Global Perspectives On Industrial Transformation In The American South Edited By Susanna Delfino And Michele Gillespie

Download Global Perspectives On Industrial Transformation In The American South Edited By Susanna Delfino And Michele Gillespie full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Global Perspectives On Industrial Transformation In The American South Edited By Susanna Delfino And Michele Gillespie ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!

Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South

Author : Michele Gillespie
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
ISBN 13 : 0826264727
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (262 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South by : Michele Gillespie

Download or read book Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South written by Michele Gillespie and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering the late colonial age to World War I and beyond, this collection of essays places the economic history of the American South in an international light by establishing useful comparisons with the larger Atlantic and world economy. In an attempt to dispel long-lasting myths about the South, the essays analyze the economic evolution of the South since the slave era. From this perspective, the conception of a backward, wholly agricultural antebellum South occupied only by wealthy planters, poor whites, and contented slaves has finally given way to one of economic and social dynamism as well as regional prosperity. In a coherent and cohesive progression of subjects, these essays show that the South had been deeply enmeshed in the Atlantic economy since the colonial period and, after the Civil War, retained distinctive needs that caused increasing departure from the course northerners adopted on matters of political economy. This comparative approach also helps explain the motivations behind the political choices made by the South as an eminently export-oriented region. This book shows that the South was not slower to develop with respect to industrialization than either the majority of the northern states, especially in the West, or the countries of Western Europe. In fact, the apparently disappointing performance of the New South's economy appears to be the result of more pervasive and largely uncontrollable trends that affected the national as well as the international economy. Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South makes an important contribution to the economic history of the South and to recent efforts to place American history in a more international context.

Daily Life in the Industrial United States, 1870-1900

Author : Julie Husband
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 377 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (16 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Daily Life in the Industrial United States, 1870-1900 by : Julie Husband

Download or read book Daily Life in the Industrial United States, 1870-1900 written by Julie Husband and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-06-24 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not just about the rise of the factories or the emergence of the modern city, this fascinating history conveys how it felt to work the assembly line and walk the bustling urban streets. Daily Life in the Industrial United States: 1870–1900 is a narrative-based social history that is ideal for college and high school students researching this era. Thematically organized chapters, devoted to Economic Life, Domestic Life, Recreational Life, and other themes, are broad in scope but include primary documents and telling details that give readers a visceral sense of the lives of people who lived during the era of industrialization. Primary documents range from first-person diaries of individuals who lived during the era, to letters from freed slaves looking to reunite with relatives sold away from them, to speeches and essays by activists including Frederick Douglass and Jane Addams. They reveal how people understood the goals of education, the legal position of African Americans in the South, and marriage, among many other daily phenomena. Readers will become privy to a range of personal experiences while comprehending the importance of the economic and social developments of the period. A chronology, a glossary, a selection of illustrations, and further reading sources complete the work.

Southern Society and Its Transformations, 1790-1860

Author : Susanna Delfino
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
ISBN 13 : 0826272436
Total Pages : 271 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (262 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Southern Society and Its Transformations, 1790-1860 by : Susanna Delfino

Download or read book Southern Society and Its Transformations, 1790-1860 written by Susanna Delfino and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2011-06-15 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Southern Society and Its Transformations, a new set of scholars challenge conventional perceptions of the antebellum South as an economically static region compared to the North. Showing that the pre-Civil War South was much more complex than once thought, the essays in this volume examine the economic lives and social realities of three overlooked but important groups of southerners: the working poor, non-slaveholding whites, and middling property holders such as small planters, professionals, and entrepreneurs. The nine essays that comprise Southern Society and Its Transformations explore new territory in the study of the slave-era South, conveying how modernization took shape across the region and exploring the social processes involved in its economic developments. The book is divided into four parts, each analyzing a different facet of white southern life. The first outlines the legal dimensions of race relations, exploring the effects of lynching and the significance of Georgia’s vagrancy laws. Part II presents the advent of the market economy and its effect on agriculture in the South, including the beginning of frontier capitalism. The third section details the rise of a professional middle class in the slave era and the conflicts provoked. The book’s last section deals with the financial aspects of the transformation in the South, including the credit and debt relationships at play and the presence of corporate entrepreneurship. Between the dawn of the nation and the Civil War, constant change was afoot in the American South. Scholarship has only begun to explore these progressions in the past few decades and has given too little consideration to the economic developments with respect to the working-class experience. These essays show that a new generation of scholars is asking fresh questions about the social aspects of the South’s economic transformation. Southern Society and Its Transformations is a complex look at how whole groups of traditionally ignored white southerners in the slave era embraced modernizing economic ideas and actions while accepting a place in their race-based world. This volume will be of interest to students of Southern and U.S. economic and social history.

