Empire of Cotton: A Global History
by Sven Beckert · 2 Dec 2014 · 1,000pp · 247,974 words
Whitney, only a few months after arriving in Savannah from his college days at Yale, built the first working model of a new kind of cotton gin that was able to rapidly remove the seeds of upland cotton. Overnight, his machine increased ginning productivity by a factor of fifty. News of the
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politics in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision, the association literally went to the ends of the earth delivering cotton gins, giving advice, and distributing seeds and implements to farmers, while collecting information on various kinds of cotton and various ways of growing it. The association
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India was filled with hundreds if not thousands of stories about cotton. Manchester manufacturers shipped cottonseed to Bombay to be distributed to growers; they moved cotton gins and cotton presses into the countryside; and they talked about investing in railroads to remove cotton to the coast. They ran afoul, however, of India
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’s well-known obstacles. In 1862, when the Manchester Cotton Supply Association sent cotton gins and presses to India, they planned to unload them in the newly constructed port of Sedashegur, close to areas in which cotton was grown. Yet
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Land Tenure.” Manufacturers and colonial bureaucrats, faced with the cotton famine, became increasingly impatient with the workings of the market. As the superintendent of the Cotton Gin Factory in the Dharwar Collectorate reported in May 1862, while “we are strongly impressed with the belief, that, as a general rule, it is not
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, as we have seen, begun about four decades earlier under Pasha Muhammad Ali, now seemed closer than ever to fruition. New railroads, new canals, new cotton gins, and new cotton presses were built. By 1864, 40 percent of all fertile land in Lower Egypt had been converted to cotton farms. Egyptian rural
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few years after the war, in 1872, when he came to the Indian city of Agra—the site of the Taj Mahal—to visit a cotton gin there, “From the tomb of the Mogul monarch Of India, Akbar, we passed to the tomb of the pretended monarch of America, King Cotton.”51
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, they had moved their capital ever closer to the actual cotton growers, creating purchasing agencies in cotton-growing regions of India, including Khamgaon, and erecting cotton gins and presses. Agents in the employ of Volkart would purchase cotton from local dealers, have it processed in the firm’s own gins, then press
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been created just two years earlier. The association systematized and expanded Wakamatsu’s efforts, focusing especially on the introduction of American cotton strains, building a cotton gin, and eventually presenting a report to the government of Korea with recommendations to increase cotton production. By 1906, Japanese spinners had established the Korean Cotton
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the late 1880s more than half of the Central Asian cotton crop derived from these seeds. At the same time, large Russian cotton manufacturers erected cotton gins in Turkestan and sent out agents who advanced credit to local growers on the security of their future crop.11 As time went on, the
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, eliminating middlemen, forcing certain cotton strains on producers, and, last but not least, extracting labor from peasants by force. Not only were roads, railways, and cotton gins built by forced labor, but colonial authorities also asserted ever tighter control over cotton production and the trade of raw cotton. Local government officials supervised
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,” in Roy, ed., Cloth and Commerce, 87; Bray, “Textile Production,” 127. 34. Smith and Hirth, “Development of Prehispanic Cotton-Spinning,” 349; Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005), 11–12; Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton, 74–82, 89; Smith and Hirth, “Development of
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, Italian Cotton, 53; Ashtor, “Venetian Cotton,” 675, 676, 697; Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton, 35. 45. Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton, 65–66, 74–82, 89; Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin, 11–12; Mazzaoui, “Cotton Industry,” 274, 275; Bohnsack, Spinnen und Weben, 65–66, 37, 63, 67, 114, 115; Karl-Heinz Ludwig, “Spinnen im Mittelalter unter
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. Bruchey, Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 1790–1860: Sources and Readings (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 45; Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) disagrees, in my eyes unpersuasively, with this account; David Ramsay, Ramsay’s History
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’s Rise to Pre-eminence, 1780–1812” (unpublished paper presented at the Business History Conference, Le Creusot, France, June 19, 2004), 21; Michael Hovland, “The Cotton Ginnings Reports Program at the Bureau of the Census,” Agricultural History 68 (Spring 1994): 147; Bruchey, Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 2. 40
