This research project will call into question five standard lessons about the development of American agriculture, and more specifically of plantation agriculture in the slave South: 1. Little biological change occurred in the antebellum South, or indeed anywhere in American agriculture 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 primarily associated with labor organization and scale. The analysis, based on archival plantation records, will demonstrate that each of these lessons must be fundamentally rethought. In preliminary work, the authors have collected a sample of over 400,000 observations 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 in a day increased by over 2.2 percent per annum. Thus, in the 50 years preceding the Civil War, picking efficiency tripled. Given that picking was the peak-load labor requirement, this change relaxed the key binding constraint and allowed planters to reallocate labor and land to higher value uses. The introduction, local refinement, and diffusion of new cultivars (the so-called Mexican cottons) is the leading 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 its coverage of the pre-1840 period and of the important cotton belt in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. In addition to picking records, the authors will collect information on slave demographics, seed varieties, management activities, and other cultural practices. Pushing the sample back in time and increasing its geographic coverage will substantially improve its usefulness for understanding the diffusion of the new biological technology (improved seeds) and its relationship to increased picking efficiency. Funding will facilitate assembling the data from specific plantations into a larger panel dataset including the micro data for several thousand individual African-American slaves. Such a panel dataset will allow the improved analysis of productivity growth controlling for labor force composition and other factors, the measurement of differences in picking performance across age and gender categories, and the fuller re-evaluation of standard conclusions about the relationship between plantation scale, labor organization, and efficiency. The intellectual merit of this proposal is the creation and analysis of a large new panel dataset that will improve our understanding of the dynamics of American economic development by directing attention 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 associated with 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 American economic growth by highlighting the role of biological technologies. Such technologies had enormous impacts on both land and labor productivity that are at odds with the conventional views inspired by the pioneering work of Zvi Griliches on hybrid corn. The findings will also challenge standard views about the 'uninventive South' that influence the way American history is understood and taught. Finally, the research will illuminate the working lives of individual African-American slaves who have heretofore labored in anonymity.