Bonds of Womanhood

Author : Susanna Delfino
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 081315488X
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (131 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Bonds of Womanhood by : Susanna Delfino

Download or read book Bonds of Womanhood written by Susanna Delfino and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Class, race, and gender collide in this insightful examination of the life of Susanna (Susan) Preston Shelby Grigsby (1830–1891)—a white plantation mistress and slaveholder who struggled to participate in the economic modernization of antebellum Kentucky. Drawing on Grigsby's correspondence, author Susanna Delfino uses Grigsby's story to explore the complex cultural and social issues at play in the state's economy before, during, and after the Civil War. Delfino demonstrates that Grigsby engaged in certain kinds of antislavery activism, such as hiring white servants as a way of conveying her support for free labor and avoiding ever selling a slave. Despite her beliefs, however, Grigsby failed to hold to her moral compass when faced with her husband's patriarchal authority or when she experienced serious economic trouble. This compelling study not only illuminates how white women participated in the South's nineteenth-century economy, but also offers new perspectives on their complicity in slavery.

The Southern Exodus to Mexico

Author : Todd W. Wahlstrom
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 0803274246
Total Pages : 229 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (32 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Southern Exodus to Mexico by : Todd W. Wahlstrom

Download or read book The Southern Exodus to Mexico written by Todd W. Wahlstrom and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2015-03 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Civil War, a handful of former Confederate leaders joined forces with the Mexican emperor Maximilian von Hapsburg to colonize Mexico with former American slaveholders. Their plan was to develop commercial agriculture in the Mexican state of Coahuila under the guidance of former slaveholders with former slaves providing the bulk of the labor force. By developing these new centers of agricultural production and commercial exchange, the Mexican government hoped to open up new markets and, by extending the few already-existing railroads in the region, also spur further development. The Southern Exodus to Mexico considers the experiences of both white southern elites and common white and black southern farmers and laborers who moved to Mexico during this period. Todd W. Wahlstrom examines in particular how the endemic warfare, raids, and violence along the borderlands of Texas and Coahuila affected the colonization effort. Ultimately, Native groups such as the Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, and Kickapoos, along with local Mexicans, prevented southern colonies from taking hold in the region, where local tradition and careful balances of power negotiated over centuries held more sway than large nationalistic or economic forces. This study of the transcultural tensions and conflicts in this region provides new perspectives for the historical assessment of this period of Mexican and American history.

A New History of the American South

Author : W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469670194
Total Pages : 613 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis A New History of the American South by : W. Fitzhugh Brundage

Download or read book A New History of the American South written by W. Fitzhugh Brundage and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2023-03-15 with total page 613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For at least two centuries, the South's economy, politics, religion, race relations, fiction, music, foodways and more have figured prominently in nearly all facets of American life. In A New History of the American South, W. Fitzhugh Brundage joins a stellar group of accomplished historians in gracefully weaving a new narrative of southern history from its ancient past to the present. This groundbreaking work draws on both well-established and new currents in scholarship, among them global and Atlantic world history, histories of African diaspora, and environmental history. The volume also considers the experiences of all people of the South: Black, white, Indigenous, female, male, poor, and elite. Together, the essays compose a seamless, cogent, and engaging work that can be read cover to cover or sampled at leisure. Contributors are Peter A. Coclanis, Gregory P. Downs, Laura F. Edwards, Robbie Ethridge, Kari Frederickson, Paul Harvey, Kenneth R. Janken, Martha S. Jones, Blair L. M. Kelley, Kate Masur, Michael A. McDonnell, Scott Reynolds Nelson, James D. Rice, Natalie J. Ring, and Jon F. Sensbach.

