Overview

Short Listed for the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize Unable to analyze the dynamics of specific forms of social labour in the antebellum U.S., most historians of the US Civil War have ignored its deep social roots. To search out these roots, Post applies the theoretical insights from the transition debates to the historical literature on the U.S. to produce a new analysis of the origins of American capitalism.

Full Product Details

Author:   Charles Post
Publisher:   Haymarket Books
Imprint:   Haymarket Books
Volume:   No. 28
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.443kg
ISBN:  

9781608461981

ISBN 10:   160846198
Pages:   298
Publication Date:   17 April 2012
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable  
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Table of Contents

Foreword by Ellen Meiksins Wood Introduction 1. The American Road to Capitalism i. Plantation-slavery ii. Agrarian petty-commodity production iii. Capitalist manufacture and industry iv. Conclusion: the Civil War 2. The Agrarian Origins of US Capitalism: The Transformation of the Northern Countryside before the Civil War i. Rural class-structure in the North before the Civil War ii. Debating the transformation of northern agriculture iii. The transformation of the northern countryside, c. 1776–1861 3. Plantation-Slavery and Economic Development in the Antebellum Southern United States i. The ‘planter-capitalism’ model ii. The ‘non-bourgeois civilisation’ model iii. Class-structure and economic development in the antebellum-South 4. Agrarian Class-Structure and Economic Development in Colonial British North America: The Place of the American Revolution in the Origins of US Capitalism i. The commercialisation-staples model ii. The demographic-frontier model iii. Agrarian social-property relations in colonial British North America iv. Colonial economic development, the American Revolution, and the development of capitalism in the US, 1776–1861 5. Social-Property Relations, Class-Conflict and the Origins of the US Civil War: Toward a New Social Interpretation i. Ashworth’s social interpretation of the US Civil War ii. A critique of slavery, capitalism and politics in the antebellum-republic iii. Toward a new social interpretation of the US Civil War Conclusion: Democracy against Capitalism in the Post-Civil-War United States i. Democracy against capitalism in the North: radicalism, class-struggle and the rise of liberal democracy, 1863–77 ii. Democracy against capitalism in the South: the rise and fall of peasant-citizenship, 1865–77 iii. The defeat of populism, ‘Jim Crow’ and the establishment of capitalist plantation-agriculture in the South, 1877–1900 References Index

Reviews

Charles Post's new book, The American Road to Capitalism, is sure to become a reference point for debates among historians and Marxists about the transformation of the English colonies into the fully developed capitalist United States. [...] it should be widely read, appreciated for its insights and rigor, and also debated. <br>--Ashley Smith, International Socialist Review <br> Explaining the origin and early development of American capitalism is a particularly challenging task. It is in some ways even more difficult than in other cases to strike the right historical balance, capturing the systemic imperatives of capitalism, and explaining how they emerged, while doing justice to historical particularities... To confront these historical complexities requires both a command of historical detail and a clear theoretical grasp of capitalism's systemic imperatives, a combination that is all too rare. Charles Post succeeds in striking that difficult balance, which makes his book ae

Author Information

CHARLES POST, Ph. D. (1983) in Sociology, SUNY-Binghamton, is Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College-CUNY. He has published in New Left Review, Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of Agrarian Change, Against the Current and Historical Materialism.

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