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, 1861, reprinted in “The Cotton Question,” Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 45 (October 1861): 379; Liverpool Mercury, June 12, 1861, 3; the superintendent of the Cotton Gin Factory in the Dharwar Collectorate reported in May 1862, “Although the cultivation of native cotton is capable of extension to an enormous degree, yet the
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Hartmut Berghoff, Philip Scranton, and Uwe Spiekermann, eds., The Rise of Marketing and Market Research (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 49–72; Michael Hovland, “The Cotton Ginnings Reports Program at the Bureau of the Census,” Agricultural History 68, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 147; N. Jasny, “Proposal for Revision of Agricultural Statistics,” Journal
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, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 11.1, 12.1 as “woven wind,” itr.1, 1.1 Cotton Cultivation Expansion Plan of 1912 cotton gins, 1.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 9.1, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3 invention of, 5.1, 5
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. R. Bartley Depression, Great, 13.1, 14.1 Desai, Ambalal Sakarlal, 13.1, 13.2 Deutsche Orient Bank Deutsche Togogesellschaft Deutsche Volkswirthschaftliche Correspondenz Dharwar Collectorate Cotton Gin Factory D. H. Wätjen & Co. Dictionnaire universel de la géographie commerçante Diligent distaffs, itr.1, 1.1 Dixon, Job Doherty, Joe Dollfus, Emile Dollfus, Frédéric
The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution
by Charles R. Morris · 1 Jan 2012 · 456pp · 123,534 words
Slept CHAPTER NINE - Catching Up to the Hyperpower The Pleasures of Starting in Second Place Challenges Can China Cope? APPENDIX - Did Eli Whitney Invent the Cotton Gin? IMAGE SOURCES, CREDITS, AND PERMISSIONS Acknowledgments NOTES INDEX Copyright Page ALSO BY CHARLES R. MORRIS The Sages : Warren Buffett, George Soros, Paul Volcker, and the
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after his death, Eli Whitney was virtually canonized as the Father of American Technology. According to the traditional story, Whitney was the inventor of the cotton gin, which transformed the antebellum South (and unfortunately reinvigorated the institution of slavery); he was the first person to machine-produce precisely fitting interchangeable parts for
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trails in making them. He was unconscionably late in fulfilling his arms contract, in part because he spent so much of his time pursuing his cotton gin profits.5 That harsh view of Whitney as manufacturer has moderated considerably in recent years. While it’s true that Whitney made few contributions to
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that in his early career Whitney was indeed something of a flimflam man; some recent work even raises doubts as to whether he invented his cotton gin (see Appendix). And I think the record supports the charge that he dangled the promise of machined interchangeable parts to gain extensions on his contracts
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Whitney’s first year in the South. But he never made it to his tutoring job, and a year after his arrival, he patented his cotton gin in partnership with Miller. Their business plan was to leverage control over ginning technology to create ginning centers throughout the cotton country, charging 40 percent
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better comes along.” In the fall of 1801, his new advances in hand, he got word of the possibility of a lucrative settlement on the cotton gin patent. Whitney left for the southlands late in the year, did not return until May (long after the gin business was over), and took similar
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the same reason over the next several years.19 A few years after that, it seems, he finally got serious, mostly giving up on the cotton gin litigation and devoting his formidable intelligence and mechanical gifts more or less full-time to the business of producing arms. While there is little evidence
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-Bomford advanced-manufacturing team. Scion of one of the bluest-blood New England families, he had once been engaged by Whitney to maintain his Southern cotton gin establishments. He had been a high-ranking officer during the war, knew Wadsworth, and had lobbied him hard for a postwar civilian position in armory
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was nominally an armory-practice production shop: they understood models, gauging, and special purpose machinery. But their operations were a mess, with typewriters, arms, pumps, cotton gins, and other production lines tangled together in the same shops. Remington did succeed in making thousands of typewriters but was unable to ramp up production
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the national transition to a true middle-income society. The rest of the world can only hold its breath. APPENDIX Did Eli Whitney Invent the Cotton Gin? ANGELA LAKWETE IS AN AUBURN UNIVERSITY HISTORIAN WHO HAS devoted a career to the antebellum cotton industry. In a recent book, she argues that Whitney
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makes the specific charge, Lakwete also lays out an impressive prima facie case that, rather than invent the new gin, Whitney and Phineas Miller, his cotton gin partner, stole a gin design and patented it as their own. I’ve added a few details that, looked at anew, seem to strengthen the