Cotton and Race Across the Atlantic

Author : Jonathan Robins
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1580465676
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (84 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Cotton and Race Across the Atlantic by : Jonathan Robins

Download or read book Cotton and Race Across the Atlantic written by Jonathan Robins and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2016 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of how African farmers, African-American scientists, and British businessmen struggled to turn colonial Africa into a major cotton exporter.

Railroads in the Old South

Author : Aaron W. Marrs
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 0801891302
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (18 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Railroads in the Old South by : Aaron W. Marrs

Download or read book Railroads in the Old South written by Aaron W. Marrs and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-03-10 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aaron W. Marrs challenges the accepted understanding of economic and industrial growth in antebellum America with this original study of the history of the railroad in the Old South. Drawing from both familiar and overlooked sources, such as the personal diaries of Southern travelers, papers and letters from civil engineers, corporate records, and contemporary newspaper accounts, Marrs skillfully expands on the conventional business histories that have characterized scholarship in this field. He situates railroads in the fullness of antebellum life, examining how slavery, technology, labor, social convention, and the environment shaped their evolution. Far from seeing the Old South as backward and premodern, Marrs finds evidence of urban life, industry, and entrepreneurship throughout the region. But these signs of progress existed alongside efforts to preserve traditional ways of life. Railroads exemplified Southerners' pursuit of progress on their own terms: developing modern transportation while retaining a conservative social order. Railroads in the Old South demonstrates that a simple approach to the Old South fails to do justice to its complexity and contradictions. -- Dr. Owen Brown and Dr. Gale E. Gibson

At the Precipice

Author : Shearer Davis Bowman
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807833924
Total Pages : 391 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis At the Precipice by : Shearer Davis Bowman

Download or read book At the Precipice written by Shearer Davis Bowman and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bowman explores the different ways in which Americans, North and South, black and white, understood their interests, rights, and honor during the secession period. He examines the lives and thoughts of key figures and provides an especially vivid glimpse into what less famous men and women in both sections thought about themselves and the worlds in which they lived, and how their thoughts informed their actions during this time. Both sides glorified the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, yet they interpreted those sacred documents in markedly different ways and held very different notions of what constituted "American" values.

Historians across Borders

Author : Nicolas Barreyre
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520958055
Total Pages : 331 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Historians across Borders by : Nicolas Barreyre

Download or read book Historians across Borders written by Nicolas Barreyre and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this stimulating and highly original study of the writing of American history, twenty-four scholars from eleven European countries explore the impact of writing history from abroad. Six distinguished scholars from around the world add their commentaries. Arguing that historical writing is conditioned, crucially, by the place from which it is written, this volume identifies the formative impact of a wide variety of institutional and cultural factors that are commonly overlooked. Examining how American history is written from Europe, the contributors shed light on how history is written in the United States and, indeed, on the way history is written anywhere. The innovative perspectives included in Historians across Borders are designed to reinvigorate American historiography as the rise of global and transnational history is creating a critical need to understand the impact of place on the writing and teaching of history. This book is designed for students in historiography, global and transnational history, and related courses in the United States and abroad, for US historians, and for anyone interested in how historians work.

The Dangers of Fashion

Author : Sara B. Marcketti
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350052027
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (5 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Dangers of Fashion by : Sara B. Marcketti

Download or read book The Dangers of Fashion written by Sara B. Marcketti and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From sweatshops to fur farming, from polluting chemicals to painful garments, the fashion industry is associated with activities which have had devastating effects on workers, consumers, and the natural world. This ground-breaking volume provides a framework for examining the ethical, social, and environmental dangers that arise as fashion products are designed, manufactured, distributed, and sold within retail outlets, before being consumed and disposed of. Encompassing the cultural, psychological, and physiological aspects of fashion, it offers a comprehensive exploration of the hazards of a global industry. Drawing together an international team of leading textile and apparel experts, The Dangers of Fashion presents original perspectives on a wide range of topics from piracy and counterfeiting to human trafficking; from the effects of globalization on local industry to the peer pressure that governs contemporary ideals of beauty. Rooted in research into industry and consumer practices, it discusses innovative solutions-both potential and existing-to fashion's dangers and moral dilemmas from the viewpoint of individuals, companies, societies, and the global community.

