Saturday, March 30, 2013

Daily Kos: King Cotton’s Long Shadow

Daily Kos: King Cotton’s Long Shadow:


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:
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