From Light Copper to the Blackest and Lowest Type: Daniel Tompkins and the Racial Order of the Global New South

Earlier accounts applied primarily national frameworks of analysis, exploring how southern businessmen aspired to reshape their society according to a northern industrial model.11 Paradoxically, historians have argued, men like Tompkins helped turn the South into a kind of "colony" relative to northern capital.12 Yet this paradigm does not account for the global activities of southern businessmen, which included business transactions with the overseas colonies of European countries.13 As the age of emancipation evolved into the age of empire, Tompkins and others sought economic solutions to new challenges posed by European capitalists and imperialists. The first part of this article explores how Tompkins's campaign to sell his manual overseas reflected, and in some ways helped facilitate, a global economic transformation at the turn of the twentieth century - one marked not only by the rise of colonialism and the spread of cotton cultivation but also by the voracious pursuit of new colonial market ventures by European manufacturers.14 Southern businessmen looked to their northern counterparts as they built the South's economy, but they also directed their gaze across the ocean and promoted modernization and economic growth in the New South by operating within the broader context of Atlantic commerce.