Collaborative Research: Seeds and Slaves: Technological Change, Plantation Efficiency, and Southern Economic Development

合作研究：种子和奴隶：技术变革、种植园效率和南方经济发展

• 批准号: 0551130
• 负责人: Alan Olmstead
• 金额: $ 9.22万
• 依托单位: University of California-Davis
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-03-01 至 2009-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0551130&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Seeds; Slaves; Technological

This research project will call into question five standard lessons about the development of Americanagriculture, and more specifically of plantation agriculture in the slave South:1. Little biological change occurred in the antebellum South, or indeed anywhere in Americanagriculture before the advent of hybrid corn in the 1930s.2. Biological learning, when it did occur, was exclusively associated with land-augmenting (yieldincreasing)technological change rather than labor-saving technological change.3. The antebellum cotton economy grew almost exclusively through territorial expansion.4. The slave South was 'uninventive' and technologically stagnant.5. The productivity differentials that did exist across plantations and regions were primarilyassociated with labor organization and scale.The analysis, based on archival plantation records, will demonstrate that each of these lessons must befundamentally rethought. In preliminary work, the authors have collected a sample of over 400,000observations on the daily cotton picking performance of individual slaves over the 1811-62 period.Analysis of this sample at the plantation level shows that the average amount of cotton picked per slave ina day increased by over 2.2 percent per annum. Thus, in the 50 years preceding the Civil War, pickingefficiency tripled. Given that picking was the peak-load labor requirement, this change relaxed the keybinding constraint and allowed planters to reallocate labor and land to higher value uses. Theintroduction, local refinement, and diffusion of new cultivars (the so-called Mexican cottons) is theleading explanation of this labor-saving technological change.The current sample has been collected from the most accessible sources. It contains key gaps-e.g., coverage is disproportionately weighted to the Mississippi Valley and the late antebellum period.Funding will allow tapping known archival records to roughly double the sample and increase itscoverage of the pre-1840 period and of the important cotton belt in Alabama, Georgia, and SouthCarolina. In addition to picking records, the authors will collect information on slave demographics, seedvarieties, management activities, and other cultural practices. Pushing the sample back in time andincreasing its geographic coverage will substantially improve its usefulness for understanding thediffusion of the new biological technology (improved seeds) and its relationship to increased pickingefficiency. Funding will facilitate assembling the data from specific plantations into a larger panel datasetincluding the micro data for several thousand individual African-American slaves. Such a panel datasetwill allow the improved analysis of productivity growth controlling for labor force composition and otherfactors, the measurement of differences in picking performance across age and gender categories, and thefuller re-evaluation of standard conclusions about the relationship between plantation scale, labororganization, and efficiency.The intellectual merit of this proposal is the creation and analysis of a large new panel datasetthat will improve our understanding of the dynamics of American economic development by directingattention to a hitherto neglected issue-the rapid productivity growth of slave labor in cotton cultivation.The new evidence will shed light on many of the most contentious issues in American history associatedwith the competitive performance and labor organization of this nation's 'peculiar institution.'The broader significance of this research will be the reinterpretation of the sources of Americaneconomic growth by highlighting the role of biological technologies. Such technologies had enormousimpacts on both land and labor productivity that are at odds with the conventional views inspired by thepioneering work of Zvi Griliches on hybrid corn. The findings will also challenge standard views aboutthe 'uninventive South' that influence the way American history is understood and taught. Finally, theresearch will illuminate the working lives of individual African-American slaves who have heretoforelabored in anonymity.

这个研究项目将提出关于美国农业发展的五个标准教训，更具体地说，是关于奴隶制南方的种植园农业的问题：内战前的南方几乎没有发生生物学上的变化，实际上在20世纪30年代杂交玉米出现之前，美国农业的任何地方都没有发生生物学上的变化。生物学习，当它确实发生时，只与增加土地（产量）的技术变化有关，而不是与节省劳动力的技术变化有关。内战前的棉花经济几乎完全通过领土扩张来增长。实行奴隶制的南方“缺乏创造力”，技术上也停滞不前。不同种植园和地区之间确实存在的生产率差异主要与劳动力组织和规模有关。基于档案种植园记录的分析将证明，必须从根本上重新思考这些教训。在初步工作中，作者收集了超过40万份样本，观察1811年至1862年期间个体奴隶的日常棉花采摘表现。在种植园水平上对这个样本的分析表明，每个奴隶每天平均采摘的棉花量每年增加2.2%以上。因此，在内战前的50年里，采收效率提高了两倍。考虑到采摘是高峰负荷劳动力需求，这一变化放松了键绑定约束，允许种植者将劳动力和土地重新分配给更高价值的用途。新品种（所谓的墨西哥棉花）的引进、本地改良和传播是这种节省劳动力的技术变革的主要解释。目前的样本是从最容易获得的来源收集的。它包含了关键的空白。在美国，对密西西比河谷和南北战争前后期的报道不成比例。资金将允许利用已知的档案记录，使样本数量大约增加一倍，并增加1840年以前时期和阿拉巴马州、乔治亚州和南卡罗来纳州重要棉花带的覆盖范围。除了采摘记录，作者还将收集有关奴隶人口统计、种子品种、管理活动和其他文化习俗的信息。将样本时间向后推并增加其地理覆盖范围将大大提高其对理解新生物技术（改良种子）传播及其与提高采摘效率的关系的有用性。资金将有助于将来自特定种植园的数据汇编成一个更大的面板数据集，其中包括数千名非裔美国奴隶的微观数据。这样的面板数据集将允许改进对劳动力构成和其他因素控制下的生产率增长的分析，测量不同年龄和性别类别的采摘表现差异，以及对种植园规模、劳动力组织和效率之间关系的标准结论进行更全面的重新评估。这一建议的智力价值在于创建并分析了一个新的大型面板数据集，通过将注意力引向一个迄今为止被忽视的问题——棉花种植中奴隶劳动生产率的快速增长，将提高我们对美国经济发展动态的理解。新的证据将揭示美国历史上许多最具争议的问题，这些问题与这个国家特殊机构的竞争表现和劳工组织有关。这项研究更广泛的意义在于，通过强调生物技术的作用，重新解读美国经济增长的来源。这些技术对土地和劳动生产率都产生了巨大的影响，这与Zvi Griliches在杂交玉米方面的开创性工作所激发的传统观点相左。这些发现也将挑战关于“缺乏创造力的南方”的标准观点，这些观点影响着美国历史的理解和教授方式。最后，研究将阐明在此之前一直在匿名工作的非裔美国奴隶的个人工作生活。