The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Slavery and the cotton industry have “made southern enslavers incredibly wealthy, and powerful, too,” helping them to exert “disproportionate influence over the national government, ensuring the creation and implementation of policies that [benefit] them” (312). However, the North also benefits, with the labor of slaves “enable[ing] the free states to create the world’s second industrial revolution” (312). Importantly, the North’s economy is not limited to cotton mills but includes a wide range of industrialized, modern industries. Because the North has “reinvested profit generated from the backs of the enslaved in creating a diversified regional economy” (312), replacing the “cotton margin” with “an industrial margin” (323), it is able to recover quickly from the bursting of the slave asset bubble while the South, economically reliant on cotton and slaves, struggles. This begins to convince Northerners that they do not need slavery, and even that slavery is holding the US back. Now that they have “built a brave new world on the product of the cotton fields,” they are “convincing themselves that slavery [is] a premodern, inefficient drain on the national economy” (312).   

Although slavery contributed hugely to Britain’s wealth and power and was central to its industrialization, and although it is still reliant on the slave-picked cotton of the US, the empire has “concluded that it no longer need[s] its own slaves” (316).