system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Did the United States' history of slavery contribute to its modern day wealth?

It seems to me that most of the modern day economic success of the United States can be traced to the industrial revolution and not to our past agrarian systems, but is there some way that slavery contributed to the dynamics that saw the United States reach the level of wealth it has?
gpt
Going into the American Revolution, slavery was thought to be going extinct. The over planting of tobacco had exhausted southern soils, and plantations were suffering.

In the 1790s, however, new inventions began to appear in England. Utilizing steam power, they spun and wove textiles on an industrial scale. Factory owners scrambled to buy up whatever cotton was available, and its price shot up.

Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1793 was no coincidence. It had been common knowledge that the South was ideal for growing cotton for a long time, but there was no incentive to do so. Now, cotton was in demand and profitable.

Remember when slavery was becoming *un*profitable? Well now states like Virginia had a huge surplus of slave labor, but its climate (cotton needs 200 days without frost) was unsuitable for growing the new cash crop. A new system arose. Enslaved individuals, becoming increasingly valuable, were shipped from the Upper to the Deep South. There, they were forced to produce valuable cotton for export to England's industrializing textile markets.

The significance of the new cotton industry cannot be overstated. By 1840 cotton comprised over half of all US exports. Tariffs helped fuel public projects in the North such as the building of roads and canals (not to mention that about 25% of Southern cotton was going into *their* growing textile industries).

So in many ways, the institution of slavery fueled the economic success of, not only the United States, but Britain as well. Textile industries are commonly the first stage in the industrialization of any nation. Here's a quote from Marx writing in the 1840s:

"Slavery is the pivot of our industrialism today as much as machinery, credit, etc. . . . Without slavery you have no cotton, without cotton you have no modern industry."


If you want more info/clarification, try these:

American Slavery: 1619-1877
by Peter Kolchin
Pg. 94-96

The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century
by Gavin Wright
can't give you pg. numbers at the moment, sorry.