As cotton production shifted toward the southwestern states during the first half of the nineteenth century, New Orleans became increasingly important to the South's plantation economy. Handling the city's wide-ranging commerce was a globally oriented business community that represented a qualitatively unique form of wealth accumulation - merchant capital - that was based on the extraction of profit from exchange processes. However, like the slave-based mode of production with which they were allied, New Orleans merchants faced growing pressures during the antebellum era. Their complacent failure to improve the port's infrastructure or invest in manufacturing left them vulnerable to competition from the fast-developing industrial economy of the North, weaknesses that were fatally exposed during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Changes to regional and national economic structures after the Union victory prevented New Orleans from recovering its commercial dominance, and the former first-rank American city quickly devolved into a notorious site of political corruption and endemic poverty.

Other books in this series focus on behavior at the individual level, approached from the viewpoints of biochemistry, anatomy, physiology, and psychology. In this volume we show how the functioning nervous systems of interacting individuals are coordinated, with the ultimate creation of complex social structures. The intri cacies of an individual's nervous system have been subject to intense inquiry, and research at the chemical, cellular, and organ levels has made remarkable progress. Work at the social level has been conducted somewhat independently, by way of behavioral phenomena and communicative interactions. With the emergence of a large body of information from neurobiology, the beginnings of an integrated approach are possible. New data on social functions are presented in the chapters to follow, and the forward-looking reader may wish to reflect on how they clarify understanding of interactions between two or more independent nervous systems. The outcome is harmonious social structure and improvement in the inclusive fitness of group-living individuals. We believe that there is in prospect a new way of looking at social function that will ultimately increase our understanding of the highest and most complex levels of neurobiology. The modern approach to the study of social behavior involves more than the recording of interactions between animals. Each individual brings to the process of social interaction the implications of its prior genetic and experiential history."

P. Marler* and H. S. Terrace** *The Rockefeller University Field Research Center Millbrook, NY 12545 **Dept. of Psychology, Columbia University New York, NY 10027, USA For the first half of this century, theories of animal conditioning were regarded as the most promising approach to the study of learning - both animal and human. For a variety of reasons, disillusionment with this point of view has become widespread during recent years. One prominent source of disenchantment with conditioning theory is a large body of ethological observations of both learned and unlearned natural behavior. These challenge the generality of principles of animal learning as derived from the intensive study of a few species in specialized laboratory situations. From another direction, the complexities of human language acquisition, surely the most impressive of learned achievements, have prompted developmental psychologists to doubt the relevance of principles of animal learning. Even within the realm of traditional studies of animal learning, it has become apparent that no single set of currently available principles can cope with the myriad of new empirical findings. These are emerging at an accelerating rate from studies of such phenomena as selective attention and learning, conditioned food aversion, complex problem solving behavior, and the nature of reinforcement. Not very surprisingly, as a reaction against the long-held but essentially unrealized promise of general theories of learning, many psychologists have asked an obvious question: does learning theory have a future? 2 r. Marler and B. S."

As cotton production shifted toward the southwestern states during the first half of the nineteenth century, New Orleans became increasingly important to the South's plantation economy. Handling the city's wide-ranging commerce was a globally oriented business community that represented a qualitatively unique form of wealth accumulation - merchant capital - that was based on the extraction of profit from exchange processes. However, like the slave-based mode of production with which they were allied, New Orleans merchants faced growing pressures during the antebellum era. Their complacent failure to improve the port's infrastructure or invest in manufacturing left them vulnerable to competition from the fast-developing industrial economy of the North, weaknesses that were fatally exposed during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Changes to regional and national economic structures after the Union victory prevented New Orleans from recovering its commercial dominance, and the former first-rank American city quickly devolved into a notorious site of political corruption and endemic poverty.