British and American debates on the relationship between slavery and economic growth have had little interaction with each other. This article attempts intellectual arbitrage by joining these two literatures. The linkage turns on the neglected part two of the ‘Williams thesis’: that slavery and the slave trade, once vital for the expansion of British industry and commerce, were no longer needed by the nineteenth century. In contrast to recent assertions of the centrality of slavery for US economic development, the article argues that part two of the Williams thesis applies with equal force to nineteenth-century America. Unlike sugar, cotton required no large investments of fixed capital and could be cultivated efficiently at any scale, in locations that would have been settled by free farmers in the absence of slavery. Cheap cotton was undoubtedly important for the growth of textiles, but cheap cotton did not require slavery. The best evidence for this claim is that after two decades of war, abolition, and Reconstruction, cotton prices returned to their prewar levels. In both countries, the rise of anti-slavery sentiment was not driven by the prospect of direct economic benefits, but major economic interest groups acquiesced in abolition because they no longer saw slavery as indispensable.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Review
Peter A. Coclanis;
(July 2016)
Review of "Empire of Cotton: A Global History"
(/isis/citation/CBB369516381/)
Article
Joe Regan;
(2022)
Irish Canallers and the Second Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley
(/isis/citation/CBB051588207/)
Book
Brian P. Luskey;
(2020)
Men is Cheap: Exposing the frauds of free labor in Civil War America
(/isis/citation/CBB381848420/)
Article
Rosemblatt, Karin Alejandra;
(2014)
Modernization, Dependency, and the Global in Mexican Critiques of Anthropology
(/isis/citation/CBB001421526/)
Article
Elizabeth A Heath;
(2020)
The Meaning of Freedom: Slave Self-Purchase and the Making of Free Labour in Martinique
(/isis/citation/CBB508370262/)
Book
Barbara Hahn;
Bruce E. Baker;
(2016)
The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and corruption in turn-of-the-century New York and New Orleans
(/isis/citation/CBB214809756/)
Thesis
Casey Primel;
(2016)
Calculating Futures: Debt, Markets, and the Science of Prices in Colonial Egypt, 1882-1912
(/isis/citation/CBB658107916/)
Book
Ann Folino White;
(2014)
Plowed Under: Food Policy Protests and Performance in New Deal America
(/isis/citation/CBB624497168/)
Thesis
Savannah L. Williamson;
(2016)
Caring for Human Property: A Medical Biography of American Slavery, 1808-1865
(/isis/citation/CBB893771102/)
Article
Fielder, Brigitte Nicole;
(2013)
Animal Humanism: Race, Species, and Affective Kinship in Nineteenth-Century Abolitionism
(/isis/citation/CBB001201817/)
Book
Logan, Michael F.;
(2006)
Desert Cities: The Environmental History of Phoenix and Tucson
(/isis/citation/CBB000930102/)
Article
Jacob Jewusiak;
(2021)
Tennyson’s Wrinkled Feet: Ageing and the Poetics of Decay
(/isis/citation/CBB694766507/)
Book
Eric Herschthal;
(2021)
The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress
(/isis/citation/CBB289630170/)
Book
Robert J. Gordon;
(Spring 2016)
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War
(/isis/citation/CBB051834586/)
Article
Mila Daskalova;
(2021)
Printing as Poison, Printing as Cure: Work and Health in the Nineteenth-Century Printing Office and Asylum
(/isis/citation/CBB624605442/)
Book
I. E. Quastler;
(2005)
Where the Rails Cross: A Railroad History of Durand, Michigan
(/isis/citation/CBB327834686/)
Article
Lynne Feeley;
(April 2019)
The Elevationists: Gerrit Smith, Black Agrarianism, and Land Reform in 1840s New York
(/isis/citation/CBB944344857/)
Article
Margaret Cook;
(2022)
Australia's Entanglement in Global Cotton
(/isis/citation/CBB701066924/)
Book
Gudmestad, Robert H.;
(2011)
Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom
(/isis/citation/CBB001200629/)
Article
Rusert, Britt;
(2013)
Delany's Comet: Fugitive Science and the Speculative Imaginary of Emancipation
(/isis/citation/CBB001201822/)
Be the first to comment!