Report a correction
The cotton gin
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.
Factual errors are corrected without argument once documented. What you send is read by a person and checked against sources — nothing changes automatically. See the editorial policy.