Even before the Civil War, the slave South and the free North weren’t so unconnected. A recent run of important historical studies have set themselves against the view of the antebellum South as a place apart, self-destructively devoted to its peculiar institution. Instead, they show, the South was essential to the development of global capitalism, and the rest of the country (along with much of the world) was deeply implicated in Southern slavery. Slavery was what made the United States an economic power. It also served as a malign innovation lab for influential new techniques in finance, management, and technology. England abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833, but then became the biggest purchaser of the slave South’s main crop, cotton. The mills of Manchester and Liverpool were built to turn Southern cotton into clothing, which meant that slavery was essential to the industrial revolution. Sven Beckert, in “Empire of Cotton,” argues that the Civil War, by interrupting the flow of cotton from the South, fuelled global colonialism, because Europe needed to find other places to supply its cotton. Craig Steven Wilder, in “Ebony & Ivy,” attributes a good measure of the rise of the great American universities to slavery. Walter Johnson, in “River of Dark Dreams,” is so strongly inclined not to see slavery as simply a regional system that he tends to put “the South” in quotes.
full: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/02/the-price-of-union _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
