{"product_id":"9781316635438","title":"Masterless Men : Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge Studies on the American South)","description":"\u003cp\u003eAnalyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Keri Leigh Merritt reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton - and thus, slaves - in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete - for jobs or living wages - with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socio-economic consequences as a result of living in a slave society. Merritt examines how these 'masterless' men and women threatened the existing Southern hierarchy and ultimately helped push Southern slaveholders toward secession and civil war.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Cambridge University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46376042135631,"sku":"00000_00000_00000_00000","price":1155.0,"currency_code":"TWD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/kinokuniya.com.tw\/products\/9781316635438","provider":"Books Kinokuniya Taiwan","version":"1.0","type":"link"}