Peter A Coclanis
Biographic Data
| ID | 682909 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter A Coclanis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter A |
| FAMILY NAME | Coclanis |
| SIGNATURE | COCLANIS P A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 88 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 122 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 84 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Populism and Professional Wrestling in the Sunbelt South: From Rasslin' to Sports Entertainment
Measuring mercantile concentration in eighteenth-century British America: Charleston, 1735–1775
In this article, the authors attempt to advance discussions of mercantile concentration in British North America in the eighteenth century by employing two measurement tools common in the field of industrial organization-concentration ratios and the Hirschman-Herfindahl Index (HHI)—to measure and analyze concentration levels in Charleston, South Carolina between 1735 and 1775. These tools allow for the creation of standardized measures, easing co…
The Globalization of Wheat: A Critical History of the Green Revolution by Marci R. Baranski
For several decades, scholars, journalists, and activists have been beavering away to overturn triumphalist narratives regarding the Green Revolution. Earlier generations of observers had generally written positively about the revolution and its leading figures, especially U.S. crop scientist Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.This revolution involved a series of advancements in agriculture between World War II and the late 198…
The Battle Rages On
These are fraught times for supporters in academia of economic development. Prodevelopment folk are viewed by many as being tainted by a number—and perhaps a majority—of the seven deadly sins, and for attempting to worsen one or another “existential” environmental problem. Thanks to luminaries such as Amitav Ghosh and Bill McKibben, they are seen as deluded, if not deranged, and chastised for striving to push the pace, even as the human race “fal…
Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic, by Brad A. Jones
For many generations after the American Revolution, so-called Loyalists received little scholarly attention.It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that this situation changed appreciably, and not really until the 1960s and 1970s that Loyalists and Loyalism became subjects of rigorous scholarly assessments.The spike in attention proved short-lived, however, and relatively little new work on Loyalism appeared again until fairly r…
The Last Orator for the Millhands: William Jennings Bryan Dorn, 1916-2005
Few states have richer political histories or more colorful and controversial politicians than South Carolina. William Jennings Bryan Dorn, the subject of Jack Roper's biography, is less well known nationally than many South Carolina politicos, but he had a long, distinguished career in Palmetto State politics stretching from the late 1930s until the 1980s. Although Roper is certainly correct in his assessment that “Dorn cannot be called great,” …
Unravelled Dreams: Silk and the Atlantic World, 1500-1840 by Ben Marsh
Histories of individual commodities and products abound these days, but Marsh’s Unravelled Dreams differs from most of them in one important respect. Rather than spinning a tale of biological and commercial success, Marsh traces how and why silk production failed in so many different places and in so many ways in the Western Hemisphere during the early modern period. Indeed, his chronicle of serial miscalculations and disappointments involving si…
The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel
Imagining World Order: Literature and International Law in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800
International law is much in the news these days, albeit often because of breaches by one party or another. Whether one points to the later years of the Kyoto Protocol, the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, transboundary water conventions, dispute adjudication protocols under the World Trade Organization (WTO), or human rights violations in Rakhine State in Myanmar, we find serious problems upholding international agreements, whether formal and explic…
Everything that rises must converge: Asian rice, American producers, and technological change in the U.S. rice industry
This essay uses the case of the so-called rice revolution in the United Sates (c. 1885-1915) both to explain how a radically different approach to growing rice came about and to gain insight into the broader process of technological change in agriculture. There are several possible ways to interpret this revolution, one whereby rice was grown for the first time in history as a land-extensive, capital-intensive crop employing little labor. In the …
Water and Power: Environmental Governance and Strategies for Sustainability in the Lower Mekong Basin
Field Notes: Agricultural History's New Plot
The last fifty years has witnessed the field of agricultural history undergoing a process of rejuvenation in which it has drawn closer to the cognate fields of environmental history and food history. The JIH has been instrumental in furthering this development. Its editors are to be saluted for the inspired idea to mount this retrospective/prospective initiative within the pages of its anniversary volume. Also worthy of a salute are the distingui…
Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia
In no part of the U.S. South is the historiography regarding slavery and emancipation as rich, deep, and impressive as in the low country of South Carolina and Georgia. For decades, scholars have worked assiduously on this region, which comprises the outer coastal plain of these two South Atlantic states, along with numerous barrier islands adjacent to the coast. Although the region was more diverse than is sometimes believed, the standard depict…
Green Capitalism: Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century ed. by Hartmut Berghoff and Adam Rome