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case. The Whitney Cotton Gin Revisited There is no question that Whitney was a talented craftsman. Although many stories of his youthful inventing prowess are probably apocryphal, he was blacksmithing
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, who had gone back to New Haven, to expedite the patent application, for there were “two other claimants for the honor of the invention of cotton gins, in addition to those we knew before.” Whitney delivered the patent petition on June 20 and followed with detailed specifications and drawings in mid-October
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an accepted filing, Miller launched a preemptive business strategy. The plan was to create ginning mills throughout the cotton areas, charging 40 percent of the cotton ginned, while at the same time fighting off any competitive gins with litigation. The struggle that ensued would be tedious to recount. Suffice it to say
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; Catherine Tai, “The ‘Princelings’ and China’s Corruption Woes,” CIPE Development Blog, August 5, 2009, www.cipe.org/blog. APPENDIX 1 Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 45. 2 Whitney and Greene corresponded regularly the rest of her life, and
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. 9 Constance McLaughlin Green, Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956), 48. 10 Eli Whitney, “Description of a New Invented Cotton Gin,” US Patent (X)72, copy of patent filed June 20, 1793, certified correct by James Madison, Secretary of State, November 25, 1903. 11 P. J
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. Federico, “Records of Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin Patent,” Technology and Culture 1, no. 2 (Spring 1960): 168–176. (Quotes in the footnote are on 173.) Federico was examiner in chief of the
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and Consumption investment and Contracts Cooke, Jay Cooper, Carolyn Corliss, George H. steam engines by (fig.) valve regulator by(fig.) Corliss Steam Engine Company Cotton Cotton gins (fig.) revisiting Coxe, Tench Crowe, Tim Crystal Palace(fig.) Cummins Engine Cunard Lines Cutters(fig.) Cutting, Uriah Cylinders(fig.) breech(fig.) wire/wooden-toothed Dalliba
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(Smith) Weaving Webb, William H. Webster, Ambrose Webster, Daniel Wellington, Duke of Wen Jiabao Wen Yunsong Westervelt & Mackay Westinghouse Whewell, William Whitney, Eli case against cotton gin of(fig.) interchangeability and Irvine and Jefferson and Madison and manufacturing by mechanization and Miller and muskets by North and reputational thrill ride of Stebbins
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shown in Figure A.1 is a copy of drawings, certified as accurate in 1804, which were found in the records of one of the cotton-gin patent cases. The Patent Office later made a model of the Whitney gin and apparently made drawings from that, which are now bundled with the
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that the patent office commissioned a model of the Whitney gin in 1845, and that the drawings now on file “are merely drawings of the cotton gin made in 1845” and include “the addition of some figures . . . showing alternative forms of teeth.” But it adds, “Whitney is known to have made a
The Rough Guide to Australia (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides · 14 Oct 2023 · 1,955pp · 521,661 words
. Wee Waa The town of WEE WAA, roughly 40km west of Narrabri, was where the Namoi cotton industry began in the 1960s, and the large cotton “gins” or processing plants are located here. If you can stand the rather raw, dispirited town and the blazing summer heat, you could earn some cash
Worn: A People's History of Clothing
by Sofi Thanhauser · 25 Jan 2022 · 592pp · 133,460 words
, opened the first industrial cotton-spinning mill in America in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, known as the Slater Mill. The same year, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. The metal teeth of Whitney’s gin could process as much short staple cotton in under an hour as a team of slaves had formerly
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the cotton into a freestanding loaf that stood on the field’s edge until it was picked up in a semi and trucked to the cotton gin. Dennis McGeehee was one of a cabal of Lubbock cotton titans. Cotton exists in the national imaginary as a southern crop, but after 1920 the
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should.” I nodded gravely. * * * — In 1790, the United States grew 1.5 million pounds of cotton. In 1800, seven years after the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793, it grew 36.5 million pounds. In 1820 it grew 167.5 million pounds. During the thirty years following the
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image of largely motionless Klansmen rather than to any specific action or violence.” Made invisible, the violence becomes a kind of total atmosphere. * * * — At the cotton gin outside Lubbock, at night when I visited, cotton particulate hung in the air, illuminated by the headlights of semis as they pulled in and out
