From postbellum plantation to modern agribusiness: A history of the Delta and Pine Land Company

Zhengkai Dong, Purdue University

Abstract

This study investigates the history of the Delta and Pine Land Company, a large business plantation devoted to staple crop production in the postbellum South, from its inception in 1911 to its modernization in the 1960s--how the plantation was first organized; how it operated; and how it adjusted to falling prices during the 1920s and 1930s, to the exodus of black labor to the North during World War II, to technological changes after the war, and to competition from California, Texas, and other western states and from abroad. Delta and Pine Land was typical of many large commercial plantations in the South in its focus on expert management and centralized production control. The history of the plantation demonstrates that specialization in staple crop production, centralization in production management, and control over the labor and product were the three distinctive features of plantation farming. The professional management of the plantation, the increasing use of sharecroppers, and the growing reliance on scientific methods--all these evidenced on the Delta and Pine Land plantation suggest that despite regional lag, the managerial revolution in American business did not completely bypass the South. Just as managers in large industrial enterprises wrested control over production from the workers on the shop floor, so their counterparts on southern plantations took production decisions away from the laborers in the cotton fields, albeit in a different manner. It was the development of this process that laid the foundation for the highly mechanized, capital-intensive modern agribusiness in the South.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Woodman, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American studies|American history|Economic history

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