ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with several aspects of the political economy of the New South, with a particular focus on cotton. It describes how academic interest in continuity or discontinuity between the political economy of the Old South and the New South has been intrinsically tied to the question of distinctiveness. The chapter explains how a late nineteenth-century belief in what called the paradox of poverty and progress – that the South paradoxically seemed to be moving toward modernization while simultaneously remaining in a state of backwardness – shaped historiography on the political economy of the South with its fixation on the continuity–discontinuity and North–South binary. It also explains how there are two ways to break free from the propensity to frame the history of the political economy in the South in terms of the region's agrarian rural characteristics as contrasted with the North's industrial modern features.
