Planters' progress: The meaning of modernization in Civil-War Georgia.

摘要

If the Confederacy was to repel the North and secure its independence, it had to modernize rapidly. From 1861 to 1865, the Confederacy undertook in earnest the Procrustean task of fitting modernity to the demands of a slave society. I want to argue here that what ensued was a singular historical process: a non-revolutionary modernization carried out by a landed elite. In other societies, some form of revolution preceded the advent of modernity. The bourgeoisie overthrew the landed classes to clear the path to the modern world in many western nations. Peasant uprisings heralded government-controlled modernization programs under Communist regimes in China and Russia. Even where old elites persevered as in Germany and Japan, they were able to do so because the state forced feudal lords to adopt bourgeois values and practices. In the Confederacy, by contrast, the elite deployed the state to modernize southern society as a way of perpetuating their rule as slaveholding planters.