{"product_id":"9781316877586","title":"Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South","description":"Analyzing 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.","brand":"Cambridge University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47146847305968,"sku":"9781316877586","price":48.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781316877586_p0.jpg?v=1763707853","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781316877586","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}