Credit Merchandising in the Post-Emancipation South: Structure, Conduct, and Petformance*

The last three decades of the nineteenth century witnessed only a miniscule growth in the agricultural output of the Cotton South.’ By the beginning of the twentieth century, all dreams of a “New South” had been dashed and the region would be characterized by any reasonable criterion as economically backward. In One Kind of Freedom (Ransom and Sutch, 1977) we argued that this inability of the Southern economy to expand at the same pace as the rest of the nation stemmed from institutional flaws which stymied economic growth and development. We identified such flaws in the South’s educational institutions, in its patterns and