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Plant breeding, not working slaves harder, drove cotton efficiency gains in...
Summary : New cultivars of cotton led to an unprecedented rise in the productivity of US southern cotton in the 60 years before the American Civil War. The Economist magazine may have said some stupid...
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Baptism by Blood Cotton
The underlying claim in Edward Baptist’s “oral economic history” of slavery, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, is that slave owners, through the scientific...
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Piketty & Slave Wealth
A quick note on Piketty, slave-wealth, and US capitalism. Matthew Yglesias had a Vox article thundering “American prosperity was built on slavery and torture” as part of his reaction to Edward...
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Was slavery necessary for the Industrial Revolution ?
Did western industrialisation require American slave cotton ? What coal and sugar might tell us. (Short answer: It’s reasonable and plausible to argue slavery accelerated the industrial revolution, but...
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McCloskey: Cotton wasn’t crucial to the Industrial Revolution
I (mostly) copy-and-paste Deirdre McCloskey’s argument that cotton was not crucial to the Industrial Revolution in Britain. I also have a very brief rant about historians’ erasure of Robert Fogel from...
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The Baptist Question Redux: Emancipation & Cotton Productivity
Edward Baptist, the author of The Half Has Never Been Told, has been claiming since the publication of his book that a putative post-Emancipation drop in overall agricultural productivity in the...
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