Cotton and the Plantation Economy

[USS ALASKA]

Interestingly enough the British cotton textile industry did not encourage cotton cultivation in Cuba and Brazil.

...because unlike Egypt and India, she couldn't control it there and she strived to have greater control upon that which had such power over her economy?
714

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

 

[USS ALASKA]

I was told there would be no math.

There is no power to avoid math in the 10th amendment

"...any power NOT reserved for the Federal or State Government is implied to belong to the individual." Good luck with your taxes, sirs...

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

 

[leftyhunter]

...because unlike Egypt and India, she couldn't control it there and she strived to have greater control upon that which had such power over her economy?
714

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

Not sure why that would be a problem. The UK had quite a recession in the Geater Manchester area. Folks were hungry and the US even sent food aid to the laid off workers. The UK had no major problems with the Spanish Empire,Cuba or the Central American nations.
Curiously France had severe layoff with it's industrial work force due to the cotton embargo. Curiously the French didn't attempt to grow cotton in Mexico which was at least partially under French rule and has ports on the Atlantic Coast.
Leftyhunter

 

[USS ALASKA]

University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange
Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School
5-2013

The Dixie Plantation State: Antebellum Fiction and Global Capitalism
by Katharine Aileen Burnett

This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected].

ABSTRACT
“The Dixie Plantation State: Antebellum Fiction and Global Capitalism” connects the development of literature of the U.S. South to the ideological tensions inherent in the southern plantation economy before the Civil War. Southern literary form during this time reflects an economy that was sustained by international capitalism but which imagined itself as a version of provincial feudalism. The antebellum southern economy was defined by slavery and individual plantations, which created a culture that was isolated, rural, and oppressive. However, with global trade through cotton plantations as the driving force behind regional profit, the southern economy was also shaped by a form of laissez-faire, liberal capitalism that emphasized individual opportunism and modernization. The texts I discuss create myths of plantation life and re-imagine southern society under the plantation economy in ways that simultaneously support and question the ideological foundations of the system. Literary representation then becomes a method of merging nineteenth-century models of capitalism and international trade with the ostensibly self-contained tendencies of the plantation and the racial oppression of the slave system.
Each chapter is organized around a different literary form or genre and incorporates a comparative study of British fiction and fiction of the U.S. South. I argue that the form of nineteenth-century southern literature developed in tandem with the expansion of transatlantic trade. Therefore, the antebellum authors I discuss in this study do not consistently separate literary value from practical business or financial concerns. In chapters that focus on the historical romance, the sketch form, social problem novels and African-American autobiographical narratives, I highlight the interconnected nature of literary representation and economic change. Authors such as William Gilmore Simms, Joseph Glover Baldwin, George Tucker, Maria J. McIntosh, and Martin Delany drew from British novels such as Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South to represent the South as both economically progressive and culturally traditional. In this sense, fiction allowed southern authors to engage with the quasi-feudal space of the plantation within the modern economic models of the nineteenth century, without fully rejecting or denying either.

https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2878&context=utk_graddiss

File too large to attach - please see above link
249

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

 

[jgoodguy]

University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange
Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School
5-2013

The Dixie Plantation State: Antebellum Fiction and Global Capitalism
by Katharine Aileen Burnett

This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected].

ABSTRACT
“The Dixie Plantation State: Antebellum Fiction and Global Capitalism” connects the development of literature of the U.S. South to the ideological tensions inherent in the southern plantation economy before the Civil War. Southern literary form during this time reflects an economy that was sustained by international capitalism but which imagined itself as a version of provincial feudalism. The antebellum southern economy was defined by slavery and individual plantations, which created a culture that was isolated, rural, and oppressive. However, with global trade through cotton plantations as the driving force behind regional profit, the southern economy was also shaped by a form of laissez-faire, liberal capitalism that emphasized individual opportunism and modernization. The texts I discuss create myths of plantation life and re-imagine southern society under the plantation economy in ways that simultaneously support and question the ideological foundations of the system. Literary representation then becomes a method of merging nineteenth-century models of capitalism and international trade with the ostensibly self-contained tendencies of the plantation and the racial oppression of the slave system.
Each chapter is organized around a different literary form or genre and incorporates a comparative study of British fiction and fiction of the U.S. South. I argue that the form of nineteenth-century southern literature developed in tandem with the expansion of transatlantic trade. Therefore, the antebellum authors I discuss in this study do not consistently separate literary value from practical business or financial concerns. In chapters that focus on the historical romance, the sketch form, social problem novels and African-American autobiographical narratives, I highlight the interconnected nature of literary representation and economic change. Authors such as William Gilmore Simms, Joseph Glover Baldwin, George Tucker, Maria J. McIntosh, and Martin Delany drew from British novels such as Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South to represent the South as both economically progressive and culturally traditional. In this sense, fiction allowed southern authors to engage with the quasi-feudal space of the plantation within the modern economic models of the nineteenth century, without fully rejecting or denying either.

