Clarkson and others had therefore called for a boycott of slave-produced Southern cotton and its substitution in the mills of England with cotton produced by free labourers in India. That way, Clarkson suggested, Britain and her factories would no longer be contaminated by America’s ‘blood stained produce’, and the economic foundations of the slave economy of the Mississippi Valley would be swept away. In the two decades since the World Anti-Slavery Convention the opposite had happened. The Cotton kingdom had expanded and Britain had become even more dependent upon Southern cotton.
