the continuation of the power of the same elite.
F ROM S LAVERY TO J IM C ROW
In Guatemala, extractive institutions persisted from colonial
to modern times with the same elite firmly in control. Any
change in institutions resulted from adaptations to changing
environments, as was the case with the land grab by the
elite motivated by the coffee boom. The institutions in the
U.S. South were similarly extractive until the Civil War.
Economics and politics were dominated by the southern
elite, plantation owners with large land and slave holdings.
Slaves had neither political nor economic rights; indeed,
they had few rights of any kind.
The South’s extractive economic and political institutions
made it considerably poorer than the North by the middle of
the nineteenth century. The South lacked industry and made
relatively little investment in infrastructure. In 1860 its total
manufacturing output was less than that of Pennsylvania,
New York, or Massachusetts. Only 9 percent of the southern
population lived in urban areas, compared with 35 percent
in the Northeast. The density of railroads (i.e., miles of track
divided by land area) was three times higher in the North
than in southern states. The ratio of canal mileage was
similar.
Map 18 (this page) shows the extent of slavery by plotting
the percentage of the population that were slaves across
U.S. counties in 1840. It is apparent that slavery was
dominant in the South with some counties, for example,
along the Mississippi River having as much as 95 percent
of the population slaves. Map 19 (this page) then shows
one of the consequences of this, the proportion of the labor
force working in manufacturing in 1880. Though this was
not high anywhere by twentieth-century standards, there are
marked differences between the North and the South. In
much of the Northeast, more than 10 percent of the labor
force worked in manufacturing. In contrast in much of the
South, particularly the areas with heavy concentrations of
slaves, the proportion was basically zero.