How and to what degree did slavery shape the reach of the American state? Building on existing literatures, I develop and test the hypothesis that slavery shaped the development of the American welfare state by creating highly labor coercive societies. To test the argument, I focus on the New Deal period of the United States — one of the largest expansions of the American state in American history — as a window into understanding the link between labor coercion and redistribution. I assemble a dataset using historical census data combined with detailed, program-by-county level New Deal spending data across the U.S. South and use an instrumental variables identification strategy to establish causality. Results show strong evidence for the argument and hypothesized mechanism. These results indicate the importance of interaction between history, local politics, and national state expansion.
Old South, New Deal: How the Legacy of Slavery Undermined the New Deal Available to Purchase
I would like to thank Matt Blackwell, Dan Carpenter, Ryan Enos, Jennifer Hochschild, Jon Rogowski, Pavitra Suryanarayan for helpful feedback on the manuscript. I would also like to thank seminar audiences at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania for incisive, constructive, and critical feedback at earlier stages of the project. Finally, I would like to thank audience members of the workshop on Slavery and Its Legacies hosted by the University of Southern California for feedback.
Mazumder S (2021), "Old South, New Deal: How the Legacy of Slavery Undermined the New Deal". Journal of Historical Political Economy, Vol. 1 No. 3 pp. 447–475, doi: https://doi.org/10.1561/115.00000016
Download citation file:
Sign in
ICE Member Sign In
Log inPurchased this content as a guest? Enter your email address to restore access.
