Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the Reconstruction Era

Michael R Cohen

Des. 2017 · Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History Boek 8 · NYU Press

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“Effectively argues that ethnic networks were important to...Jewish businesses as they participated in the cotton economy.” —Choice
 
In the nineteenth century, Jewish merchants created a thriving niche economy in the United States’ most important industry—cotton. Cotton Capitalists argues that Jewish merchants’ status as a minority fueled their success by fostering ethnic networks of trust. Trust in the nineteenth century was the cornerstone of economic transactions, and this trust was largely fostered by ethnicity. Much as money flowed along ethnic lines between Anglo-American banks, Jewish merchants in the Gulf South used their own ethnic ties with other Jewish-owned firms in New York, as well as Jewish investors across the globe, to capitalize their businesses. They relied on these family connections to direct Northern credit and goods to the war-torn South, avoiding the constraints of the anti-Jewish prejudices which had previously denied them access to credit, allowing them to survive economic downturns.

These American Jewish merchants reveal that ethnicity matters in the development of global capitalism. The story of Jews in the American cotton trade is far more than the story of American Jewish success and integration—it is the story of the role of ethnicity in the development of global capitalism.
 

“This eloquent study reminds us that we cannot fully understand the Souths economic revival in the age of reconstruction without looking at the critical role played by immigrant Jewish merchants.” —Rebecca Kobrin, Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History, Columbia University
 
“Michael R Cohens...well-written book, reveals how...Jews played a key role in building the cotton economy of the South.” ―The Jewish Chronicle

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Michael Cohen is Professor and chair of Jewish Studies at Tulane University, where he holds a Sizeler Professorship. He is the author of Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneuship in the Reconstruction Era (NYU Press, 2017) and The Birth of Conservative Judaism: Solomon Schechter's Disciples and the Creation of an American Religious Movement (Columbia University Press, 2012).