Planters' Progress is the first book to examine the profoundly transformative industrialization of a southern state during the Civil War. More than any other Confederate state, Georgia mixed economic modernization with a large and concentrated slave population. In this pathbreaking study, Chad Morgan shows that Georgia's remarkable industrial metamorphosis had been a long-sought goal of the state's planter elite. Georgia's industrialization, underwritten by the Confederate government, changed southern life fundamentally. A constellation of state-owned factories in Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, and Macon made up a sizeable munitions and supply complex that kept Confederate armies in the fields for four years against the preeminent industrial power of the North. Moreover, the government in Richmond provided numerous official goads and incentives to non-government manufacturers, setting off a boom in private industry. Georgia cities grew and the state government expanded its function to include welfare programs for those displaced and impoverished by the war. Georgia planters had always desired a level of modernization consistent with their ascendancy as the ruling slaveowner class. Morgan shows that far from being an unwanted consequence of the Civil War, the modernization of Confederate Georgia was an elaboration and acceleration of existing tendencies, and he confutes long and deeply held ideas about the nature of the Old South. Planters' Progress is a compelling reconsideration not only of Confederate industrialization but also of the Confederate experience as a whole.

In An Anxious Pursuit, Joyce Chaplin examines the impact of the Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds of American planters in the colonial Lower South. She focuses particularly on the influence of Scottish notions of progress, tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia, and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern, improving people. She reads developments in agricultural practice as indices of planters' desire for progress, and she demonstrates the central role played by slavery in their pursuit of modern life. By linking behavior and ideas, Chaplin has produced a work of cultural history that unites intellectual, social, and economic history. Using public records as well as planters' and farmers' private papers, Chaplin examines innovations in rice, indigo, and cotton cultivation as a window through which to see planters' pursuit of a modern future. She demonstrates that planters actively sought to improve their society and economy even as they suffered a pervasive anxiety about the corrupting impact of progress and commerce. The basis for their accomplishments and the root of their anxieties, according the Chaplin, were the same: race-based chattel slavery. Slaves provied the labor necessary to attain planters' vision of the modern, but the institution ultimately limited the Lower South's ability to compete in the contemporary world. Indeed, whites continued to wonder whether their innovations, some of them defied by slaves, truly improved the region. Chaplin argues that these apprehensions prefigured the antimodern stance of the antebellum period, but she contends that they were as much a reflection of the doubt inherent in theories of progress as an outright rejection of those ideas.