A Common Thread

Author : Beth Anne English
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820336696
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis A Common Thread by : Beth Anne English

Download or read book A Common Thread written by Beth Anne English and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With important ramifications for studies relating to industrialization and the impact of globalization, A Common Thread examines the relocation of the New England textile industry to the piedmont South between 1880 and 1959. Through the example of the Massachusetts-based Dwight Manufacturing Company, the book provides an informative historic reference point to current debates about the continuous relocation of capital to low-wage, largely unregulated labor markets worldwide. In 1896, to confront the effects of increasing state regulations, labor militancy, and competition from southern mills, the Dwight Company became one of the first New England cotton textile companies to open a subsidiary mill in the South. Dwight closed its Massachusetts operations completely in 1927, but its southern subsidiary lasted three more decades. In 1959, the branch factory Dwight had opened in Alabama became one of the first textile mills in the South to close in the face of post-World War II foreign competition. Beth English explains why and how New England cotton manufacturing companies pursued relocation to the South as a key strategy for economic survival, why and how southern states attracted northern textile capital, and how textile mill owners, labor unions, the state, manufacturers' associations, and reform groups shaped the ongoing movement of cotton-mill money, machinery, and jobs. A Common Thread is a case study that helps provide clues and predictors about the processes of attracting and moving industrial capital to developing economies throughout the world.

Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization

Author : Susanna Delfino
Publisher : University of Missouri Press
ISBN 13 : 0826266312
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (262 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization by : Susanna Delfino

Download or read book Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization written by Susanna Delfino and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because of its strong agrarian roots, the South has typically been viewed as a region not favorably disposed to innovation and technology. Yet innovation was never absent from industrialization in this part of the United States. From the early nineteenth century onward, southerners were as eager as other Americans to embrace technology as a path to modernity. This volume features seven essays that range widely across the region and its history, from the antebellum era to the present, to assess the role of innovations presumed lacking by most historians. Offering a challenging interpretation of industrialization in the South, these writings show that the benefits of innovations had to be carefully weighed against the costs to both industry and society. The essays consider a wide range of innovative technologies. Some examine specific industries in subregions: steamboats in the lower Mississippi valley, textile manufacturing in Georgia and Arkansas, coal mining in Virginia, and sugar planting and processing in Louisiana. Others consider the role of technology in South Carolina textile mills around the turn of the twentieth century, the electrification of the Tennessee valley, and telemedicine in contemporary Arizona--marking the expansion of the region into the southwestern Sunbelt. Together, these articles show that southerners set significant limitations on what technological innovations they were willing to adopt, particularly in a milieu where slaveholding agriculture had shaped the allocation of resources. They also reveal how scarcity of capital and continued reliance on agriculture influenced that allocation into the twentieth century, relieved eventually by federal spending during the Depression and its aftermath that sparked the Sunbelt South's economic boom. Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization clearly demonstrates that the South's embrace of technological innovation in the modern era doesn't mark a radical change from the past but rather signals that such pursuits were always part of the region's economy. It deflates the myth of southern agrarianism while expanding the scope of antebellum American industrialization beyond the Northeast and offers new insights into the relationship of southern economic history to the region's society and politics.

Plantation Kingdom

Author : Richard Follett
Publisher : Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN 13 : 1421419408
Total Pages : 174 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Plantation Kingdom by : Richard Follett

Download or read book Plantation Kingdom written by Richard Follett and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How global competition brought the plantation kingdom to its knees. In 1850, America’s plantation economy reigned supreme. U.S. cotton dominated world markets, and American rice, sugarcane, and tobacco grew throughout a vast farming empire that stretched from Maryland to Texas. Four million enslaved African Americans toiled the fields, producing global commodities that enriched the most powerful class of slaveholders the world had ever known. But fifty years later—after emancipation demolished the plantation-labor system, Asian competition flooded world markets with cheap raw materials, and free trade eliminated protected markets—America’s plantations lay in ruins. Plantation Kingdom traces the rise and fall of America’s plantation economy. Written by four renowned historians, the book demonstrates how an international capitalist system rose out of slave labor, indentured servitude, and the mass production of agricultural commodities for world markets. Vast estates continued to exist after emancipation, but tenancy and sharecropping replaced slavery’s work gangs across most of the plantation world. Poverty and forced labor haunted the region well into the twentieth century. The book explores the importance of slavery to the Old South, the astounding profitability of plantation agriculture, and the legacy of emancipation. It also examines the place of American producers in world markets and considers the impact of globalization and international competition 150 years ago. Written for scholars and students alike, Plantation Kingdom is an accessible and fascinating study.

