March 21, 2022

• Kirk Boott
  • Boott Cotton Mill
  • Mill Girls
• Women’s Work
  • Alice Kessler Harris
  • Carol Belkin
  • Linda Kerber
  • Coverture
• Course Summation
  • War Capitalism
  • Cotton and Petroleum

March 14, 2022

• Human Capital
• Diana Ramey Berry
• America’s First Great Depression
  • Deregulation in the 1830s
  • Kathryn Boodrey
  • The Panic of 1837
• The Birth of American Manufacturing
  • Jefferson versus Hamilton
  • American Textile Manufactuting
  • Stealing the Water Frame
  • Samuel Slater
  • Francis Cabot Lowell
  • Boston Manufacturing Company
• Lowell Massachusetts
  • Merrimack Manufacturing
  • Dyes and the Chemical Industry
  • The Lowell Canal System

March 7, 2022

• Slavery in the New World
• The First Slavery
• The Second Slavery
• Slavery in America
• The “Lost Cause”
• The Half Has Never Been Told
• Plantation Innovations
  • Benchmarking/Accounting
  • “Scientific Slavery”
  • Slaves as a Commodity
  • Internal Migration

February 28, 2022

• The Shift to Slave Labor
• Decline in Available Indentured Servants
• Development of the British Slave Trade
  • Company of Royal Adventurers
  • The British Slave Trade
  • Was There Opposition to Slavery?
  • Triangular Trade
  • Banks
• Slavery in the American Colonies
  • Susan Constant
  • Three Mistaken Assumptions About Slavery
  • Stephanie McCurry

February 21, 2022

• Slavery
  • Importance of slavery in production of sugar
  • Origin of slave trade
  • How were slaves obtained?
  • Sugar slavery
• Conquest, slavery, and genocide in the Americas
• British North America
  • Indentured servants
  • How did indenture work?
  • Revolts of indentured servants
  • Shift to slave labor
• Capitalism and slavery

February 14, 2022

• Globalization of trade
• Eastern hemisphere crops (sugar cane & cotton) introduced in Americas
• Conquest, genocide, and slavery
• Origins of Industrial Capitalism
• White Gold – raw cotton prices rise
• Caribbean becomes center of raw cotton production
• Haiti becomes leading supplier (36% of total, 24% of British supply)
• Haitian Revolution
• Hunt was on for a replacement source of raw cotton
• British mainland colonies seek labor to work rice, tobacco, and (eventually) cotton

February 7, 2022

• Workhouses created to compel indigents to either perform mindless, arduous, repetitive tasks if the would not submit to working in factories
• Child labor
  • Taken on as unpaid apprentices, then paid much less than adults
  • Small stature – performed dangerous tasks in and under machinery
  • Harsh discipline and long hours 
  • Parents rarely objected – needed extra money
• Empire of Cotton depended upon large-scale use of child labor
• Low pay and low resistance to harsh work environment
• Case of Ellen Hooten
• Early attempts in Britain to pass cosmetic restrictions on child labor
• Lewis Hine, American sociologist and photographer
• Failure of Keating-Owens Child Labor Act of 1916
• Long road in United States to limiting exploitation of child labor and a minimum wage

I may have caused some confusion by including some material on mid-nineteenth century Manchester in the first class. After that I cycled back to the situation in the late fifteenth century around the time of the voyages of Columbus and da Gama. 

In 1600, when the British East India Company was founded, there was no shortage of raw cotton. This is because the process of making thread and then weaving textiles was so slow that the existing supplies were more than adequate. In next week’s class we will see how the steps of the process were originally performed. 

We will then see how each time one step of the process was speeded up by a new invention there would be a scramble to find a way to invent something to eliminate the next bottleneck in the process. Only after the introduction of machines that simultaneously spun hundreds of threads did the supply of raw cotton become the bottleneck. 

