King Cotton made slavery and capitalism globally interdependent and mutually constitutive

Evidence

Cotton was to the nineteenth century what oil was to the twentieth: one of the most valuable and widely traded commodities in the world. It gave rise to factories, vast manufacturing enterprises, and large industrial proletariat workforces, forming whole industries around itself. Unlike other staple crops grown by enslaved Black workers—rice in coastal South Carolina and Georgia, sugar in Louisiana—cotton could be cultivated throughout the South, relied heavily on industrial production, and was sought by consumers across the developed world. Together, cotton planters, enslaved workers in the South, wage laborers in the North, and millers and consumers from across the ocean helped fashion a new economy, one that was global in scope and required the movement of capital, labor, and products across long distances. In other words, one that was capitalist. “The beating heart of this new system,” Beckert notes, “was slavery.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 558

Categorization

• XREF: This is the crux of the 1619 Project’s reframing claim that American capitalism was built on slavery — distinct from the more familiar claim that slavery merely existed alongside a pre-existing market economy. Directly relevant to the reader’s task of separating reframing thesis from contested empirical claims. — connects to: American territorial expansion, slavery, and cotton drove the Industrial Revolution symbiotically — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 199; American cotton built on expropriated land and slave labor powered the English Industrial Revolution
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘slave-based capitalism’ thesis: cotton’s global production chain (Southern enslaved labor + Northern wage labor + European consumers) is the mechanism by which slavery is foundational rather than peripheral.