Reviewed by: Green Capitalism: Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century ed. by Hartmut Berghoff and Adam Rome Peter A. Coclanis (bio) Green Capitalism: Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century Edited by Hartmut Berghoff and Adam Rome. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. 298. $65. The term "green capitalism" is riddled with ambiguity. To some, it is an oxymoron: Capitalism, predicated as it is on the…
Sovereign of the Market: The Money Question in Early America
Research taking shelter under the “new history of American capitalism” (NHAC) umbrella has gathered a great deal of attention in recent years. Although numerous sources of inspiration for such research exist, many point, in particular, to the crisis associated with the great recession of 2008–2009, which focused historians' attention on capitalism qua economic system. Because this recession began—or at least presented early and vividly—in the fin…
Bound for America: A Profile of British Convicts Transported to the Colonies, 1718-1775
Madison, Hamilton, and Jefferson: Reinterpreting America's Founding Fathers
These are “interesting times” for the Founding Fathers—“interesting” in the ironical sense in which the word is employed popularly, but also in the apocryphal Chinese curse. For example, for several decades now, writers such as Gary Wills, Joseph Ellis, Ron Chernow, and Richard Brookhiser have been tapping into large general audiences with best-selling studies on the Founding Fathers. At the same time, numerous dyspeptic faculty members—including…
The American Reaper: Harvesting Networks and Technology, 1830-1910 by Gordon M. Winder
Reviewed by: The American Reaper: Harvesting Networks and Technology, 1830–1910 by Gordon M. Winder Peter A. Coclanis (bio) The American Reaper: Harvesting Networks and Technology, 1830–1910. By Gordon M. Winder. Aldershot, Hants, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. xiv+ 257. $119.95. Arguably, over the last twenty years the biggest development in the field of business history has been the polite but insistent challenge to the so-called Chand…
Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Enterprise in an Antebellum Southern Port
In recent decades students of American history have come to learn much about sailors and seamen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in large part because of the complementary interests of labor historians, African American historians, naval historians, and historians of the Atlantic world. Similar attention has yet to be paid to allied occupational groups such as draymen, porters, dockmen, and stevedores, who helped ensure that vessels we…
Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism by Tiago Saraiva
Reviewed by: Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism by Tiago Saraiva Peter A. Coclanis (bio) Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism. By Tiago Saraiva. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Pp. 326. $40. Perhaps it's because they are so smart, or maybe just because they are the source of bacon. Whatever the reason, our porcine friends inspire scholars to come up with great titles when writing abo…
Plantation Kingdom: The American South and Its Global Commodities
Plantation Kingdom traces the rise and fall of America’s plantation economy. Written by four renowned historians, the book demonstrates how an international capitalist system rose out of slave labor, indentured servitude, and the mass production of agricultural commodities for world markets. Vast estates continued to exist after emancipation, but tenancy and sharecropping replaced slavery’s work gangs across most of the plantation world. Poverty …
King Cotton: Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton
King CottonSven Beckert, Empire of Cotton Peter A. Coclanis (bio) Were one asked in 2016 to name some “hot” areas of historical research in recent years, one could do worse than to put the history of commodities, global history, and the history of capitalism near the top of the list. In his important, long-awaited, and widely acclaimed 2014 book, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. Pp. 615. $35), Sven Beckert, who…
Quantification in History
Rice: Global Networks and New Histories
Empire of Vines: Wine Culture in America
Journal Article Empire of Vines: Wine Culture in America Get access Erica Hannickel. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 298 pp. $39.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 4, March 2015, Pages 1261–1262, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav029 Published: 01 March 2015
Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History
This essay attempts at once to perform three interrelated tasks: to provide a brief sketch of the development of the field of Atlantic history; to document and assess Bernard Bailyn's monumental contributions to this field; and to issue a respectful but spirited critique of Atlantic history from a global perspective
On the Puzzling Cycle in the Biological Standard of Living: The Case of Antebellum Georgia
The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel
Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman
Situating the German-born economist Albert O. Hirschman has never been easy. He made significant - in some cases, exceptional - scholarly contributions in a half-dozen fields ranging from development economics to international relations and from political theory to social science methodology and statistics. He did important applied work in the field, particularly in Latin America, and labored hard to build institutions and networks supportive of …
Nutrition and Economic Development in Post-Reconstruction South Carolina: An Anthropometric Approach
Southeast Asia's Incorporation into the World Rice Market: A Revisionist View
The story of Southeast Asia's incorporation into the “world” — or, more properly, Western — rice market is well known. Indeed, this story is sufficiently familiar so as almost to invite employment of the presumptuous “as every schoolboy knows” rhetorical conceit. Briefly put, the region's incorporation into this market is said to have coincided with the “New Imperialism”, more or less as defined by Hobson and Lenin: the period between about 1860 …
Slavery in the Development of the Americas
Rice Prices in the 1720s and the Evolution of the South Carolina Economy
Urbs in Horto
Bitter Harvest: The South Carolina Low Country in Historical Perspective
