The Politics of Produce · Episode 8 of 17 · 24 min
King Cotton: The Crop That Built and Broke America
Cotton fused global capitalism to American slavery. The story runs from the gin that accelerated the domestic slave trade, through Confederate Cotton Diplomacy, to the sharecropping and debt peonage after emancipation, and on to Black land loss and the 2024 USDA discrimination payouts. Capital and labor are written in race.
Who's who
- Eli Whitneycredited with patenting the cotton gin in 1793
- Timothy Pigfordlead plaintiff in the 1997 suit against the USDA
- Sven Beckerthistorian associated with the New History of Capitalism
- Edward Baptisthistorian whose cotton and slavery claims are disputed
Where it happens
- Deep Southcotton frontier where about a million enslaved people were relocated
- Manchester and Lancashire, Englandmills that depended on American cotton
- Upper Southregion from which enslaved people were forcibly moved
Timeline
- 1793Eli Whitney builds the cotton gin
- 1808Congress bans importing enslaved people, intensifying the internal trade
- 1861-1865Confederacy's Cotton Diplomacy fails
- 1999Pigford v. Glickman consent decree settles USDA discrimination claims
- 2024USDA pays about $2.2 billion to roughly 43,000 recipients
Still debated
Historians dispute how central slave-grown cotton was to American and global capitalism. The New History of Capitalism calls it a core engine, while critics dispute specific calculations and say slavery was not necessary for industrialization.
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