King Cotton & the Post Bellum Economy

It is often argued that Western civilization was built upon the backs of slaves. In his book, “Capitalism and Slavery”, author Eric Williams points out that:

Slavery was an economic institution of the first importance. It had been the basis of the Greek economy and had built up the Roman Empire. In modern times it had provided the sugar for the tea and coffee cups of the Western world. It produced the cotton to serve as a base for modern capitalism. It made the American South and the Caribbean islands.[1]

These sentiments are echoed, albeit in a more locally focused geographic location, by Frank L. Owsley Jr. when he states, “if slavery was the corner stone of the Confederacy, cotton was its foundation”.[2] Furthermore, Owsley Jr. argues that Southern social and political institutions revolved around “King Cotton” and served as a catalyst for its economy.”[3]

In response, it has often been considered safe to assume that the South’s reliance on the forced and free labor that arrives part in parcel with chattel slavery led to the success of cotton as an economic commodity in the American colonies, and later the United States prior to the American Civil War. Historian Sven Beckert reemphasizes these points when he reminds readers that the Civil War served as the driving force form social and economic change when “4 million slaves gained their freedom in the nation that dominated world cotton production, leading to fears among merchants and manufactures that the disruption of the ‘deep relationship between slavery and cotton production” might ‘destroy one of these essential conditions of the mass production’ of cotton textiles.”[4] According to Beckert, the war itself was a byproduct of economic “tensions within the empire of cotton, and in turn transformed the ways in which it linked distant people and places involved in the growing, trading, manufacturing, and consuming of cotton.”[5] In short, the Civil War brought about drastic change to two major markets within the American and globally economy. First, it brought about an abrupt end to American dependence upon chattel slavery as a source of free and forced labor. Second, it “recast the worldwide web of cotton production, its prevailing forms of labor and, with them, global capitalism itself.”[6]

However, Beckert goes on to provide a different perspective as to the true social and economic significance of the Civil War. He accomplishes by comparing the post-bellum cotton industry around the globe to antebellum economic conditions of the product. For Beckert, this period of a status quo serves as an excellent tool of measurement against which the post-bellum economy can be measured. For example, antebellum economic conditions surrounding cotton, which were largely dependent on slave labor, allowed the United States to “account for a full 77 percent of 800 million pounds of cotton consumed by Britain, 90 percent of the 192 million Pounds used in France, 60 percent of the 115 million pounds spun in Germany, and as much as 92 percent of the 102 million pounds manufactured in Russia.”[7] However, after two years of the American civil war Southern exports of cotton to Europe decreased from “3.8 million bales in 1860 to virtually nothing in 1862.”[8]

As a result, the global cotton market required a complete economic, political, and social overhaul for it to properly function. In sum, it now had to learn how to stand on its own two feet without the aid of the crutch that was chattel slavery. In response, Beckert argues that the world-wide “cotton famine” created by the war and a shift away from slave labor around the globe forced the countries around the globe to adapt to a new sense of economic reality. One in which “King Cotton” no longer reigned as monarch from on high upon his throne in the South. Instead, the kingdom of cotton would spread its democratic wings across around the world in the form a free market that was globally interconnected and interdependent.

Evidence in support of these claims can be found in form of cotton production during the post-bellum era in the countries of India and Egypt. Prior to the war, “India had contributed 16 percent of Britian’s supply of raw cotton in 1860, and 1.1 percent of France’s in 1857.” However, as the war raged on so to do the worlds demand for cotton despite South’s inability to produce to product. In response, India “contributed 75 percent in 1862 in Britian and as much as 70 percent in France.”[9] Furthermore countries such as Egypt experienced a seismic shift in the economic focus concerning cotton during and after the American Civil War. This is demonstrated by the conversion of 40 percent of all fertile land in lower Egypt toward the cultivation of cotton.

In conclusion, the post-bellum cotton market was one that was defined by international economic growth. This sudden and drastic growth was made possible by the circumstances surround the American Civil war and the impact that a forced transition away from slavery as a primary source of labor would have on the production of a product that had largely been limited to the South prior to the start of the war in 1861. As a result, historians such as Beckert argue that this shift away from slave labor in the American South and global dependency on American production of cotton lead to “new global political economy.”[10] One in which “the global empire of cotton, torn asunder by the Civil War, was pulling together far-flung threads to create the warp woof of a new global political economy.”[11] Therefore, it is safe to say the global economy and the society in which we currently live was not built by slavery. Rather, it is the product of our successful separation from it.

[1] Williams, Eric. 2014. Capitalism and Slavery. UNC Press Books.

[2] “Cotton and the Civil War - 2008-07.” n.d. Home | Mississippi History Now. Accessed March 27, 2024.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War.” 2004. The American Historical Review, December. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/109.5.1405.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.