Cotton, the Cotton Gin and American Slavery

Britain's mills needed vast amounts of raw cotton, and much of it came from the southern United States. In 1793 Eli Whitney built the cotton gin, a machine that quickly separated seeds from short-staple cotton, which could be grown across large areas of the American South. The gin made cotton farming far more profitable, and demand from British mills soared.

As a result, slavery expanded westward into new cotton lands, and the number of enslaved people in the United States grew from about 700,000 in 1790 to nearly 4 million by 1860. Historians emphasize that the textile boom in Britain and New England and the expansion of slavery in the South were tightly connected parts of one Atlantic economy. This link shows that industrial technology could deepen, rather than weaken, systems of forced labor.