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for it was formed. It was the most literal revolution: pertaining as it did to acts of spin. Across the Atlantic, the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 made the short staple cotton that grew so well in the American South suddenly commercially viable. The U.S. emerged swiftly as a
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stuffed with cotton. The auction unfolded with silent intensity: the auctioneer barked the stats for each bag of cotton; then the buyers, who represented different cotton gins, placed bids by blinking their eyes. The auctioneer and the buyers moved down the rows together, from one burlap sack of cotton to the next
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released by a group of Indian doctors in 2009. “Recently, however, intentional suicidal deaths predominate.” * * * — After we left the auction, Sivanpillai and I visited a cotton gin in the countryside outside Tiruppur. About an hour east of Coimbatore, Tiruppur emerged in the late nineteenth century as an important railhead on the line
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stacked them on their heads, transporting them up a flight of stairs into the ginning room, with its rows and rows of American cast iron cotton gins from the 1930s, painted over in a soft lichen. The bushel baskets were dumped into the tops, like coffee into the grinder. The women were
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pressure from above to make a bale. From here, the bales would be trucked to the spinning mills that fanned out around Coimbatore. Work at cotton gins was formerly the only industrial work open to women in this region. For most of Tamil Nadu’s industrial history, spinning mills employed men who
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belief, that, as a general rule, it is not judicious to interfere by legislative enactments in matters connected with trade,” wrote the superintendent of the Cotton Gin Factory in the Dharwar Collectorate in 1862, in the matter of forcing Indian peasants to grow cotton for the world market, “we are forced to
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, 203–4, 210, 220–21 corsets, 30 cotton agriculture overview of, xv, 87 description of, 43 for earliest Navajo weavings, 273 as subsistence crop, 58 cotton gins, 18, 45, 56–57, 62, 72–73 cotton in India, 44, 58–80 at auction, 69, 71–72 British control of, 59, 60–65 chemicals
Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism
by Bhu Srinivasan · 25 Sep 2017 · 801pp · 209,348 words
few more attempts, he had a fully functioning prototype for his cotton engine, shortened to “gin.” It wasn’t much of an actual engine—the cotton gin was a simple hand-cranked device that pressed the raw cotton against comblike metallic “teeth,” with the seeds staying on one side of the teeth
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would do so “without throwing any class out of business.” This turned out to be the understatement of the century. Rather, the breakthrough of the cotton gin put the entire American South, powered by millions of black hands, in the business of growing cotton. • • • TWO YEARS BEFORE Whitney made his journey south
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, the Carolinas and Georgia had produced 3,000 bales of cotton, much of it the satinlike Sea Island variety. Ten years after he invented the cotton gin, annual production stood at 136,000 bales of cotton—equal to 68 million pounds in weight—almost all of the upland variety. This number too
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Greene plantation, now searched for the business model to turn the idea into the coveted fortune. One idea was to build the machines and operate cotton gins themselves, where the Miller & Whitney operation would separate the cotton from the seed, keeping one third of the cotton as their profit and giving the
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to bankruptcy” were rather thin. If it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, they did. London traders complained about the impurities contained in the cotton ginned by Miller & Whitney. With a Georgia operation consisting of real estate and thirty operating gins in 1796, Miller & Whitney had picked a business model that
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, having come to terms with the fact that little money would come to him from the cotton gin, he had turned his attention to weapons. With his skill in manufacturing and fame as inventor of the cotton gin, he received an initial order for ten thousand muskets for $134,000 from the U.S
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of a man who saw the world in terms of dollars and cents. The commercial frustrations that plagued the mechanical genius of Whitney with his cotton gin, or thwarted the ambitions of polymath Fulton before his steamboat, were foreign to Vanderbilt’s innate sense of the transactional world. Conversely, the patrician sponsors
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places on routes where tracks had to be repaired. Morse, benefiting from a great self-awareness about his commercial limitations, took the opposite strategy of cotton gin inventor Eli Whitney. While Whitney attempted to manufacture the devices and process the cotton in his own facilities, Morse decided to license his patent liberally
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as a very clear beginning of the end. Ten SLAVERY Not too far from the South Carolina plantation where Eli Whitney first conceived of his cotton gin back in 1793 stood Butler Island, another plantation on the Georgia side of the border. Almost seventy years later, in 1859, the lasting consequences of
