Inbunden, Engelska, 2016

The Cotton Kings

Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans

Av Bruce E. Baker, Barbara Hahn

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Beskrivning

The Cotton Kings relates a rip-roaring drama of competition in the marketplace and reveals the damage markets can cause when they do not work properly. It also explains how they can be fixed through careful regulation. At the turn of the twentieth century, cotton was still the major agricultural product of the American South and an important commodity for world industry. Key to marketing cotton were futures contracts, traded at exchanges in New York and New Orleans. Futures contracts had the potential to hedge risk and reduce price volatility, but only if the markets in which they were traded worked properly. Increasing corruption on the powerful New York Cotton Exchange pushed prices steadily downwards in the 1890s, impoverishing millions of cotton farmers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture tried to solve the problem with better crop predictions and market information, shared equally and simultaneously with all participants, but these efforts failed.To fight the cotton market's corruption, cotton brokers in New Orleans, led by William P. Brown and Frank Hayne, began quietly to assemble resources. They triumphed in the summer of 1903, when they cornered the world market in cotton and raised its price to reflect the reality of increasing demand and struggling supply. The brokers' success pushed up the price of cotton for the next ten years. However, the structural problems of self-regulation by market participants still threatened the cotton trade. More corruption at the New York Cotton Exchange appeared, until eventually political pressure inspired the Cotton Futures Act of 1914, the federal government's first successful regulation of a financial derivative.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum: 2016-01-07
Mått: 155 x 236 x 22 mm
Vikt: 522 g
Format: Inbunden
Språk: Engelska
Antal sidor: 232
Förlag: OUP USA
ISBN: 9780190211653

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Mer information

Bruce E. Baker teaches at Newcastle University in England and is co-editor of the journal American Nineteenth Century History. He is the author of What Reconstruction Meant: Historical Memory in the American South, This Mob Will Surely Take My Life: Lynchings in the Carolinas, 1871-1947, After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South, and The South at Work: Observations from 1904. Barbara Hahn is associate professor of history at Texas Tech University and associate editor of Technology and Culture. She is the author of Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617-1937. She is spending 2014-2016 as a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK.

Recensioner i media

"An insightful, useful, and interesting book that blends the histories of business, the South, society, politics, and the environment...Rather than being a dull book on a dull subject...The Cotton Kings...is a book that shows that real people influenced history but also worked within institutional constraints...A great read that is a terrific example of how history should be done."--American Historical Review"An instant classic. Baker and Hahn show us the gambling, fraud, and tragedy at the heart of American capitalism. In this gripping narrative we learn how a futures market worked, how one man could influence cotton prices by controlling information, and how a modern state crushed the operation, ruining thousands. This book is vital for understanding the paradoxes at the heart of the Progressive Era."--Scott Reynolds Nelson, author of A Nation of Deadbeats:An Uncommon History of America's Financial Disasters"This is a wonderful study, exemplary of the New Financial History: rigorously attentive to market microstructure while richly contextualized with wider implications for those of us concerned with the political economy of financial markets regulation. And they've given us a rip-roaring good read to boot! With skill and imagination, the authors have brought those 'bloodless statistics and tiresome technicalities' to life."--D'Maris Coffman, University CollegeLondon"Entrepreneurs' greatest dream is to corner the market--and no market was a more tempting target in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States than the cotton market. In this fascinating history, Bruce Baker and Barbara Hahn tell the story of the cotton bears and bulls, and how a more assertive federal government eventually tamed their epic struggles."--Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History"A carefully researched and skillfully narrated account of an important episode in the history of the cotton trade which provides new and relevant insights into the development of American financial markets and their regulation."--Catherine Davies, Global Urban History"An important and wonderfully entertaining book."--Eli Cook, Business History Review"It would be a disservice to The Cotton Kings to label it as just an economic history...It is also a work of social history, labor history, urban history, cultural history, and Southern history. The authors' interdisciplinary approach draws upon the rich sub-focuses within nineteenth and twentieth century history and results in a book that enriches our understanding of the symbiotic relationship between commodities and the marketplace. The clear andnontechnical explanations of financial terminology and processes augment this well-researched book...ensuring that it will be featured on many reading lists and be useful to numerous scholars."--CarinPeller-Semmens, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

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