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Agriculture is just as industrial as the next... industry - you may have stepped into the fallacy known as "physiocracy". It's an easy thing to do. Cotton, Ant

Agriculture is just as industrial as the next... industry - you may have stepped into the fallacy known as "physiocracy". It's an easy thing to do. Cotton, Antebellum cotton, was the - the feedstock for the British textile portion of the Industrial Revolution - which was in Britain, the main event. Cotton went "offline" during the American Civil War so the Brits simply found other sources elsewhere in the Empire. IMO, we can view American chattel slavery as in an intermediate state between Mercantilist ... modes and Capitalist modes. Once a royal patent on a trade system was granted, it was very difficult for a king to control the patent holder. See also Adam Smith... Once (proto) capitalism began in earnest in the U.S., slavery presented challenges to the establishment of law that proved insurmountable. Free labor in the North also saw fit to take up arms against slavery. Lincoln saw this clearly and it's worth taking him both metaphorically/poetically as well as literally.

dllthomas 12y ago
There are clearly ways in which agricultural production differs from other kinds of production. Whether you call it "not industry" depends on what lines you've chosen to draw, which is why I said "arguably a different thing". If you don't want to draw those lines, fine - but the economy of the US South in that time was clearly dominated specifically by agriculture.
- finid 12y ago
  But you do have to agree that that agricultural economy made other industries possible. The agricultural part formed the base of a pyramidal industrial setup.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    You mean, "so it is still an example of slavery being, indirectly, the base of an industrial society"? That's probably fair.
    - ArkyBeagle 12y ago
      Slavery still seems more of a colonial (hence Mercantilist) feature than an industrial (hence Capitalist) feature - to me, anyway. Michener's excellent "Caribbean" discusses this in some detail.
  - ArkyBeagle 12y ago
    As simple as that question seems, I'm sorta unsure how to answer it. Cotton was a boom crop that had huge demand in the textile mills. Tobacco preceded it, and for all I know, with tobacco farming, slavery would have ended on its own. Tobacco is much higher-skill than cotton, and that could easily have led to a much gentler slope out of slavery. It's all a tangled mess of counterfactuals. The aristocrats in the South were definitely riding the tiger, and could not afford to compromise on the Peculiar Institution.

dllthomas 12y ago

There are clearly ways in which agricultural production differs from other kinds of production. Whether you call it "not industry" depends on what lines you've chosen to draw, which is why I said "arguably a different thing". If you don't want to draw those lines, fine - but the economy of the US South in that time was clearly dominated specifically by agriculture.

finid 12y ago
But you do have to agree that that agricultural economy made other industries possible. The agricultural part formed the base of a pyramidal industrial setup.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  You mean, "so it is still an example of slavery being, indirectly, the base of an industrial society"? That's probably fair.
  - ArkyBeagle 12y ago
    Slavery still seems more of a colonial (hence Mercantilist) feature than an industrial (hence Capitalist) feature - to me, anyway. Michener's excellent "Caribbean" discusses this in some detail.
- ArkyBeagle 12y ago
  As simple as that question seems, I'm sorta unsure how to answer it. Cotton was a boom crop that had huge demand in the textile mills. Tobacco preceded it, and for all I know, with tobacco farming, slavery would have ended on its own. Tobacco is much higher-skill than cotton, and that could easily have led to a much gentler slope out of slavery. It's all a tangled mess of counterfactuals. The aristocrats in the South were definitely riding the tiger, and could not afford to compromise on the Peculiar Institution.