Essay Topic No. 3--Due Friday, October 19, 2007

So far in this course we’ve been viewing the southern plantation as a sort of "factory in the field," using a system of forced labor undergirded by racism and run by hard-driving businessmen. But there’s another, very different, way to look at the plantation--that of Eugene Genovese. Given what you’ve seen so far, and viewing the documents and readings in Chapter 6 of EGMT--how effective is his critique of the "capitalist" thesis of the plantation?