https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2878&context=utk_graddiss

File too large to attach - please see above link
249

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

Lots of interesting subjects to look at. Saves the sleep meds tonight too.

 

[USS ALASKA]

College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University
[email protected]/SJU
Honors Theses Honors Program
1997

Regional Variations in Antebellum Southern Agriculture
by Joseph Liss

College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's University
Available by permission of the author. Reproduction or retransmission of this material in any form is prohibited without expressed written permission of the author.

Given the above 'permission', the full article may be viewed / downloaded here for free...

https://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1609&context=honors_theses
346

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

 

[USS ALASKA]

This one could be useful to a couple of current threads...

East Texas Historical Journal
Volume 48 | Issue 1 Article 8
3-2010

Confederates and Cotton in East Texas
by Judy Gentry

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by SFA ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in East Texas Historical Journal by an authorized administrator of SFA ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected].

The Union naval blockade of the Confederate coastline severely disrupted existing marketing practices. Cotton producers east of the Brazos found their efforts to market their crops disrupted by the unavailability of shipping and the accelerating breakdown of the factorage system that had served their needs since the 1830s. The Union blockade, distance from the Mexican border and the main blockade--running port at Galveston, and the unavailability of enough wagons and teams for overland transport of crops kept the gold value of their cotton in the low range.
Government policies originating from the Confederate capital in Virginia and implemented by the Confederate army also affected the production and marketing of cotton in Texas east of the Brazos. The Confederate Produce Loan in 1861, a government cotton purchasing agent in 1863, Cotton Bureau policies in 1864 and early 1865, and in the last few months of the war, new Confederate Treasury Department rules greatly impacted the lives of cotton producers. Texas east of the Brazos did not share in the large profits that cotton producers in western Texas enjoyed during the war, but planters were able to survive economically despite the blockade and despite the coerced sales of half their crops. Some large planters successfully resisted both coerced sales and impressments, thereby preserving their ability to benefit from the short-lived high prices for cotton that prevailed in the third quarter of 1865.

https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2594&context=ethj
400

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

 

[Norm53]

Interesting but technical article about the effect of Indian Cotton on British factories.

Econometrica, Vol. 83, No. 1 (January, 2015), 67–100
NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION: INPUT SUPPLIES
AND DIRECTED TECHNICAL CHANGE
BY W. WALKER HANLON
Link

I exploit the impact of the U.S. Civil War on the British cotton textile industry, which reduced supplies of cotton from the Southern United States, forcing British producers to shift to lower-quality Indian cotton. Using detailed new data, I show that this shift induced the development of new technologies that augmented Indian cotton. As these new technologies became available, I show that the relative price of Indian/U.S. cotton rebounded to its pre-war level, despite the increased relative supply of Indian cotton. This is the first paper to establish both of these patterns empirically, lending support to the two key predictions of leading directed technical change theories.​

​

To do so, it exploits a large exogenous shift in relative supplies to the British cotton textile industry caused by the U.S. Civil War (April 1861–April 1865). The war, which included a blockade on Southern shipping by the Union Navy, sharply increased the cost of supplying U.S. cotton from the South. The result was a sharp depression in the industry; output dropped by as much as 50% and hundreds of thousands of mill operatives found themselves out of work or working short-time. The shortage of U.S. cotton forced British producers to turn to raw cotton from alternative suppliers, chiefly India. However, the cotton available from India differed from American cotton in important ways; it was a low-quality variety that was difficult to clean and prepare for the spinning process. Thus, this event generated a sharp shift in the relative supplies of two similar, but not identical, inputs to the production process. Historians and contemporary observers have noted the important changes that took place as a result of this event. D. A. Farnie, in his authoritative history of the British cotton textile industry, wrote, “The shortage of American cotton compelled employers to re-equip their mills in order to spin Surat [Indian cotton], and especially to improve their preparatory processes. . . The reorganization of the preparatory processes entailed such an extensive investment of capital that it amounted almost to the creation of a new industry. . . ”3​

