The great English historian Eric Hobsbawm once described industrialization as the greatest event in the history of humankind. The story of slavery, of plantations, and of the Black labor that generated the most important product of that era, cotton, is by any reasonable standard a core element in this immense human change. But that is not all: the economic activity that surrounded cotton also lifted banking and insurance and drove globalized commerce on scales never seen before. It profoundly reshaped the political maps of continents. It positioned the United States to become the world’s
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