The cotton gin
A labour-saving machine that multiplied slavery
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A cotton gin is a machine that separates cotton fibre from the seeds, the work that had until then been the great bottleneck in production. The gin removed the bottleneck in cleaning, not in planting and picking — and those were the stages that demanded labour. American cotton went from negligible to two-thirds of the world market and supplied the mills of Lancashire. This is the economic precondition both for the American Civil War and for Britain's industrial revolution, and one of the clearest examples that a technology carries no inherent direction.
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A simple machine separated cotton seed from fibre fifty times faster than by hand. Everyone assumed it would make enslaved labour less necessary. The opposite happened: growing cotton now paid everywhere in the South, and the number of enslaved people quadrupled in fifty years.
Sources
- Beckert, Empire of Cotton (2014)
- Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told (2014)
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