An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 [Hardcover]

Joyce E. Chaplin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1993

In An Anxious Pursuit, Joyce Chaplin examines the impact of the Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds of American planters in the colonial Lower South. She focuses particularly on the influence of Scottish notions of progress, tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia, and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern, improving people. She reads developments in agricultural practice as indices of planters' desire for progress, and she demonstrates the central role played by slavery in their pursuit of modern life. By linking behavior and ideas, Chaplin has produced a work of cultural history that unites intellectual, social, and economic history.

Using public records as well as planters' and farmers' private papers, Chaplin examines innovations in rice, indigo, and cotton cultivation as a window through which to see planters' pursuit of a modern future. She demonstrates that planters actively sought to improve their society and economy even as they suffered a pervasive anxiety about the corrupting impact of progress and commerce. The basis for their accomplishments and the root of their anxieties, according the Chaplin, were the same: race-based chattel slavery. Slaves provied the labor necessary to attain planters' vision of the modern, but the institution ultimately limited the Lower South's ability to compete in the contemporary world.

Indeed, whites continued to wonder whether their innovations, some of them defied by slaves, truly improved the region. Chaplin argues that these apprehensions prefigured the antimodern stance of the antebellum period, but she contends that they were as much a reflection of the doubt inherent in theories of progress as an outright rejection of those ideas.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

An important contribution to southern and Revolutionary era historiography.

Choice

[C]ombine social and intellectual history, skillfully tying early modern social thought to evidence from the fields and irrigation works.

American Historical Review

A major work of scholarship. Chaplin displays equally remarkable command over the grubbiest agricultural details and the loftiest philosophical ideas.

William and Mary Quarterly

[This] study of agricultural innovation in the Lower South and its relationship to modernity is a hallmark of its kind.

Journal of Economic History

A stunning synthesis of intellectual, social, and economic history.

Journal of the Early Republic --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Joyce E. Chaplin is associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 411 pages
• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press (June 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807820849
• ISBN-13: 978-0807820841
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,970,038 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An ambitious interpretation of the 18th century Lower South, May 20, 2001

By 

Sandra Parke Topolski (New Albany, Indiana United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American Hist) (Paperback)

Many histories of the South have focused exclusively on the antebellum period, characterizing the region as economically undiverse, intellectually out of touch with Enlightenment ideals, and culturally static. These assesments create the impression that southerners were backward people who should have known that the society they created was not maintainable. Joyce Chaplin argues that during the period from 1730 to 1815, the region was in actuality a dynamic and innovative place that fell victim only to its own success. To do so, she has compiled an enormous amount of evidence, based on sources ranging from specialized secondary literature on economics, philosophy, and culture, as well as primary documents such as period newspapers, public records, and private correspondence.

Chaplin begins her study with a treatment of the predominant economic and political theories of the late 17th century, arguing that southerners accepted the theories of the Scottish school that a commercial society was most conducive to individual wealth creation, and thereby a stronger and more harmonious society. To find products that would create the most wealth, southerners experimented and innovated with various crops and productive means, reflecting the Enlightenment values of scientific pursuit and rationality. In the process, they created a culture that celebrated the right of the individual to pursue prosperity, but that relied upon government aid and regulation, as well as black slavery. Both of the latter aspects were seen as potentially disruptive to their fragile new society, but also unavoidable if individual (and thereby societal) betterment was to be achieved. Even as southerners came to fear the potential of government and slaves (who Chaplin shows to be far from powerless) to challenge their authority, they found that they could not do away with them without undermining the culture of white achievement they had fostered.

Chaplin shows that southereners were not hostile to manufacturing, engaging in it on a small scale particularly during times of market disruption, such as during the Revolution and the War of 1812. Cotton and rice production returned as the dominant economic activities of the South because they were by far the least risky and most profitable, not because of any intellectual opposition to non-agricultural forms of capitalization. Chaplin believes that if only the region had continued its economic diversification, the South would not have been so heavily tied to slavery, and would not have experienced its eventual economic and social stagnation.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Looking forward but stuck in the past, March 10, 2007

By 

James Hoogerwerf (Auburn, AL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American Hist) (Paperback)

As the title implies, Joyce E. Chaplin has a dual purpose. She describes slave agriculture in the colonial to the pre-antebellum period and studies the Lower South's notions of Western modernity and innovation. While southern whites were aware of and tried to apply modern ideas and innovations, they could not, in the end, disassociate themselves from being slaveholders. In a nutshell the Lower South was characterized by continuity as well as, in Chaplin's words, change and persistence. It was anything but static.

In her analysis, Chaplin found that whites frequently used Scottish enlightened thought as an historical framework for assessing their own chances of achieving socio-economic improvement. The Scottish school, Chaplin proposes, is a way to show how whites' were informed of modern contemporary theory from newspapers, books, and local authors. The Reverend Alexander Hewitt wrote a 1770s account of the rise and progress of the Lower South and David Ramsey, a physician and early North American historian, modeled the Scottish statistical efforts of Sir john Sinclair.

Landholders were keeping up with the times and not at all languishing in the backwaters enjoying mint juleps on verandahs. Still, while they adjusted to national and world events and adapted their crops, capital and labor, they did not, in the end, relinquish their reliance on slavery. Chaplin's tries to understand this aspect of slavery in order to discover why racism is so persistent.

Chaplin offers a cautionary comment in the preface. She says she doesn't want to come across as cynical toward humanity's ability to overcome racism. She succeeds in adhering to her scholarly purpose until, interestingly, at the end of her book she expresses some skepticism. While whites in the Lower South adopted notions of modernity, they adhered to slavery in order to achieve their own ends. In doing so they rejected an opportunity to use their wealth, resources and leadership for reform. Instead they chose to avoid the instability that would be necessary to move beyond slavery.