![]() ![]() The availability of cheap land and the shortage of labor led to a ruthless system of exploitation “that enslaved people called the ‘pushing system’” and that Edward Baptist aptly describes as “innovation in violence” (pp. Production kept growing because planters continuously expanded the cotton acreage and because forced migration supplied the necessary enslaved labor force. However, in contrast to the textile industries in Europe and New England, technological innovation played no role in increasing the productivity of cotton plantations in the American South. During the same time period, the productivity of cotton pickers, measured by the amount of cotton harvested per day, rose by 400 percent, nearly equal to the productivity gains in English cotton mills (pp. Between 17, cotton production skyrocketed from a paltry two million pounds to 1.536 billion pounds per year, accounting for more than 60 percent of the world’s total cotton production and also for 60 percent of all US export revenues (p. More than half of them ended up in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi (pp. ![]() ![]() Between the end of the American Revolution and the eve of the Civil War, roughly one million black slaves were transported from the southeastern United States to the expanding southwestern cotton frontier. ![]()
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