From Nature and Power, A Global history of the Environment by Joachim Radkau (2002)
[English Translation 2008]
(p 178) Everyone knew what cotton cultivated without crop rotation "does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it." [Quotation from John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath]
Interestingly, Radkau argues that cotton triggered the Civil War. With progressive soil exhaustion due to the cotton monoculture, the Southern states had to keep the road to the West open to cotton along with slavery.
In 1926, historian Avery Craven introduced soil exhaustion as the chief factor in the history of Virginia and Maryland. The push to the west was due to the flight from ecological crisis. Instead of practicing long term husbandry, farmers simply moved westward to access new farmland.
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Avery Odelle Craven. Soil exhaustion as a factor in the agricultural history of Virginia and Marylan, 1606-1860. (1926)
Abbot S. Usher. Soil fertility, soil exhaustion and their historical significance. (1923) Quarterly Journal of Economics 37: 385-411.
http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/37/3/385.short
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