Sentences by Mexican Indian Peasants

Much of the existing literature on the replacement of sharecropping by wage labour in the cotton South during the post‐Depression era tends to focus on developments internal to the United States and to the South as a region. As such, it fails to provide a more global analysis which takes into account the fact that Southern cotton production was integrally tied to a world economy. This article addresses these shortcomings by examining how changes in the class structure of Southern cotton production had an impact on both foreign cotton production and the rise of the man‐made fibre industries between 1930 and 1950. This analysis attempts to avoid some of the major criticisms levelled against dependency theories and world‐system approaches, while showing how a global approach provides a more complete understanding of the relationships between the internal and external socio‐conomic factors which contributed to this historical transformation.