Last	First	Title	Date	Publisher
Aliber	Robert	Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, 7th Edition	2015	Palgrave Macmillan
Baptist	Edward	The Half Has Never Been Told	2014	Basic Books
Beard	Charles	An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States	1913	The Free Press
Beckert	Sven	Empire of Cotton: A Global History	2015	Vintage
Beckert	Sven	Slavery’s Capitalism	2016	Univ Pennsylvania Press
Berry	Daina	The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: the Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave	2017	Beacon Press
Berry	Daina	Enslaved Women in America: an Encyclopedia	2012	Greenwood
Blight	David	Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory	2001	Harvard University Press
Chang	Ha-Joon	23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism	2010	Bloomsbury Press
Chang	Ha-Joon	The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism	2008	Bloomsbury Press
Conason	Joe	It Can Happen Here	2007	St Martin’s Press
Deresiewicz	William	“It Didn’t Have to Be This Way,” The Atlantic, November 2021
Diamond	Jared	Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies	2007	W. W. Norton
Diamond	Jared	Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed	2004	Penguin
Dineen	Jacquline	Cotton and Silk	1988	Enslow Publishers
Ehrenreich	Barbara	This Land is Their Land	2008	Metropolitan Books
Foner	Eric	Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party	1995	Oxford University Press
Freeman	Joshua	Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World	2018	W. W. Norton
Fuentes	Carlos	The Buried Mirror; Reflections on Spain and the New World	1992	Houghton Mifflin
Genovese	Eugene	The World the Slaveholders Made	1988	Wesleyan University Press
Genovese	Eugene	Roll Jordan Roll	1974	Random House
Goldstone	Lawrence	Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution	2005	Walker Books
Goodheart	Adam	1861: The Civil War Awakening	2011	Vintage
Griffin	Patrick	American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutiary Frontier	2007	Hill and Wang
Hall	Kermit	The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States, 2nd Edition	2005	Oxford University Press
Hanson	Victor Davis	The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece	2009	Univ of California Press
Harari	Yuval Noah	Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind	2014	Harvill Secker
Hobsbawm	Eric	The Age of Revolution 1789 -1848	1996	Vintage
Horne	Gerald	The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance of the Origins of the United States	2014	New York University Press
James	Margaret	Social Problems and Policy During the Puritan Revolution	1966	Routledge
Kolchin	Peter	American Slavery: 1619-1877	1993	Harper Collins
Levine	Bruce	The Fall of the House of Dixie	2013	Random House
Levine	Bruce	Half Slave Half Free: the Roots of the Civil War, revised edition	2005	Hill and Wang
Lewis-Kraus	Gideon	“Free For All,” The New Yorker, November 8, 2021
Manning	Richard	Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization	2004	Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
McCoy	Alfred W.	In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power	2017	Haymarket Books
McCurry	Stephanie	Confederate Reckoning	2010	Harvard University Press
Piketty	Thomas	Capital in the Twenty-First Century	2014	Harvard University Press
Pilling	David	The Growth Delusion	2018	Crown Publishing
Pomeranz	Kenneth	The World Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy	2005	Routledge
Pomeranz	Kenneth	The Great Divergence	2001	Princeton University Press
Postman	Neil	The Disappearance of Childhood	1982	Delacorte Press
Preston	Diana	The Dark Defile: Britain’s Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan 1838-1841	2012	Walker and Company
Remini	Robert	The Life of Andrew Jackson	1988	Perennial Classics
Remini	Robert	Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union	1991	W. W. Norton
Remini	Robert	At The Edge of the  Precipice	2010	Basic Books
Rifkin	Jeremy	The End of Work	1995	G. P. Putnam and Sons
Roach	Mary	Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex	2008	W. W. Norton
Roberts	Alasdair	America’s First Great Depression	2012	Cornell University Press
Rosenberg	Chaim	Child Labor in America: A History	2013	McFarland
Rosenthal	Caitlin	Slavery’s Scientific Management: Masters and Managers	2018	Harvard University Press
Sublette	Ned and Constance	The American Slave Coast: a History of the Slave-Breeding Industry	2016	Lawrence Hill Books
Williams	Eric	Capitalism and Slavery	1994	Univ of North Carolina
Wills	Garry	The Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power	2003	Houghton Mifflin
Wills	Garry	Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence	1978	Doubleday
Zinn	Howard	A People’s History of the United States	2005	Harper Perennial

January 17, 2022

• Today cotton is found everywhere, it is cheap and commonplace
• In the past it was rare and expensive – used as wall hangings not clothing
• If only there were a way to make large quantities of cotton textiles, great fortunes could be made
• Cotton become the driving force of the industrial revolution
• The potential of profits from cotton drove innovation
• Making textiles faster required numerous technological, political, and societal innovations
• The innovations involved banking, technology, military, urban planning, social relationships, and others 
• At the time India was the source of the finest finished cotton goods
• India accounted for 25% of global manufacturing output
• Indian textiles reached Europe via Arab middlemen traders
• Voyages of Columbus and da Gama set the Empire of Cotton in motion
  • Bypassed Arab middle men
  • Sea routes were faster, cheaper, and could move more cargo
  • Direct European trade with India was now possible
  • Paid for with New World gold
• Edward Baptist’s War Capitalism Assertion
  • Made possible by direct governmental military and economic intervention
  • Subsidies to manufacturers
  • Use of Royal Navy to protect sea routes and intimidate rivals
  • In England: government seizure of land for factories 
  • In America: endorsement of slavery by inclusion in US Constitution
  • In America: seizure of Native American land to expand plantations
• East India Company
  • Originally just a trading company
  • Became a de-facto government of the British Raj
  • Wrote laws and issued currency
  • Maintained enormous standing army