Empire of Cotton

Throughout the preceding chapters, Beckert repeatedly emphasizes the colossal importance of American slavery to the global cotton industry:

On the eve of the Civil War, raw cotton constituted 61 percent of the value of all U.S. products shipped abroad. Before the beginnings of the cotton boom in the 1780s, North America had been a promising but marginal player in the global economy. Now, in 1861, the flagship of global capitalism, Great Britain, found itself dangerously dependent on the white gold shipped out of New York, New Orleans, Charleston, and other American ports. By the late 1850s, cotton grown in the United States accounted for 77 percent of the 800 million pounds of cotton consumed in Britain (243).

But as the abolitionist movement grew, and as the demands of Northern industrialists and Southern enslavers diverged dramatically, the Manchester Cotton Supply Association began to realize how “treacherous” (244) a foundation slavery was to the cotton industry. The rise of the abolitionist movement, the fear of rebellions, and the increasingly divergent needs of Northern industrialists versus Southern enslavers all fed these anxieties over slavery’s future.

Those anxieties finally boiled over on April 12, 1861 when Confederate troops attacked a federal garrison at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, thus igniting the American Civil War, the deadliest conflict in US history and also “the world’s first truly global raw materials crisis” (246).