​

The first contribution of this paper is to document the pattern of directed technical change generated by the shock to input supplies. Using detailed new patent data, I show that the Civil War time period was characterized by a sharp increase in innovation in three types of cotton textile machinery—gins, open- ers/scutchers, and carding machines—that were particularly important for ad- dressing the key bottlenecks in the use of Indian cotton. Comparing these three technology types to all other cotton spinning technologies, I document substan- tial increases in innovation in technologies related to the use of Indian cotton. Innovators reacted quickly, introducing simple improvements in technologies during the first year of the war, followed by more advanced machines in later years. Innovation in technologies related to Indian cotton peaked three years into the conflict, and remained high one to two years after the end of the war. Thus, the patent data reveal substantial directed technical change toward technologies that augmented Indian cotton.​

It is only 33 pages. Can you produce them using your usual magical powers of extracting text?

Norm

 

[Norm53]

Interestingly enough - to me at any rate - at one time prior to the ACW, India had a booming cotton industry. Unlike the Opium Wars which encouraged the Brits to introduce and raise tea in India to break the Chinese monopoly, cotton has a long history on the sub-continent...

Indian cotton threads have been found that dated to the Neolithic period. Indian cultivation is dated to the Indus Valley Civilization, between 3300 and 1300 BC. The sub-continent cotton industry was well-developed and some methods used in cotton spinning and fabrication continued to be used until the industrialization of India. Between 2000 and 1000 BC cotton became widespread across much of India. Handheld roller cotton gins had been used in India since the 6th century. Between the 12th and 14th centuries, dual-roller gins appeared. The Indian version of the dual-roller gin was prevalent throughout the Mediterranean cotton trade by the 16th century. This mechanical device could be driven by water power. The spinning wheel was invented in India, between 500 and 1000 AD.

During the Mughal Empire, Indian production of both raw cotton and cotton textiles increased. The Mughals instituted agrarian reforms such as an incentive system that was leaned in favor of high value cash crops such as cotton and indigo, providing official incentives to grow them, in addition to rising market demand. The largest manufacturing industry in the Mughal Empire was cotton textiles, which included the production of piece goods, calicos, and muslins, available unbleached and in a variety of colors. The cotton textile industry was responsible for a large part of the empire's international trade. ( this sound familiar? ) India had a 25% share of the global textile trade in the early 18th century. Indian textiles were the most important manufactured goods in world trade in the 18th century. ( this sound familiar? ) The epicenter of cotton production was the Bengal Subah province. The worm gear roller cotton gin, which was invented in India during the early Delhi Sultanate era of the 13th–14th centuries, came into use in the Mughal Empire some time around the 16th century. Another innovation, the incorporation of the crank handle in the cotton gin, first appeared in India some time during the late Delhi Sultanate or the early Mughal Empire. The production of cotton was advanced by the diffusion of the spinning wheel across India shortly before the Mughal era, lowering the costs of yarn and helping to increase demand for cotton.

And then, the EIC showed up...

The English East India Company introduced Britain to cheap calico and chintz cloth. The cheap colorful cloth proved popular and overtook the EIC's spice trade by value in the late 17th century. The EIC jumped on this, particularly for calico, by expanding its factories in Asia and producing and importing cloth in bulk, creating competition for domestic woolen and linen textile producers. The displaced weavers, spinners, dyers, shepherds and farmers objected and the calico question became one of the major issues of National politics between the 1680s and the 1730s. Parliament began to see a decline in domestic textile sales, and an increase in imported textiles from places like China and India. Seeing the East India Company and their textile importation as a threat to domestic textile businesses, Parliament passed the 1700 Calico Act, blocking the importation of cotton cloth. In 1721, dissatisfied with the results of the first act, Parliament passed a stricter addition, this time prohibiting the sale of most cottons, imported and domestic, exempting only thread Fustian and raw cotton. The exemption of raw cotton from the prohibition initially saw 2 thousand bales of cotton imported annually, to become the basis of a new indigenous industry, initially producing Fustian for the domestic market, though more importantly triggering the development of a series of mechanized spinning and weaving technologies, to process the material. The mechanized production was concentrated in new cotton mills, which slowly expanded, till by the beginning of the 1770s seven thousand bales of cotton were imported annually, and pressure was put on Parliament, by the new mill owners, to remove the prohibition on the production and sale of pure cotton cloth, since they could then easily compete with anything the EIC could import. The acts were repealed in 1774, triggering a wave of investment in mill based cotton spinning and production, doubling the demand for raw cotton within a couple of years, and doubling it again every decade, into the 1840s.

