Date of Award
Spring 5-2016
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.
Degree Program
History
Department
History
Major Professor
Mary Mitchell
Second Advisor
Connie Atkinson
Third Advisor
Robert Dupont
Abstract
After the American Civil War, and the collapse of the market in slave-produced cotton in the South, cotton merchants in New Orleans faced challenges in re-establishing the city as a central port for Southern cotton. As commodities exchanges emerged as centralized spaces for business in the 1870s, a new class of experts emerged, upon whose reports traders bought and sold newly developed securities derivatives. Henry G. Hester (1846- 1934), Secretary of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange, was an integral player in the development of the methods that governed sophisticated commodities trading around the world. His career at the New Orleans Cotton Exchange tells the story of the arrival of these methods and subsequent downfall of Euro-American centrality in the global cotton empire and contradicts previous histories that deemphasize Southern businesspersons’ contributions to modernization.
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Recommended Citation
Lincecum, Joshua E., "“The Grand Old Man of Cotton”: Colonel Henry G. Hester, Economic Innovation, and the New Orleans Cotton Exchange, 1871-1932" (2016). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. 2170.
https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2170
Rights
The University of New Orleans and its agents retain the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible this dissertation or thesis in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The author retains all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis or dissertation.