King Cotton’s Long Shadow
is the title of this piece in the Opiniator section of the New York Times website. It was written by Walter Johnson, a professor of history and African and African-American Studies at Harvard. It is not long, and definitely worth the read.
A couple of things caught my eye. He posits that the normal viewpoint that the Civil War represented the victory of capitalism over slavery is incorrect:
A couple of things caught my eye. He posits that the normal viewpoint that the Civil War represented the victory of capitalism over slavery is incorrect:
In actual fact, however, in the years before the Civil War, there was no capitalism without slavery. The two were, in many ways, one and the same.He reminds us that
Eighty-five percent of the cotton Southern slaves picked was shipped to Britain. The mills that have come to symbolize the Industrial Revolution and the slave-tilled fields of the South were mutually dependent. Every year, British merchant banks advanced millions of pounds to American planters