Indian cotton textiles continued to maintain a competitive advantage up until the 19th century. In order to compete with India, Britain invested in labor-saving technical progress, while implementing protectionist policies such as bans and tariffs to restrict Indian imports. At the same time, the East India Company's rule in India contributed to its deindustrialization, opening up a new market for British goods, while the capital amassed from Bengal after its 1757 conquest was used to invest in British industries such as textile manufacturing and greatly increase British wealth. British colonization also forced open the large Indian market to British goods, which could be sold in India without tariffs or duties, compared to local Indian producers who were heavily taxed, while raw cotton was imported from India without tariffs to British factories which manufactured textiles from Indian cotton, giving Britain a monopoly over India's large market and cotton resources. India served as both a significant supplier of raw goods to British manufacturers and a large captive market for British manufactured goods. Britain surpassed India as the world's leading cotton textile manufacturer.

India's cotton-processing sector changed during EIC expansion in India, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, from focusing on supplying the British market to supplying raw cotton. As the Artisan produced textiles were no longer competitive with those produced Industrially, and Europe preferring the cheaper slave produced, long staple American, and Egyptian cottons, for its own materials.

During the ACW, cotton growing in the British Empire, especially Australia and India, greatly increased to replace the lost production of the American South. Through tariffs and other restrictions, the British government discouraged the production of cotton cloth in India; rather, the raw fiber was sent to England for processing. The Indian Mahatma Gandhi described the process:

1. English people buy Indian cotton in the field, picked by Indian labor at seven cents a day, through an optional monopoly.
2. This cotton is shipped on British ships, a three-week journey across the Indian Ocean, down the Red Sea, across the Mediterranean, through Gibraltar, across the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic Ocean to London. One hundred per cent profit on this freight is regarded as small.
3. The cotton is turned into cloth in Lancashire. You pay shilling wages instead of Indian pennies to your workers. The English worker not only has the advantage of better wages, but the steel companies of England get the profit of building the factories and machines. Wages; profits; all these are spent in England.
4. The finished product is sent back to India at European shipping rates, once again on British ships. The captains, officers, sailors of these ships, whose wages must be paid, are English. The only Indians who profit are a few lascars who do the dirty work on the boats for a few cents a day.
5. The cloth is finally sold back to the kings and landlords of India who got the money to buy this expensive cloth out of the poor peasants of India who worked at seven cents a day.

I always thought that Indian cotton was a 'Johnny-come-lately' to the cotton game - the things I have to unlearn...(cross-thread reference!!!) The English mills were not set up for Indian cotton - different feed stock, different process...

Sources;
"First Evidence of Cotton at Neolithic Mehrgarh, Pakistan: Analysis of Mineralized Fibres from a Copper Bead". Journal of Archaeological Science.
A History of India.
"The spread of textile production and textile crops in India beyond the Harappan zone: an aspect of the emergence of craft specialization and systematic trade"
The Columbia Encyclopedia
Historical Geography of Crop Plants: A Select Roster
The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India
Cotton: Origin, History, Technology, and Production. 4. John Wiley & Sons.
Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History
An Atlas and Survey of South Asian History
Monitoring the World Economy, 1820-1992
Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850
The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760
Economic History of Medieval India, 1200-1500
"Machinery and Large-Scale Industry."
"Cotton textiles and the great divergence: Lancashire, India and shifting competitive advantage, 1600-1850"
Finance and Society in 21st Century China: Chinese Culture Versus Western Markets
The Islamic World: Past and Present Bengal Industries and the British Industrial Revolution (1757-1857)
The Process of Economic Development.
Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes.
The Definitive Glossary of British India.
"100 Years of Cotton Production, Harvesting, and Ginning Systems".
Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber.
276

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

Where to obtain this? "
The Definitive Glossary of British India.
"100 Years of Cotton Production, Harvesting, and Ginning Systems".
Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber. "

