The Decline and Fall of a Cotton Empire: Economic and Land-use Change in the Lower Mississippi River "delta" South, 1930-1970
Open Access
- Author:
- Hagge, Patrick David
- Graduate Program:
- Geography
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- None
- Committee Members:
- Deryck William Holdsworth, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Deryck William Holdsworth, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Roger Michael Downs, Committee Member
Donna Jean Peuquet, Committee Member
William Alan Blair, Committee Member - Keywords:
- historical geography
cotton
Delta
rural
agriculture
US South
economic change
1930s
1970s
land - Abstract:
- The overwhelmingly rural “Delta” in Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee experienced an economic revolution in agriculture during the twentieth century as a result of the shocks of the Great Depression and the rise of other national and global sources of cotton. These events led to an economic restructuring of the Delta, as that region subsequently transitioned away from hand-picked cotton, small plots of land, and tenant farming. Before 1930, most cotton farms were worked by tenant farmers or day laborers, with mules the motive power for plow and wagon. Government agricultural-support programs instigated during the Depression helped planters transition to more modern forms of farming, manifested in shifts to larger farms and adoption of mechanized equipment. Between 1930 and 1970 the comparative advantages of the Delta cotton economy disappeared as cheaper, more efficient cotton production developed in the U.S. West and Asia. By 1970, the Delta was a depopulated landscape (due to decades of outmigration by farmers and farm workers) dominated by large, mechanized commercial farms that increasingly cultivated crops other than cotton. Land use, land ownership and settlement patterns are analyzed to understand the manner and method of the rural Delta’s agricultural remaking. Historical documents (county atlases, U.S. Census records) are used in comparative and time-series analyses. Evidence suggests that external forces in national and global cotton markets, along with the resulting breakdown of local land systems of ownership, size, and parcel division affected twentieth-century economic change in the Delta: characteristics of local cotton production that served as comparative advantages of production in 1930 had become disadvantageous to cotton production by 1970. This dissertation analyzes how significantly agrarian regions experienced economic change (particularly rural-to-rural economic change) as other sources of similar crop cultivation were increasingly mechanized and globally-connected.