"Nineteenth-century Americans had little difficulty grasping slavery's capitalism. Advocates of national economic development presumed the reciprocal relationship of the slaveholding and nonslaveholding states, as well as the mutual interests of the slaveholder, manufacturer, and merchant. 'On the White mountains of New Hampshire we find the sugar of Louisiana, and in the plains beyond the Mississippi the cotton cloths of Rhode Island are domesticated,' explained the famed editor Hezekiah Niles in 1827. Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison recognized the North as a 'partner in iniquity' and credited the Panic of 1837 with delivering a deserved ruin to those New York City mercantile firms engaged in commerce with the South. In turn, southern nationalists lambasted northern sanctimoniousness. 'Many of the abolitionists of the present-day affect to have such tender consciences, and to feel such abhorrence of slavery, that they declare they will not wear the cotton of the South, because it has been cultivated by slaves,' observed the Baltimore minister Alexander McCaine, 'yet, these extremely sensitive, and pre-eminently holy characters, feel no qualms of conscience, to sell Southern planters their boots and shoes, their negro cloth, and all the et cetera that make up a cargo of Yankee notions, and put the money, arising from the labour of slaves, in their pockets.' Indeed, an 1845 manufacturing census found that nearly half the woolens manufacturers in Rhode Island produced textiles for plantation markets. A South Carolina industrialist such as William Gregg might rightfully lament that such thriving northern cities as Bridgeport, Connecticut, had 'been built by the capital of Charleston,' while a compatriot writing in De Bow's Review could declare slavery the 'nursing mother of the prosperity of the North.'
"The escalation of political tensions in the 1850s generated ever more vivid renderings of the economic relationship between the sections. The New England minister Orpheus Lanphear described slavery as 'a huge serpent' menacing 'Northern Capital, Trade, and Manufactures': its 'hiss was heard in the Stock-market, and in the Counting-house, making the very Ledgers tremble in their cases. It was audible in the whirl of every spindle, and the vibration of every loom, in the muttering of every waterwheel, and in the whistle of every engine; and rang its menace along the edge of the ship-carpenter's adze.' ... 'Every man at the North, who makes a plough, a hoe, a shovel, or a cotton-gin, to aid the production of cotton, should be counted as a hand engaged in that crop,' argued one advocate of reconciliation. It was a familiar refrain that the North was poised to kill the goose that has laid their golden egg.' ...
"As capitalism expanded from within the world market it had created, slavery came to play a central, even decisive, role -- first in the Caribbean and Latin America, and then in North America -- tightly connected to the world-altering Industrial Revolution and the so-called Great Divergence. ...
"More than a century ago, W. E. B. Dubois recognized American slavery as an outgrowth of European colonialism, and scholars such as Stuart Hall, Eric Wolf, Cedric J. Robinson, and Robin Blackburn have long situated the plantation-driven economies of British North America and the subsequent United States within an international history of capitalism and empire. Economic history has more recently explored comparative questions, puzzling over the late emergence of England as a rival to China for global economic dominance. Slave-mined silver in the Americas first provided European empires the opportunity to gain access to Chinese markets and consumer goods, and slave-grown agricultural commodities gave England specifically the possibility of supplanting China by escaping the environmental constraints on its population growth. As Kenneth Pomeranz has argued, one factor in England's ability to break the 'Malthusian trap' was that nation's access to calories and fibers in the form of sugar and cotton harvested on American plantations."
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Cotton
is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, yet understanding its
history is key to understanding the origins of modern capitalism. Sven
Beckert’s rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably
brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the
world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial
expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change
the world. Here is the story of how, beginning well before the advent of
machine production in the 1780s, these men captured ancient trades and
skills in Asia, and combined them with the expropriation of lands in the
Americas and the enslavement of African workers to crucially reshape
the disparate realms of cotton that had existed for millennia, and
how industrial capitalism gave birth to an empire, and how this force
transformed the world.