Slavery, Industry and Empire

Slavery, Industry and Empire

1830 to 1857

“For almost all the nineteenth century, raw cotton was America’s largest export, making up half the total from 1830 to 1860, and as much as a quarter as late as 1913. After 1830, with the rounding-out of the ‘Cotton Kingdom’ in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, production rose sensationally under the regime of plantation slavery. The cotton trade was the lubricant of the American economy and the secret of New York’s commercial ascent. Much the largest market for the cotton crop was Britain, in the mills of Lancashire. Cheap, reliable and abundant supplies of cotton and the invention of power-weaving made Lancashire the textile factory of the world, with a product that was highly competitive in almost every unprotected market. Cotton textiles were the battering ram with which the British first broke into the markets of Asia – though with opium as its steel tip in China. Once the age of plunder had subsided, it was the demand for cotton goods that turned India into a huge economic asset, a captive market that could not be trusted with self-rule lest tariffs follow in its wake. With India in their hands, the British became the greatest military power from Suez to Shanghai, and all round the rim of the Indian Ocean. The ‘Cotton Kingdom’ and its slavery system, Lancashire industry and British rule in India were thus bound together by an extraordinary symbiosis. In this respect, as in so many others, however ‘anti-colonial’ their political views, Americans were the indispensable sleeping partners of Europe’s expansion into Afro-Asia.”

pages 244 and 245 of John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global empires, 1400 – 2000.New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008.Print.