New in paper
A History of Transportation in the
Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
New Introduction by Aaron W. Marrs
“Phillips has written a scholarly book rich in detail. He has placed students of social as
well as economic history under lasting obligations.”—Journal of Political Economy
A History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860 (1908) was Southern historian
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips’s first major monograph and has stood for over a century as one
of the principal studies of transportation in the antebellum South. In this work Phillips
(1877–1934) used a detailed exploration of the development of the railroad systems in
Georgia and South Carolina to probe the structure, accomplishments, and limitations of
the antebellum Southern economy.
For Phillips the region’s economic identity as a producer of staple crops determined its
transportation priorities. He carefully outlined the restrictions and opportunities created
by Southern geography, economy, and labor structure as a precursor to his examination
of every railroad corporation established in South Carolina and Georgia before the Civil
War.
If railroads represented an outstanding accomplishment of the South, Phillips argued,
the railroads also demonstrated the limits of the antebellum economy. Although railroads were essential to the South’s livelihood, the technological revolution did not transform the region or liberate it from the the cotton- and slave-based economy that Phillips
believed stunted its growth. Phillips saw Southern railroads chiefly as an improvement
in carrying staple goods to the coast—as part of a traditional economic system—rather
than dynamically contributing to the region’s evolution and diversification.
This Southern Classics edition includes a new introduction by Aaron W. Marrs that
chronicles the circumstances surrounding Phillips’s writing of this book and illustrates
how contemporary historians continue to debate the social and economic issues Phillips
raised.
Aaron W. Marrs is a historian at the
U.S. Department of State. He earned
his Ph.D. in history from the University
of South Carolina and is the author
of Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing
Progress in a Slave Society. Marrs also
served as associate managing editor of
The South Carolina Encyclopedia.
Available 2011, 432 pages, 6 illus.
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