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• W4386930027 abstract "Reviewed by: Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Re-made Our Economy and the Planet by Bart Elmore Andrew C. Baker (bio) Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Re-made Our Economy and the Planet. By Bart Elmore. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 248. $28.00 cloth; $21.99 ebook) Bart Elmore has once again written a crisp and compelling environmental business history. In Country Capitalism he brings together stories of how five of the world’s biggest companies built out the infrastructure of twenty-first century consumer capitalism. Coca-Cola delivered ice-cold satisfaction “within arm’s reach” of Americans at every crossroads hamlet and rural gas station (p. 8). Delta Airlines pioneered the hub and spoke system that connected regional cities to national markets. Walmart’s trucking network and inventory tracking system distributed goods to small-town stores. FedEx used these systems to deliver packages overnight across the country. Bank of America, in turn, streamlined the credit that paid for the purchases that kept the diesel engines rumbling and the jet engines spinning. [End Page 196] Each company played a role in creating the system that lets me expect two-day shipping on the latest object of desire. These stories build on the argument Elmore made in Citizen Coke (2016), that consumer businesses were most profitable when they consciously avoided getting bogged down in resource extraction or production. These companies transformed themselves into “conduits of capitalism” (p. 5). They mastered logistics, leveraged federal infrastructure projects, navigated shifting regulations, and secured government contracts. Their profitability came from greasing the wheels of consumer capitalism; it came from conquering time and space. This conquest came at a high environmental cost. For each chapter on a business’s innovative early years, Elmore includes a second examining how a more mature business in later decades navigated the environmental debts that came with these innovations. Coke’s vending machines forced it to confront the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) crisis. Delta’s fleet of inefficient planes made it particularly sensitive to the oil crises of the 1970s. Walmart’s sprawling supercenters clashed with slow-growth and NIMBY activism in the 1990s. FedEx faced pressure for enabling exploitative production chains in Asian markets. Bank of America’s portfolio connected it with “dirty” industries like coal and oil. By the late twentieth century, these companies were having to reckon with the ways that they had “remade our economy and the planet.” In Country Capitalism Elmore makes a regional argument. His five stories argue that “the rural roads that led to our have-it-now, fly-by-night, buy-on-credit economy ran through the American South” (p. 7). In this argument his “country capitalism” builds on Bethany Moreton’s “Walmart Country” and Shane Hamilton’s “Trucking Country,” finding each business’s core identity in the ways each spent their formative years “developing systems of servicing the rural countryside” (p. 5). As Sam Walton explained, “We were forced to be ahead of our time in distribution and in communication because our stores were sitting out there in tiny little towns and we had to stay in touch and keep them supplied” (p. 90) It is also no coincidence [End Page 197] that these companies grew during a time when the federal government lavished investments in highways, airports, and military bases on the region. Each grew out of a particular regional history—a particular “where” and “when.” It is a compelling historical argument. As I finished the book, though, I couldnot help wondering whether the definitive part of the “where” was the “rural roads” that led “to our earth-changing economy” or “the unique commercial ecology of the American South” (pp. 1, 5). Put another way, was this “country capitalism” or “southern capitalism”? This question takes on particular interest in the sixth chapter, which follows Walmart’s move into Williston, Vermont. This rural New England community “was the final frontier of Walmart’s American conquest” (p. 92). Elmore frames the battle through the lens of environmental destruction (sprawl) against the preservation of the countryside (environment). But what did it mean for Walmart’s southern “country capitalism” to confront Vermont’s rather gentrified, progressive..." @default.
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• W4386930027 title "Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Re-made Our Economy and the Planet by Bart Elmore (review)" @default.
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