A Cultural History of Work in the Age of Enlightenment

Author : Anne Montenach
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 135007828X
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (5 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis A Cultural History of Work in the Age of Enlightenment by : Anne Montenach

Download or read book A Cultural History of Work in the Age of Enlightenment written by Anne Montenach and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Multivolume Reference/Humanities The Enlightenment led to revised ideas about work together with new social attitudes toward work and workers. Coupled with dynamism in the economy, and the rise of the middling orders, work was more frequently perceived positively, as a commodity and as a source of social respectability. This volume explores the cultural implications of the transition from older systems based on privilege, control and embedded practices to a more open society increasingly based on merit and ability. It examines how guild controls broke down and political and commercial systems loosened. It also considers the theoretical justifications that brought new binding ideas, such as the strengthening of ideology on home, domesticity for the female, and work and politics for the male. North America embodied the extremes of these transitions with free workers able to make their way in a society based on ability and initiative while solidifying the ravages of the slavery system. A Cultural History of Work in the Age of Enlightenment presents an overview of the period with essays on economies, representations of work, workplaces, work cultures, technology, mobility, society, politics and leisure.

Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South

Author : Michael S. Frawley
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807171395
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South by : Michael S. Frawley

Download or read book Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South written by Michael S. Frawley and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-05-08 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of the Civil War, contemporary narratives about the American South pointed to the perceived lack of industrial development in the region to explain why the Confederacy succumbed to the Union. Even after the cliometric revolution of the 1970s, when historians first began applying statistical analysis to reexamine antebellum manufacturing output, the pervasive belief in the region’s backward-ness prompted many scholars to view slavery, not industry, as the economic engine of the South. In Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South, historian Michael S. Frawley engages a wide variety of sources—including United States census data, which many historians have underutilized when gauging economic growth in the prewar South—to show how industrial development in the region has been systematically minimized by scholars. In doing so, Frawley reconsiders factors related to industrial production in the prewar South, such as the availability of natural resources, transportation, markets, labor, and capital. He contends that the Gulf South was far more industrialized and modern than suggested by census records, economic historians like Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, and contemporary travel writers such as Frederick Law Olmsted. Frawley situates the prewar South firmly in a varied and widespread industrial context, contesting the assumption that slavery inhibited industry in the region and that this lack of economic diversity ultimately prevented the Confederacy from waging a successful war. Though southern manufacturing firms could not match the output of northern states, Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South proves that such entities had established themselves as vital forces in the southern economy on the eve of the Civil War.

Building Charleston

Author : Emma Hart
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813928699
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (139 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Building Charleston by : Emma Hart

Download or read book Building Charleston written by Emma Hart and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2009-12-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the colonial era, Charleston, South Carolina, was the largest city in the American South. From 1700 to 1775 its growth rate was exceeded in the New World only by that of Philadelphia. The first comprehensive study of this crucial colonial center, Building Charleston charts the rise of one of early America's great cities, revealing its importance to the evolution of both South Carolina and the British Atlantic world during the eighteenth century. In many of the southern colonies, plantation agriculture was the sole source of prosperity, shaping the destiny of nearly all inhabitants, both free and enslaved. The insistence of South Carolina's founders on the creation of towns, however, meant that this colony, unlike its counterparts, would also be shaped by the imperatives of urban society. In this respect, South Carolina followed developments in the rest of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, where towns were growing rapidly in size and influence. At the vanguard of change, burgeoning urban spaces across the British Atlantic ushered in industrial development, consumerism, social restructuring, and a new era in political life. Charleston proved no less an engine of change for the colonial Low Country, promoting early industrialization, forging an ambitious middle class, a consumer society, and a vigorous political scene. Bringing these previously neglected aspects of early South Carolinian society to our attention, Emma Hart challenges the popular image of the prerevolutionary South as a society completely shaped by staple agriculture. Moreover, Building Charleston places the colonial American town, for the first time, at the very heart of a transatlantic process of urban development.