Climatological factors; but it would be a mistake on this account to read the institution of slavery out of the story, as some historians are tempted to do.
A related but distinct interpretive line starts from the proposition that the peculiarities of southern agricultural history derive from distinctive features of the particular crops in which the region specialized. Recognizable as the “staples thesis” of Canadian provenance, this view was extended to the South in 1961 by Douglass North, who maintained:
For our purposes, the South was a region characterized by production for the market of a number of agricultural staples in which slave labor was both the major capital investment and an important intermediate product. The nature of cotton production (and of tobacco, rice and sugar production), and the economic and social consequences of investment in this form of capital, affected not only the economic structure of the area, but molded the
Mechanisms for staples effects include scale economies and skill requirements in production, linkages to
local processing, and bulk without weight, which lowered inbound freight rates and thus discouraged
the development of manufacturing. Historical geographer Carville Earle presents variations on the
staples theme, in which the southern landscape was initially shaped by the transportation and processing
properties of tobacco, while the nineteenth century choice of labor system was driven by the seasonality
historians and geographers, but economic historians are also sometimes inclined to demote slavery to a
subsidiary historical role, by explaining the geographic spread of the institution in terms of its affinity for
particular crops. Stefano Fenoaltea argues that slavery was well-adapted to “effort-intensive” activities
such as mining and sugar production, but not to “care-intensive” assignments such as olive oil, wine, and
largeplantations,. Morerecently,Christopher
Hanes postulates that the distribution of slavery in Anglo-America was dictated by the relative costs of
pattern of settlement and urbanization and the distribution of income as well.
