Cotton Was King

Cotton produced by enslaved labor accounted for about 60% of all US exports in the decades before the Civil War. British textile mills ran on this cotton, making slavery a major engine behind industrial capitalism.

Northern banks, insurance companies, and textile mills profited directly from the slave economy too. In the United States, that financial and political entanglement helped make slavery impossible to remove peacefully; elsewhere, abolition followed different political routes, including legislation in the British Empire.