Bruce E. Baker and Barbara Hahn. The Cotton Kings

What do cotton, Canada, and Mardi Gras krewes have in common? If you read The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans you will find out. Bruce E. Baker and Barbara Hahn have written an insightful, useful, and interesting book that blends the histories of business, the South, society, politics, and the environment. In this “economic drama” they argue that the cotton market at the turn of the twentieth century worked better when it was regulated (1). By the late 1800s, there were two cotton exchanges in the U.S., one in New Orleans and the other in New York. Traders in both places made futures trades, which were essentially bets as to whether the price of cotton would rise or fall. The price of futures began to affect the spot, or immediate sales, usually by inhibiting prices. Bear traders in New Orleans worked to drive up prices while their counterparts in New York, the bulls, strove to drive down prices. A complicating factor was the lack of information about cotton forecasts. Bulls typically created, or at least publicized, reports that pointed to a bumper crop. Such rosy forecasts tended to drive down prices.

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