Editor's Column

Some historians have regarded the Civil War of 1861-1865 as sufficient explanation of the disruption and relative backwardness of the Southern economy. Those who have felt the need for additional analysis have often stopped after pointing to the alleged horrors of Radical Reconstruction or the alleged exploitation of the Southern economy by Northern business interests. J. Carlyle Sitterson, of the history faculty at the University of North Carolina, takes a more comprehensive view in his article on the southern sugar industry from 1850 to 1910. He shows the significance for this industry of factors which did not originate in the United States at all: the rise of new producing areas abroad, the gradual penetration of the new sciences of agronomy and chemistry into the sugar industry. By working chiefly with plantation records, he is able to trace the interaction of production costs, sugar prices, technological changes, marketing methods, problems of recruiting labor and organizing it into an efficient work force. At the center of these interacting forces was the planter-manager, charged with combining all of these functions in such a way that the productive unit would be profitable. Students of business history will note another feature of Professor Sitterson's story. During the late nineteenth century, many American firms, in fields as diverse as manufacturing and retailing, sought survival by means of integration. But in those years the existing integration in the sugar industry was destroyed. Vertical integration decreased as planters began to specialize in the cultivation of sugar cane, while central factories for the production of raw and refined sugar were operated by independent firms. And horizontal concentration also was reduced with the appearance of numerous small farmers and tenants as producers of sugar cane. Dr. Fritz Redlich continues in this issue his account of the Lauchhammer Iron Works, which was begun in the June issue of the BULLETIN. The present installment focuses on the efforts of Count Detlev von Einsiedel and his son to introduce in the Lauchhammer Works the most advanced methods which had been developed in