American cotton built on expropriated land and slave labor powered the English Industrial Revolution

Evidence

We speak of the blood-cemented fabric of the prosperity of New Orleans or the Havanna: let us look at home. What raised Liverpool and Manchester from provincial towns to gigantic cities? What maintains now their ever active industry and their rapid accumulation of wealth? The exchange of their produce with that raised by the American slaves; and their present opulence is as really owing to the toil and suffering of the negro, as if his hands had excavated their docks and fabricated their steam-engines. Every trader who carries on commerce with those countries, from the great house which lends its name and funds to support the credit of the American Bank, down to the Birmingham merchant who makes a shipment of shackles to Cuba or the coast of Africa, is in his own way an upholder of slavery: and I do not see how any consumer who drinks coffee or wears cotton can escape from the same sweeping charge. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 570 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The large-scale cultivation of cotton by enslaved people hastened the development of the factory, an institution that propelled the Industrial Revolution and changed the course of history. In 1810, there were eighty-seven thousand cotton spindles in America. Fifty years later, there were five million. Slavery, wrote one of its defenders in De Bow’s Review, a widely read agricultural magazine, was the “nursing mother of the prosperity of the North.” The Northern textile mills that spun cotton grown and harvested in slave-labor camps helped usher in a new economic arrangement, one that required workers to sell not crops or goods but bits of their life: their labor. Cotton manufacturing required people to give up their old lives and join the “newly emerging factory proletariat.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 581 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: American territorial expansion, slavery, and cotton drove the Industrial Revolution symbiotically — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 199; Enslaved cotton cultivation accelerated the factory system and wage labor — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 581; Northern factories and Southern plantations formed one cotton economy — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots: My Fight with Harvard…, 801 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• British industrial wealth derived directly from American slave labor #corroborates (0.95) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 570
• Enslaved cotton cultivation accelerated the factory system and wage labor #expands (0.85) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 581
• Slave-created colonial wealth financed British commercial and industrial growth #corroborates (0.85)
• The triangular trade’s profits directly financed the Industrial Revolution in England #corroborates (0.85) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 431
• King Cotton made slavery and capitalism globally interdependent and mutually constitutive #corroborates (0.82) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 558
• Northern factories and Southern plantations formed one cotton economy #expands (0.80) — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 801
• The slave trade financed Britain’s industrial revolution while underdeveloping Africa’s economies #corroborates (0.80) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 600
• Slavery powered European merchant capitalism and American expansion #expands (0.78) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 19
• Slavery was the economic engine of early American growth #corroborates (0.75) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 533