University of North Carolina at Pembroke professor Jamie Martinez taught a class about the Confederacy’s economic policies during the Civil War. She explained how a pre-war focus on cotton exports over food production combined with wartime farm labor disruptions led to food shortages and riots in the South in 1863. This, she said, forced the Confederate government into developing more nationalized policies for food production and resource allocation that ran counter to their constitution’s emphasis on a decentralized government.

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