Confederate Political Economy

How did the Confederate States of America survive for four years? Most historians have cited the South's vast expanse of land, exemplary military leadership, and the sustaining power of Confederate nationalism to explain the Confederacy's persistence through four long years of war. Michael Brem Bonner offers a different interpretation of the Confederacy's endurance, one that accounts for the political culture and political economy of the Confederate state. The Confederacy, Bonner argues, took the form of an “expedient corporatist state” (p. 9). Corporatism involves “shared governance and responsibility between the public and private sectors in which government, business and labor provide direction for mutually beneficial economic policies”; it is often associated with twentieth-century fascist and quasi-fascist states but can be found in other governmental systems such as interwar France (ibid.). Bonner identifies several key components to the Confederate corporatist system: a Constitution granting the executive branch enormous power, an incipient public-private armaments industry to support the Confederate war machine, a domestic passport system to monitor the movement of civilians, a large-scale conscription system to supply the army with fighting men, and a private sector–driven railroad policy. Bonner stresses the expedient nature of this system, designed on the fly during a war for the nation's survival

Business · Economic system · Economics · Economy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Law

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