Thank you, Norm

 

[USS ALASKA]

The Definitive Glossary of British India.
"100 Years of Cotton Production, Harvesting, and Ginning Systems".
Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber. "

https://www.amazon.com/dp/8121501091/?tag=civilwartalkc-20

https://www.researchgate.net/public...ing_and_Ginning_Systems_Engineering_1907-2007

https://www.amazon.com/Cotton-Biography-Revolutionaryfiber-Stephen-Yafa/dp/1613838603/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=Cotton:+The+Biography+of+a+Revolutionary+Fiber&qid=1553177240&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull
848

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

 

[Norm53]

How India fuelled slavery with the export of cotton
Arup K. Chatterjee
December 15, 2018 16:26 IST
Updated: December 16, 2018 12:44 IST

Indian cotton was the gasoline for the Industrial Revolution in Britain as well as the accelerator of railway projects in India. Shashi Tharoor has famously remarked that India “paid for its own oppression” under British rule. India has exported cotton and fabrics to Europe since the 16th century — in the process procuring its own slavery and that of Africa.

Harvard historian Sven Beckert writes in Empire of Cotton, “What all these European trading companies had in common was that they purchased cotton textiles in India… whence they might be consumed domestically or shipped to Africa to pay for slaves to work the plantations just beginning to take root in the New World… Slaves, after all, could only be gotten by exchanging them for the cottons from India.”

Full article can be found here - https://www.thehindu.com/society/ho...with-the-export-of-cotton/article25751881.ece
509

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

From the article:

"When the American Civil War broke out (1861-65), the export of long-staple American cotton to the Lancashire Mills stopped, becoming the chief reason why Britain began to look towards India for raw cotton. Britain thus bought India’s crop, grown under strict regulations of imperial revenue and taxation, finished it into cheap textiles using British technology, and oversold it to the colony under the monopoly of its administration. "

The manufacturers could have changed their machinery to accommodate the Indian cotton. (Just a guess on my part.) Sold the cloth back to the Indians and others who would accept the inferior cloth (compared with the superior cloth from US cotton).

Norm

 

[Norm53]

Oh Great - I'm reading about cotton and have to do math?

View attachment 201678

Geez...

Kinda reminds me of the oil refining process. Some refineries are set up for light sweet, some for heavy, others for blends. Change the feed stock that the production system was optimized for and you have to change the production system.
199

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

I understand the math, but I need the article to obtain the definition of the variables. However, in 33 pages, I don't see how the author will get from a macroeconomic view to the microtechnology. We shall see, I hope.

Norm

 

[USS ALASKA]

The Cotton Boom and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Rural Egypt
by Mohamed Saleh

Abstract; The “staples thesis” argues that institutions in a given region could be explained by the nature of production of its prevailing staples, whereby slavery is likely to emerge in “slave-conducive” crops, such as cotton, rice, and sugarcane. This paper evaluates the thesis using a unique natural experiment from nineteenth-century rural Egypt, the cotton boom that occurred because of the American Civil War in 1861-1865. Historical evidence suggests that the cotton boom marked the emergence of the short-lived institution of large-scale agricultural slavery in Egypt’s Nile Delta, where all slaves were imported from East Africa, before the abolition of slavery in 1877. Employing the newly digitized Egyptian individual-level population census samples from 1848 and 1868, I find that cotton-favorable districts witnessed greater increases in household’s slave holdings and the share of slave-owning households between 1848 and 1868 than less favorable districts. Those districts also witnessed greater increase in the population share of free local immigrants. I examine several potential mechanisms of these effects, namely, cross-district differences in the relative scarcity of free local labor and inter-crop differences in economies of scale and skill-intensity ( results on mechanisms are not complete).

http://pseweb.eu/ydepot/seance/257_SAL2015COT.pdf

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

 

[USS ALASKA]

The Cotton Boom and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Rural Egypt
by Mohamed Saleh

