Winner of the 2004 Edelstein Prize given by the Society for the History of Technology
Description
"The cotton gin animates the American imagination in unique ways. It evokes no images of antique machinery or fluffy fiber but rather scenes of victimized slaves and battlefield dead. It provokes the suspicion that had Eli Whitney never invented the gin, United States history would have been somehow different. Yet cotton gins existed for centuries before Whitney invented his gin in 1794. Nineteenth-century scholars overlooked them as well as gins made by southern—and northern—mechanics, in order to create a history meant to chasten some southerners and demean others. Using the gin as evidence, they read failure back from the Civil War into the choices that southerners made from the American Revolution, tracing the steps that led them to Appomattox."
In Inventing the Cotton Gin, Lakwete explores the history of the cotton gin as an aspect of global history and an artifact of southern industrial development. She examines gin invention and innovation in Asia and Africa from the earliest evidence to the seventeenth century, when British colonizers introduced an Asian hand-cranked roller gin to the Americas. Lakwete shows how indentured British, and later enslaved Africans, built and used foot-powered models to process the cotton they grew for export. After Eli Whitney patented his wire-toothed gin, southern mechanics transformed it into the saw gin, offering stiff competition to northern manufacturers. Far from being a record of southern failure, Lakwete concludes, the cotton gin—correctly understood—supplies evidence that the slave labor–based antebellum South innovated, industrialized, and modernized.Reviews
"With careful use of vivid illustrations and keen analytic skills, Lakwete captures the relationship between technology and human initiative."—Lester P. Lee, Jr., Times Literary Supplement"Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which created the Old South and then destroyed it . . . Lakwete targets this myth in Inventing the Cotton Gin and largely demolishes it."—John Bezís-Selfa, Alabama Review "This study provides students a clear example of how technological choices are not the storybook cases of perfected innovations replacing hopelessly outclassed traditional methods."—William H. Phillips, EH.Net "For those seeking to understand how the interplay of market factors, cultural norms, and personal choices shape—and are shaped by—technology, Inventing the Cotton Gin is an excellent read."—Don Butts, History: Reviews of New Books "Lakwete has written the first scholarly study of the cotton gin in antebellum America . . . Instead of viewing Eli Whitney's work as a historical watershed, she finds continuity."—Choice "Lakwete joins the pantheon of technological historians by demolishing a standard, widely accepted myth with the careful and persuasive analysis of a vast array of evidence . . . The book is a triumph."—Barbara Hahn, H-South, H-Net Reviews "Few will dispute that this book will change how historians think about the rise of King Cotton and the nature of technological change."—John Majewski, Business History Review "[Lakwete] captures the nuances that distinguish technological success from failure."—John S. Nader, Enterprise and Society "Another myth relating to the South is relegated, shall we say—with apologies to Marx—to the (cotton) dustbin of history . . . A major work of scholarship."—Peter A. Coclanis, Technology and Culture "Inventing the Cotton Gin is an education in economic and business history as much as a needed revisionist version of the cotton gin myth."—Kim Long, Bloomsbury Review "Bold and path-breaking . . . Most forcefully, Lakwete impugns the notion that a machine bears the responsibility for the Civil War and its aftermath."—Mark Finlay, South Carolina Historical Magazine "The best and most sophisticated treatment of the gin in the larger context of the antebellum cotton South we are likely to see . . . The dramatic, great-white man narrative of Eli Whitney yields to a richer, more complex story."—David L. Carlton, Georgia Historical Quarterly "Lakwete's compelling and revisionist book on the cotton gin is a major contribution to the history of Southern technology. The writing is clear and concise, the descriptions of very complex mechanical operations are lucid, and the study is grounded in superb research."—Pete Daniel, curator, National Museum of American History "The book is a highly original and substantial contribution to the history of technology, particularly in showing how machine designs are shaped by the pull and haul of both economics and culture. The scholarship is impressive, skillfully linking together a very wide range of diverse documentary and pictorial evidence."—Carolyn C. Cooper, Yale University "She has done an excellent job of weaving together an amazingly complex series of events in a straightforward and interesting manner."—Twyla Dell, Material Culture
Author Information
Angela Lakwete is an associate professor of history at Auburn University.
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