Masterless Men (Hardback)
Hardcover/Business & Economics 370 pages English Jun 15, 2017
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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.
- Author:
- Keri Leigh Merritt
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Publication Date:
- Jun 15, 2017
- Number of pages:
- 370 pages
- Language:
- English
- Binding:
- Hardcover/Business & Economics
- ISBN-10:
- 110718424X
- ISBN-13:
- 9781107184244