“If you can read only one book about how history happened to the post-Civil War economy, read this one.”—New York Review of Books

In this provocative and intricate analysis of the post-Civil War southern economy, Gavin Wright finds in the South’s peculiar labor market the answer to the perennial question of why the region remained backward for so long. After the Civil War, Wright explains, the South continued to be a low-wage regional market embedded in a high-wage national economy. He vividly details the origins, workings, and ultimate demise of this separate southern labor market and explains why the post-World War II southern economy, which created today’s Sunbelt, is not the result of the evolution of the old system, but the product of a revolution brought on by the New Deal and World War II that shattered the South’s stagnant system and created a genuinely new, thriving economy.