Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil Warстатья из журнала
Аннотация: HISTORIANS GENERALLY VIEW the U.S. Civil War as a crucial turning point in the history of the American nation.But it was more than this: the Civil War sparked the explosive transformation of the worldwide web of cotton production and, with it, of global capitalism.The cotton industry was among the world's largest industries at midcentury, drawing on the labor of perhaps 20 million workers.Prior to 1861, most of the world supply of raw cotton had been produced by slaves on plantations in the American South and was spun into thread and woven into cloth by textile workers in Lancashire.But in the decades following Appomattox, this world had given way to a global empire of cotton structured by multiple and powerful states and their eolonies and worked by non-slave labor.Sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and peasants, often highly indebted to local merchants, produced most of the global cotton, a significant fraction of which was grown outside the American South, in such places as India, Egypt, West Africa, Turkmenistan, and Brazil.The American Civil War was pivotal in these transformations.In its wake, nearly 4 million slaves gained their freedom in the nation that dominated world cotton production, leading to fears among merchants and manufacturers that the disruption of the "deep relationship between slavery and cotton production" might "destroy one of the essential conditions of the mass production" of cotton textiles.'By exploding global confidence in the structure of one of the world's most important industries, the war encouraged a new regime of bureaucrats and industrialists in cotton-consuming countries to secure supplies of the "white gold" not from slaves, but from sharecroppers, tenants, and peasants, decisively shifting the balance between free and coerced labor.And by removing several million bales
Год издания: 2004
Авторы: Sven Beckert
Издательство: Oxford University Press
Источник: The American Historical Review
Ключевые слова: American History and Culture, Cuban History and Society, American Environmental and Regional History
Другие ссылки: The American Historical Review (HTML)
Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University) (PDF)
Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University) (HTML)
Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University) (PDF)
Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University) (HTML)
Открытый доступ: green
Том: 109
Выпуск: 5
Страницы: 1405–1438