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

这项研究项目将质疑有关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发展：1.南北战争前的南方几乎没有发生生物变化，或者在1930年代杂交玉米出现之前，美国农业中的任何地方都几乎没有发生生物变化。生物学习，当它确实发生时，完全与土地增加(产量增加)的技术变化有关，而不是节省劳动力的技术变化。南北战争前的棉花经济几乎完全是通过领土扩张实现的。奴隶制的南方“缺乏创造力”，技术停滞不前。不同种植园和地区之间的生产率差异主要与劳工组织和规模有关。基于种植园档案记录的分析将证明，必须从根本上重新思考每一个教训。在前期工作中，作者收集了1811-1862年间奴隶个体每日棉花采摘表现的40多万个观测样本。对这些样本在种植园层面的分析表明，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，采摘效率提高了两倍。鉴于采摘是高峰负荷的劳动力需求，这一变化放松了键约束，并允许种植者将劳动力和土地重新分配到更高价值的用途。新品种(所谓的墨西哥棉花)的引进、当地提炼和推广是对这一省力的技术变革的主要解释。目前的样品是从最容易获得的来源收集的。它包含关键差距-例如，覆盖范围不成比例地侧重于密西西比山谷和南北战争后期。基金将使已知的档案记录能够大约增加一倍的样本，并增加其对1840年前时期以及阿拉巴马州、佐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。将样本推回时间并扩大其地理覆盖面将极大地提高其对了解新生物技术(改良种子)的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小组数据集，包括数千名非洲裔美国奴隶的微观数据。这样的小组数据集将允许改进对控制劳动力构成和其他因素的生产率增长的分析，测量不同年龄和性别类别的采摘业绩差异，并更充分地重新评估关于种植园规模、劳动力组织、这一提议的智力价值在于创建和分析了一个新的大型面板数据集，它将把注意力集中在一个迄今被忽视的问题上，从而提高我们对美国经济发展动态的理解--棉花种植中奴隶劳动的生产率快速增长。新的证据将揭示美国历史上许多与这个国家“特殊制度”的竞争表现和劳动组织相关的最具争议性的问题。这项研究的更广泛的意义将是通过强调生物技术的作用来重新解释美国经济增长的来源。这种技术对土地和劳动生产率都有巨大的影响，这与兹维·格里利克斯在杂交玉米方面的开创性工作所启发的传统观点不同。这一发现还将挑战关于“缺乏创造力的南方”的标准观点，这些观点影响了人们理解和教授美国历史的方式。最后，这项研究将阐明在此之前一直默默无闻的非洲裔奴隶的工作生活。

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.