INTRODUCTION

In recent years, scholarly debate has focused increasingly on the usefulness of comparative history and on the appropriate methods to practise it. Key works written by comparative historians have shown the possibility and advantage of using the comparative approach as a means to shed light on a variety of different issues. For the most part, such works deal with a particular case-study placing it in a broader context of historical comparison. As Peter Kolchin has recently argued in A Sphinx on the American Land (2003), this can be characterized as the ‘soft’ approach to comparative history, since it enables scholars to ‘combine attention to two important historical components: specificity and context’. Instead, what Kolchin calls ‘rigorous’ approach to comparative history, one adopted by works that ‘compare and contrast’ two cases giving equal weight to both, is still rare. Arguably, the most active advocates of this approach have been experts of the ante-bellum American South. Works such as George Fredrickson's White Supremacy (1981), Peter Kolchin's Unfree Labour (1987), and Shearer Davis Bowman's Masters and Lords (1993) have been hailed as models of specific and rigorous comparison. The method that all the above studies employ in their ‘rigorous’ approach to comparison can be described as ‘contrast of contexts’, according to the definition given by sociologists Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers in an important article published in the 1980 issue of Comparative Studies in Society and History.