Cotton (II)

choi

American slavery | Blood cotton; How slaves built American capitalism. Economist, Sept 6, 2014
www.economist.com/news/books-and ... talism-blood-cotton
(book review on Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told; Slavery and the making of American capitalism.

Quote:

“Raw cotton was America’s most valuable export. It was grown and picked by black slaves. So Mr Baptist, an historian at Cornell University, is not being especially contentious when he says that America owed much of its early growth to the foreign exchange, cheaper raw materials and expanding markets provided by a slave-produced commodity.

“the astonishing increases he [the author, Mr Baptist] cites in both cotton productivity and cotton production. In 1860 a typical slave picked at least three times as much cotton a day as in 1800. In the 1850s cotton production in the southern states doubled to 4m bales and satisfied two-thirds of world consumption. By 1860 the four wealthiest states in the United States, ranked in terms of wealth per white person, were all southern: South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia.

Note:
(a) “Although the import of African slaves into the United States was stopped in 1807, the country’s internal slave trade continued to prosper and expand for a long time afterwards.”

Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_Prohibiting_Importation_of_Slaves
(b) “Slaves were valuable property, and much harder and, thanks to the decline in supply from Africa, costlier to replace than, say, the Irish peasants that the iron-masters imported into south Wales in the 19th century.”

iron-master

(c) How and when China get its cotton?
(i) cotton
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton
(The fiber is almost pure cellulose; native to tropical and subtropical regions around the world; both the English and Spanish words came from Arabic; section 1 Type; section 2 History: read only the 2 1/2 paragraphs starting "By the 1840s, India was no longer capable of supplying the vast quantities of cotton fibers needed by mechanized British factories")
(ii) Economy of the Song dynasty
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Song_dynasty
(Cotton was introduced from Hainan Island into central China * * * weaved into cloth called "jibei" 吉贝布)

苏东坡诗《和陶拟古九首》: “遗我吉贝布，海风今岁寒”