The factors responsible for the South Carolina Low Country's rapid economic rise in the eigthteenth century and for the area's subsequent lapse into stagnation and decline are described and analyzed. The conclusion is that the rise and fall of the Low Country grew out of the white settlers' early economic commitment to the production of plantation staples with bound labor. The Low Country was locked into a pattern of economic development that req…
Field Notes: Agricultural History's New Plot
The last fifty years has witnessed the field of agricultural history undergoing a process of rejuvenation in which it has drawn closer to the cognate fields of environmental history and food history. The JIH has been instrumental in furthering this development. Its editors are to be saluted for the inspired idea to mount this retrospective/prospective initiative within the pages of its anniversary volume. Also worthy of a salute are the distingui…
Breaking New Ground: From the History of Agriculture to the History of Food Systems
The author makes the case for an integrated approach to the study of agricultural history, an approach that explicitly connects matters pertaining to agricultural production, broadly conceived, to those pertaining to agricultural input acquisition and to the distribution and consumption of agricultural output. Drawing heavily on the economic approach known as input-output analysis (associated with the Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontie…
Globalization in Southeast Asia
The authors attempt to accomplish four interrelated tasks in this article: (1) to develop a plausible and defensible approach to studying globalization; (2) to define Southeast Asia; (3) to delimit and historicize the globalization process in Southeast Asia; and (4) to describe and analyze the economic performance of Southeast Asia over the past 30 years or so, paying particular attention to the region before, during, and after the events of 1997
The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920
Time in the Paddies: A Comparison of Rice Production in the Southeastern United States and Lower Burma in the Nineteenth Century
The Question Of the relative efficiency of agricultural production within the institutional framework of slavery flared in the 1970s. Fogel and Engerman (1971, 1977) found antebellum Southern agriculture to have been considerably more productive than previously thought. Although this aspect of their finding became generally accepted, the controversy focused on just how efficient slave production actually was compared to Northern agriculture (Davi…
Tobacco Road: New Views of the Early Chesapeake
KF in the Year of Y2K: Framing Ransom and Sutch
The Uninventive South? A Quantitative Look at Region and American Inventiveness
Historical economists studying the United States have typically been preoccupied with explaining the American economic success story. With their gaze firmly set on the national level, it is not surprising that they have stressed the role played by the creation of a highly integrated national economy in furthering growth. Although economists' fascination with the benefits of free trade, factor mobility, and the division of labor is justifiable, th…
Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915
Journal Article Black Property Owners in the South, 1790–1915. By Loren Schweninger. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. xviii + 426 pp. $50.00.) Get access Peter A. Coclanis Peter A. Coclanis University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 78, Issue 2, September 1991, Pages 653–654, https://doi.org/10.2307/2079570 Published: 01 Septemb…
Capital Mobilization and Southern Industry, 1880-1905: The Case of the Carolina Piedmont
As the American South commenced its modern industrialization in the late nineteenth century, it found itself handicapped not simply by its poverty, but also by its lack of institutionalized means for mobilizing investment capital for manufacturing. Using evidence from the first major southern manufacturing region, the Carolina Piedmont, we argue that the resulting high information and transactions costs forced industrial promoters to rely heavily…
Rice Prices in the 1720s and the Evolution of the South Carolina Economy
Bitter Harvest: The South Carolina Low Country in Historical Perspective
The factors responsible for the South Carolina Low Country's rapid economic rise in the eigthteenth century and for the area's subsequent lapse into stagnation and decline are described and analyzed. The conclusion is that the rise and fall of the Low Country grew out of the white settlers' early economic commitment to the production of plantation staples with bound labor. The Low Country was locked into a pattern of economic development that req…
The Sociology of Architecture in Colonial Charleston: Pattern and Process in an Eighteenth-Century Southern City
Journal Article The Sociology of Architecture in Colonial Charleston: Pattern and Process in an Eighteenth-Century Southern City Get access Peter A. Coclanis Peter A. Coclanis The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27514 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 18, Issue 4, Summer 1985, Pages 607–623, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh/18.4.607 Published: 01 July 1985
The Papers of Henry Laurens. Vol. VIII; Vol. IX
Journal Article The Papers of Henry Laurens. Vol. VIII: Oct. 10, 1111–April 19, 1773. Ed. by George C. Rogers, Jr., and David R. Chesnutt, The Papers of Henry Laurens. Vol. IX: April 19, 1773–Dec. 12, 1774. Ed. by George C. Rogers, Jr., and David R. Chesnutt and The Papers of Henry Laurens. Vol. X: Dec. 12, 1774–Jan. 4, 1776. Ed. by David R. Chesnutt Get access Peter A. Coclanis Peter A. Coclanis University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Search f…
Time in the Paddies: A Comparison of Rice Production in the South-Eastern United States and Lower Burma in the Nineteenth Century
Peter Coclanis, John Komlos, Time in the Paddies: A Comparison of Rice Production in the South-Eastern United States and Lower Burma in the Nineteenth Century, Social Science History, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 343-354
