiss

The contribution of Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss to the debate over slavery and industrialization has been a considerable one, given the data they have unearthed and their skill in manipulating it. But their conclusions are not valid and warrant a brief review. They argue that “by market dictates, industrial expansion should have occurred”. Aggregate levels of demand were satisfactory, savings and investment were more than sufficient, markets in the South in general operated adequately. So why the “deplorable scarcity” of industry? “The answer”, they argue, “appears to lie with the planter class, specifically in its members’ entrepreneurial attitudes and decisions, especially their behavior toward risk”. Yet they immediately discount the risk factor: “even after risk is taken into account, the manufacturing returns should have been judged superior by shrewd investors”. Only if southerners were especially averse to risk can this factor provide the key. Why should southerners be so risk-averse? Bateman and Weiss end by pointing to “the conservative, cautious and slow-moving southerner of literary tradition”. Despite market signals, “it seemed to take more evidence and more time to convince southerners to enter the murky waters of the American Industrial Revolution”.

What is curious is their reluctance to interpret this behavior in terms of the constraints imposed by slavery. They recognize that some planters doubted whether industrialism and slavery were compatible and acknowledge that the effect of these doubts “may have been sufficiently real to have discouraged some planters from investing in manufacturing enterprises.”