Atlantic Cotton Trade

The slave-grown cotton pipeline from the American South to Britain's mills that powered the Industrial Revolution from the 1780s to the 1860s.

Overview

The cotton gin of 1793 made short-staple upland cotton profitable, and Southern plantations fed Liverpool's docks and Manchester's mills, supplying perhaps 70 to 80 percent of Britain's raw cotton by the 1850s. The trade ran on credit instruments circulating through London, an early commodity-finance complex. The Civil War blockade triggered the Lancashire cotton famine, idling hundreds of thousands of workers and proving the dependence in human terms, while Egyptian and Indian supply rose as substitutes. Southern share recovered after the war but diversified away over decades. The trade remains the classic study of slavery's entanglement with industrial capitalism.