Time in the Paddies: A Comparison of Rice Production in the Southeastern United States and Lower Burma in the Nineteenth Century
The Question Of the relative efficiency of agricultural production within the institutional framework of slavery flared in the 1970s. Fogel and Engerman (1971, 1977) found antebellum Southern agriculture to have been considerably more productive than previously thought. Although this aspect of their finding became generally accepted, the controversy focused on just how efficient slave production actually was compared to Northern agriculture (Davi…
The Lightning-Rod Man: Franklin of Philadelphia
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The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920
Capital Mobilization and Southern Industry, 1880-1905: The Case of the Carolina Piedmont
As the American South commenced its modern industrialization in the late nineteenth century, it found itself handicapped not simply by its poverty, but also by its lack of institutionalized means for mobilizing investment capital for manufacturing. Using evidence from the first major southern manufacturing region, the Carolina Piedmont, we argue that the resulting high information and transactions costs forced industrial promoters to rely heavily…
Mountain Masters, Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina
The Market, Cultural Persistence, and Economic Change in the South
The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920
This important new book charts the economic and social rise and fall of a small, but intriguing part of the American South: Charleston and the surrounding South Carolina low country. Spanning 250 years, Coclanis's study analyzes the interaction of both external and internal forces on the city and countryside, examining the effects of various factors--the environment, the market, economic and political ideology, and social institutions--on the reg…
The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920
Journal Article The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920. By Peter A. Coclanis. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. xii + 370 pp. $39.95.) Get access Fred Bateman Fred Bateman Indiana University, Bloomington Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 77, Issue 1, June 1990, Page 282, https://doi.org/10.2307/2078676 Published:…
Irish-American Trade, 1660-1783
Journal Article Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783. By Thomas M. Truxes. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. xiv + 448 pp. $39.50.) Get access Peter A. Coclanis Peter A. Coclanis University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 77, Issue 2, September 1990, Pages 645–646, https://doi.org/10.2307/2079217 Published: 01 September 1990
The Wealth of British America on the Eve of the Revolution
Revolution British America's free population was extremely wealthy on the eve of the Revolution. A generation of scholarship has made that fact clear. Moreover, as work on wealth-holding patterns in the early modern period proceeds, it is becoming increasingly apparent that nowhere else in the world did a population of comparable size live so well. Indeed, as Perkins has pointed out, the free population of British North America-by all accounts fa…
The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920
Edmund Ruffin and the Crisis of Slavery in the Old South: The Failure of Agricultural Reform
Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915
Journal Article Black Property Owners in the South, 1790–1915. By Loren Schweninger. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. xviii + 426 pp. $50.00.) Get access Peter A. Coclanis Peter A. Coclanis University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 78, Issue 2, September 1991, Pages 653–654, https://doi.org/10.2307/2079570 Published: 01 Septemb…
The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920
History by the Numbers: Why Counting Matters
Peter A. Coclanis is Associate Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and the author of The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920 (1989). One of my best graduate students at UNC-Chapel Hill recently told me that whenever he comes across a statistical table in a history book, he skips over it, claiming just don't do it for me. If recent studies can be believed, numbers apparently don 't do it for most other …
Urbs in Horto
Southeast Asia's Incorporation into the World Rice Market: A Revisionist View
The story of Southeast Asia's incorporation into the “world” — or, more properly, Western — rice market is well known. Indeed, this story is sufficiently familiar so as almost to invite employment of the presumptuous “as every schoolboy knows” rhetorical conceit. Briefly put, the region's incorporation into this market is said to have coincided with the “New Imperialism”, more or less as defined by Hobson and Lenin: the period between about 1860 …
Twice as Less, lah: Language, Logic, and Economic Development
Employing recent research from the West, the author argues that the relationship between verbal skills, on the one hand, and science and maths skills, on the other, is closer than many scholars acknowledge. He suggests that the relatively poor performance of Singaporean students in international comparisons of scientific and mathematical achievement may be related to logical problems in Singapore English. He urges further research into the matter…
Nutrition and Economic Development in Post-Reconstruction South Carolina: An Anthropometric Approach
The determination of anthropometric historians to unearth the broad patterns of human biological well-being is now too well known to need reiteration. From Richard Steckel's exploratory essays, which could be taken as the launching manifesto of the discipline, to the most recent publications, many hundreds of thousands of records from nearly all continents of the globe have been examined (Mascie-Taylor 1991; Steckel 1979). All of this effort notw…
Nutrition and Economic Development in Post-Reconstruction South Carolina: An Anthropometric Approach
History (59 works) · Political science (45 works) · History (36 works) · Economics (34 works) · Archaeology (28 works) · Economic history (26 works) · Geography (23 works) · Law (23 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (21 works)