“The Truth about the Boll Weevil”: The Nature of Planter Power in the Mississippi Delta (2009)
The cotton boll weevil's threat to the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta at the start of the twentieth century reveals how the region's elite landowners used racism and social power to maintain control over a vast agro-environment in the face of a potentially devastating natural threat. The insect pest put their cotton kingdom in peril, and planters responded by approaching this beetle not as a natural disaster, but as a human one. Their preparations for the weevil's arrival show that they understood their control over the environment as rooted in their "natural" place atop a social order and labor system based on white supremacy and access to scientific expertise. Planters hoped to protect their place in this order, and thereby defend their cotton from the weevil, by managing knowledge about the insect as a means of controlling farm workers. Building on recent work in southern environmental history, this article uncovers the ways white landowners' ideologies about race and labor shaped their approach to the agro-environment and its pests.
...MoreDescription On agriculture and race-relations in early 20th-century Mississippi.
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