Beginning in the 1960s, many historians classified the South, from the days of slavery until the Second World War, as distinctively precapitalist in significant ways. They saw the region as having a type of ‘merchant’ or ‘agrarian’ capitalism, and never considered the states of the Old Confederacy as shrewdly ‘capitalist’ (the term itself without any modifiers). Primarily due to the absence of a free labour society, but also because of the lack of infrastructure and development within the region – a place with few cities, little industrialisation, and few social services – the South was often portrayed as distinctly anti-capitalist: enslavers had to be dragged into modernity against their wills.
After the Second World War industrialisation boom ushered the South into a more fully capitalist society, it essentially became a colonial economy to the North, as it courted investment and corporations from the capital-rich Northeastern US. Existing in a dependency-type of relationship, it was never really the South – or southern labour, no matter how unfree or brutalised – driving the US economy.
Finally, contrary to the position that American slavery represents the key or essence of capitalism, the most recent scholarship regarding economic analysis of slavery argues that the institution was not economically efficient. All these points highlight the need for studies on growth, and more importantly, on underdevelopment. Slavery made the planters very rich, but it made the South very poor. In the 19th century, capitalism, even industrial capitalism, did not bring the South to the developmental standards of the rest of the nation. The question remains: why is that so?
If we turn from looking at planters to studying labour, we see that elite capture of the state is bad for democracy and worse for development. It also helps us distinguish between growth and development, highlighting the unevenness of both in different areas of the US. The US is a large country and awareness of the difference between growth and development can help us see that perhaps it makes more sense to compare the American South with places in the Global South rather than the American North or West.