A Time (Not) Apart: A Lesson in Economic History from Cotton Picking Books

Abstract

I use the individual-level records from my own family in rural Mississippi to estimate the agricultural productivity of African Americans in manual cotton picking nearly a century after Emancipation, 1952-1965. On average, the Logan children were more than 95 % as productive as enslaved children from the same region in the late antebellum era, 1850-1860. Gender differences in productivity were smaller than among enslaved children and disappeared by late pubescence. Additional qualitative evidence answers questions about agricultural productivity that cannot be derived from the quantitative data. For example, the method of cotton picking was not the gang-labor system described by some economic historians, but an independent process. The qualitative evidence also shows that economic roles were deeply intertwined with racial identity. JEL Classification B4 . I1 . J1 . N3 . N9 . Z1 Keywords Race . Economic history . Methodology BI am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am ashamed for having at one time been ashamed.-

American Enslavement and the Recovery of Black Economic History

“…Placing people at the center requires a more humanistic economic history and would move us forward in thinking about race as well. I believe that a nuanced approach to race that emphasizes race as an experience in American history as opposed to a category or a classification goes to the heart of the epistemology of Black (and American) economic history (Logan 2015). Borrowing liberally from that work, I argue there for the advantages of new approaches that explore and theorize from experiences, which is inherently qualitative work.…”

“…What, exactly, can we learn from these alternative approaches? To provide several examples, I return to the terrain of Logan (2015) and consider the issues related to productivity in agriculture. The first issue is gender differences in productivity.…”

“…While the Logans did not pick cotton under chattel bondage, the actual process of manual cotton picking underwent relatively little technological innovation: that is, while there were significant biological innovations in cotton agriculture, the actual manual harvesting process did not change significantly. The qualitative interviews show that the cotton picking process used by the Logans was organized and ordered, but independent (Logan 2015).…”

The Impact of the WWI Agricultural Boom and Bust on Female Opportunity Cost and Fertility

“…Until the 1950s cotton and tobacco were primarily hand-picked, while many grain crops were partially or fully mechanized. Women and children played an important role in the cotton harvest, and were often times just as productive as their male counterparts (Olmstead and Rhode, 2018;Logan, 2015). In the spirit of Shultz (1985), this may suggest that the relative wage increase for women working in cotton and tobacco was larger than women working in grain production.…”

When Coercive Economies Fail: The Political Economy of the Us South after the Boll Weevil

“…Too voluminous to review in depth, we note a few works that relate to our study of the political economy effects of the cotton economy and the legacy of slavery. Logan (2015) argues that economic roles in the South were intertwined with racial identity, which pushes us to consider the arrival of the boll weevil as a potentially important shock to both the racial and economic system of the South. On the interaction of racial violence and politics, Jones et al (2017) show the negative effects on black voter turnout after local lynchings while Williams (2017) traces the correlation between lynching and voter turnout to today.…”