Description
Professor Majewski compares Virginia and Pennsylvania to provide an explanation for how slavery undermined the development of the southern economy. At first of the nineteenth century, residents in every state financed transportation improvements to lift land values and spur commercial growth. Alternatively, by the 1830s, Philadelphia capitalists started financing Pennsylvania’s railroad network, building integrated systems that reached the Midwest. Virginia’s railroads remained a selection of lines without western connections. The loss of an immense city that could provide capital and traffic for large-scale railroads used to be the weakness of Virginia’s slave economy.