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Cover image of Inventing the Cotton Gin
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Inventing the Cotton Gin

Machine and Myth in Antebellum America

Angela Lakwete

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Winner of the 2004 Edelstein Prize given by the Society for the History of Technology

"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...

Winner of the 2004 Edelstein Prize given by the Society for the History of Technology

"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

Reviews

With careful use of vivid illustrations and keen analytic skills, Lakwete captures the relationship between technology and human initiative.

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.

This study provides students a clear example of how technological choices are not the storybook cases of perfected innovations replacing hopelessly outclassed traditional methods.

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.

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.

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About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
248
ISBN
9780801882722
Illustration Description
16 halftones, 10 line drawings
Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Cotton and the Gin to 1600
2. The Roller Gin in the America, 1607-1790
3. The Invention of the Saw Gin, 1790-1810
4. The Transition from the Roller to the Saw Gin, 1796-1830
5

Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Cotton and the Gin to 1600
2. The Roller Gin in the America, 1607-1790
3. The Invention of the Saw Gin, 1790-1810
4. The Transition from the Roller to the Saw Gin, 1796-1830
5. The Saw Gin Industry, 1830-1865
6. Saw Gin Innovation, 1820-1860
7. Old and New Roller Gins, 1820-1870
8. Machine and Myth
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index

Author Bio
Featured Contributor

Angela Lakwete

Angela Lakwete is an associate professor of history at Auburn University.