Abstract; The “staples thesis” argues that institutions in a given region could be explained by the nature of production of its prevailing staples, whereby slavery is likely to emerge in “slave-conducive” crops, such as cotton, rice, and sugarcane. This paper evaluates the thesis using a unique natural experiment from nineteenth-century rural Egypt, the cotton boom that occurred because of the American Civil War in 1861-1865. Historical evidence suggests that the cotton boom marked the emergence of the short-lived institution of large-scale agricultural slavery in Egypt’s Nile Delta, where all slaves were imported from East Africa, before the abolition of slavery in 1877. Employing the newly digitized Egyptian individual-level population census samples from 1848 and 1868, I find that cotton-favorable districts witnessed greater increases in household’s slave holdings and the share of slave-owning households between 1848 and 1868 than less favorable districts. Those districts also witnessed greater increase in the population share of free local immigrants. I examine several potential mechanisms of these effects, namely, cross-district differences in the relative scarcity of free local labor and inter-crop differences in economies of scale and skill-intensity ( results on mechanisms are not complete).

http://pseweb.eu/ydepot/seance/257_SAL2015COT.pdf

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

 

[Viper21]

God save the Queen, Seriously

 

[Norm53]

https://www.amazon.com/dp/8121501091/?tag=civilwartalkc-20

https://www.researchgate.net/public...ing_and_Ginning_Systems_Engineering_1907-2007

https://www.amazon.com/Cotton-Biography-Revolutionaryfiber-Stephen-Yafa/dp/1613838603/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=Cotton:+The+Biography+of+a+Revolutionary+Fiber&qid=1553177240&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull
848

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

Bought the Yaffa book for $3.68 at eBay through bookfinder.com. Thanks for the link.

Norm

 

[Norm53]

...because unlike Egypt and India, she couldn't control it there and she strived to have greater control upon that which had such power over her economy?
714

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

From the PhD. thesis, US upland cotton seeds were being sold at a nominal transportation cost by Union organizations to Brazilian and Argentinian farmers and even to farmers along the Central RR in southern Illinois. However, there is no source saying to what extent the seeds were actually planted and harvested, so that appears to be a dead end as far as cotton harvesting is concerned.

Norm

 

[Norm53]

I don't think it was slavery that made American cotton dominant. The southern transportation system was better and the southern farmers were better agronomists. And that includes the experienced African/American farmers.
The US needed to improve its soil practices. It seems as if that was just about to happen with the Civil War interrupted the process.

I disagree with this statement: "I don't think it was slavery that made American cotton dominant."

Although American cotton was superior in quality, which certainly contributed to its dominance, it also was cheap because of the cheap slave labor required to hand pick it. The combination of low cost and high quality resulted in American cotton acquiring 80% of the cotton fiber market.

With respect to the statement, "The southern transportation system was better and the southern farmers were better agronomists.", undoubtedly southern farmers were better cotton agronomists, probably better than any in the world, based on the many years of growing it. However, I would hesitate to generalize that to other products, such as wheat, corn, rice and sugar.

With regards to southern transportation, I will need more evidence that it was superior to that of the north.

Norm

 

[USS ALASKA]

The manufacturers could have changed their machinery to accommodate the Indian cotton. (Just a guess on my part.)

Sir, which they did...

By 1864..."In England, the Cotton Supply Association claimed that the quality of Indian Cotton now made it acceptable to fully one half of Lancashire's spindles and looms."

Don't have the source handy for that one at the moment...

Sold the cloth back to the Indians and others ...

As Mahatma Gandhi described the process...

1. English people buy Indian cotton in the field, picked by Indian labor at seven cents a day, through an optional monopoly.
2. This cotton is shipped on British ships, a three-week journey across the Indian Ocean, down the Red Sea, across the Mediterranean, through Gibraltar, across the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic Ocean to London. One hundred per cent profit on this freight is regarded as small.
3. The cotton is turned into cloth in Lancashire. You pay shilling wages instead of Indian pennies to your workers. The English worker not only has the advantage of better wages, but the steel companies of England get the profit of building the factories and machines. Wages; profits; all these are spent in England.
4. The finished product is sent back to India at European shipping rates, once again on British ships. The captains, officers, sailors of these ships, whose wages must be paid, are English. The only Indians who profit are a few lascars who do the dirty work on the boats for a few cents a day.
5. The cloth is finally sold back to the kings and landlords of India who got the money to buy this expensive cloth out of the poor peasants of India who worked at seven cents a day.

I can't speak to whether the final product was inferior or not.
920

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

 

[USS ALASKA]

Although American cotton was superior in quality...

Sir, was American cotton truly superior or because of it's cost and abundance, manufacturing processes were established that targeted that strain of fiber so as to make it the most desirable feed stock?

Cheers,
USS ALASKA