In sugar’s wake, cotton grown by slaves in the American South helped launch formal industrialization, along with an immense second wave of consumerism. After plentiful calories, abundant and varied clothing for the masses became a reality for the first time in human history. As revealed here, the scale and the scope of the American antebellum cotton boom, which made this possible, were nothing short of astonishing. This made the value derived from the trade and ownership of slaves in America alone, as distinct from the cotton and other products they produced, greater than that of all of the
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