Sean Patrick Adams. Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xiv + 305 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7968-X, $45.00.

In this superbly crafted study Sean Adams compares the developmentof the coal industry in Virginia and Pennsylvania before theCivil War. The comparative method allows Adams to focus hisanalysis around a seemingly simple question: Did Pennsylvania’smore open and democratic state government create a more efficientinstitutional framework than Virginia’s planter-dominatedlegislature? Posing this question allows Adams to avoid somewhatstale debates about whether large numbers of slaves could workin manufacturing, or if anticapitalist planters opposed industrialization.