https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/128/1/177/7098054 Skip to Main Content Advertisement Oxford Academic Journals Books * Search Menu * Information * Account * Menu * Information * Account Navbar Search Filter [The American Historical Review] Mobile Enter search term [ ] Search * Issues * More Content + Advance articles + AHR Interview + History Unclassified + AHR Online * Submit + Author Guidelines + Submission Site * Purchase * Alerts * About + About The American Historical Review + About the American Historical Association + Editorial Board + Advertising and Corporate Services + Self-Archiving Policy + Dispatch Dates * Journals on Oxford Academic * Books on Oxford Academic The American Historical Review American Historical Association * Issues * More Content + Advance articles + AHR Interview + History Unclassified + AHR Online * Submit + Author Guidelines + Submission Site * Purchase * Alerts * About + About The American Historical Review + About the American Historical Association + Editorial Board + Advertising and Corporate Services + Self-Archiving Policy + Dispatch Dates Close Navbar Search Filter [The American Historical Review] Enter search term [ ] Search Advanced Search Search Menu Article Navigation Close mobile search navigation Article Navigation Issue Cover Volume 128 Issue 1 March 2023 * < Previous * Next > Article Navigation Article Navigation Journal Article When Hay Was King: Energy History and Economic Nationalism in the Nineteenth-Century United States Get access Arrow Ariel Ron Ariel Ron Glenn M. Linden Assistant Professor of the U.S. Civil War Era, Southern Methodist University , USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 1, March 2023, Pages 177-213, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad009 Published: 31 March 2023 * Views + Article contents + Figures & tables + Video + Audio + Supplementary Data * Cite Cite Ariel Ron, When Hay Was King: Energy History and Economic Nationalism in the Nineteenth-Century United States, The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 1, March 2023, Pages 177-213, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad009 Select Format [Select format ] Download citation Close * Permissions Icon Permissions * Share + Email + Twitter + Facebook + More Navbar Search Filter [The American Historical Review] Mobile Enter search term [ ] Search Close Navbar Search Filter [The American Historical Review] Enter search term [ ] Search Advanced Search Search Menu Abstract Hay was a linchpin of the early industrial energy regime. It was the primary fodder for working horses, who became more rather than less important over the 1800s. Though largely ignored by historians, hay was of comparable value to cotton and wheat in the nineteenth-century United States. The crop's historiographical invisibility is partly due to its relatively informal and decidedly subglobal production and exchange patterns. Whereas cotton and wheat exports passed through customhouses and institutionalized exchanges that carefully recorded trade volumes, hay was almost never exported and often underwent no market transaction at all, instead being used as an intermediate good on farms. Only when the US federal government added a detailed agricultural census in 1850 did the magnitude and importance of hay production become publicly legible. At that point, hay was drafted into a wide-ranging debate about economic development between Northern antislavery nationalists and Southern proslavery free traders, with "King Hay" emerging as a foil for "King Cotton." King Hay thus urges historians to pay more attention to the trade patterns, developmental policies, and economic ideologies that generated distinctly national, as opposed to global, economic spaces within nineteenth-century capitalism. energy history, agricultural history, economic history, history of capitalism, United States, US Civil War (c) The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. 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