Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America.

Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America. By Angela Lakwete. Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, c. 2003. Pp. xvi, 232. $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-7394-0.)

Few objects in American history carry more emotional baggage than the cotton gin. Nineteenth-century historians heralded it as a breakthrough that helped set in motion the expansion of chattel slavery in the South and quickened the industrialization of the North. They focused their gaze on the story of Eli Whitney, the Yale-educated tutor who encountered cotton during his stay at Mulberry Grove plantation outside Savannah, Georgia, invented the cotton gin, and went on to revolutionize the manufacture of firearms and northern industrial history by promoting the concept of interchangeable parts. The gin rendered slave-grown cotton profitable, and manufacturing ultimately defeated slavery on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War. Angela Lakwete reminds us that the story is more complicated.

The essence of her argument is that cotton ginning had a long, complicated history before and after Whitney. The first gins were single-roller gins that emerged as early as the fifth century C.E. Users in Asia, Africa, and the American Southwest pinched off the seeds from the lint by rolling an iron rod over seed cotton. By adding a second small-diameter roller and gears to turn the rollers in opposite directions, ginners increased output to meet expanding markets for woven cotton textiles. British merchants, eager to capitalize on trade, exported Indian roller-gin technology known as the charkha to the British Atlantic world. Whitney encountered variations of this type of gin while he was at Mulberry Grove.

Whitney's gin revolutionized the technology by employing a wire-studded wooden roller to pull cotton lint through a metal breastwork separating seeds from the fibers. Revolving brushes then removed the lint from the wire roller. The innovation was conceptually simple, and inventors soon substituted ganged circular saws for wires. Critics complained that the new-fashioned gins substituted quantity for quality, but the new technology also reduced labor costs associated with roller gins. By the 1830s, planters relegated roller gins to the smaller market for long-staple cotton; short-staple cotton growers preferred the saw gin.

Lakwete devotes much of the book to the many contributions that white and black southern workers made to the development of the gin. While this discussion supports her claim that southerners were instrumental in advancing the technology within the context of southern industrialization, it is hard to understand how gin makers made incremental changes in the gins without the evidence contained in the machines. Lakwete does a remarkable job attempting to recapture some of the changes from advertising and patent records, but most readers will struggle to determine what the manufacturers and inventors were trying to accomplish from the claims and counter-claims. Lakwete needs to use the material culture more to evoke the world she seeks to recover.

This book is a fine contribution to the history of technology and of the South. It successfully blends social and technological history, enlarging the scene beyond Eli Whitney to include the numerous people who helped make cotton king.

University of Delaware 

RITCHIE GARRISON