Unredeemed Land

Erin Stewart Mauldin has written a succinct and insightful analysis of southern agriculture that explodes old myths and offers new explanations by taking an environmentally holistic view of the subject. It is a truism that slavery was the principal cause of the Civil War, but this book asks a more provocative question: What “caused” cotton, and thus slavery, to be the dominant form of economic activity in the South? As this book makes abundantly clear, the southern agricultural economy was a house of cards before the Civil War. The war was simply the turbulent wind that temporarily dismantled it, and “unmasked and exacerbated the conditions created by antebellum farming practices” (p. 43). But in time this “archetype of decay” would have crumbled on its own due to a complex web of environmental limitations, social factors, and economic reality (p. 140). As Mauldin demonstrates with great clarity, a nineteenth-century army moving through the countryside is a massive parasitic pest, devouring all in its path. But the war merely “presaged” the decades of a “stagnating” agricultural economy following the war (p. 159

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• Fear of a Black planet

  Open Access•Joe P L Davidson, F C Da Silva•European Journal of Social Theory•2022

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