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was one of many well-known gunmakers in the North. Following in the footsteps of Eli Whitney—who after his endless frustration in monetizing his cotton gin turned his mechanical genius to gun making—manufacturers in New England, including Samuel Colt, Smith & Wesson, and Remington gave the Union Army a decided advantage
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Papers, Yale University Manuscripts & Archives. One account has it: Denison Olmsted, Memoir of Eli Whitney (New Haven, CT: Durrie & Peck, 1846). the cotton gin was a simple: Whitney, “Patent for Cotton Gin,” issued March 14, 1794, Records of the Patent and Trademark Office, Group 241, National Archives. 3,000 bales of cotton: Bureau of
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, 47–48 production of, in 1820s and 1830s, 56 production of, in 1850s, 126–27 slavery and, 56–57, 126–27 Whitney’s invention of cotton gin and, 48–54 Cotton Club, 313–14 Council for Virginia, 4 Council on National Defense, 359 A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco (King James I), 19
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inventions of, 192–97 telegraphy inventions of, 189–92 Edison Electric Illuminating Company, 192, 195, 196 Ed Sullivan Show, The (TV show), 386 efficiency gains cotton gin and, 51 Smith on, 48 efficient market hypothesis, 477 Eighteenth Amendment to Constitution, 309 Eisenhower, Dwight, 389, 409–10 Eleanor (ship), 39 Electoral College, 411
Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson · 15 May 2023 · 619pp · 177,548 words
the contrary, as the textile workers themselves keenly understood, work hours lengthened and conditions were horrible, both in the factory and in crowded cities. • The cotton gin was a revolutionary innovation, greatly raising the productivity of cotton cultivation and turning the United States into the largest cotton exporter in the world. The
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pay them more money. Rather, he can intensify coercion to extract greater effort and more output. Under such conditions, even revolutionary innovations such as the cotton gin in the American South do not necessarily lead to shared benefits. Even beyond slavery, under sufficiently oppressive conditions, the introduction of new technology can increase
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economic systems and continents, are emblematic of its savage implications. In nineteenth-century America, we can see the implications of the transformative technology of the cotton gin. In American economic history, Eli Whitney appears alongside Thomas Edison as one of the most creative technological entrepreneurs enabling transformative progress. Whitney invented an improved
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cotton gin in 1793 that quickly removed the seeds from upland cotton. In Whitney’s own assessment, “One man and a horse will do more than fifty
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place and who benefited from it. In the US South it was always shaped by coercion. Violence and mistreatment of Black Americans intensified after the cotton gin opened a broad area across the South for cultivation. An already harsh system of slavery was about to become much worse. Improved productivity most definitely
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are powerful and whose vision guides its trajectory, everything makes a lot more sense. Large-scale grain agriculture, mills monopolized by lords and abbots, the cotton gin intensifying slavery, and Soviet collectivization were specific technology choices, in each case clearly in the interests of a dominant elite. Predictably, what followed looks nothing
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…,” is from Lyman (1868, 158). “[R]egimented and relentless…” is from the National Archives online article on “Eli Whitney’s Patent for the Cotton Gin,” www.archives.gov/education/lessons/cotton-gin-patent. “When the price rises…” is from Brown (1854 [2001], 171); part of this quotation is also in Beckert (2014, 110). The
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development of accounting on slave plantations is in Rosenthal (2018). The cotton gin is discussed in detail by Lakwete (2003). Hammond’s speech is from Hammond (1836). On the “positive good of slavery,” see Calhoun (1837). A Technological
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Bertolt Brecht. New York: Liveright/Norton. Kurzweil, Ray. 2005. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Penguin. Lakwete, Angela. 2003. Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Landemore, Helene. 2017. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many
Frommer's Caribbean 2010
by Christina Paulette Colón, Alexis Lipsitz Flippin, Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince and John Marino · 2 Jan 1989
of Statia, the Old Gin House is a historic landmark. The inn is a faithful reconstruction of an 18th-century building that once housed a cotton gin. The bricks that went into the construction were once used by sailing ships as ballast. Surrounded by tropical gardens, including palms and bougainvillea, the hotel
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
by Edward E. Baptist · 24 Oct 2016
of long-staple, or “Sea-Island,” cotton rose. Then, in the early 1790s, Carolina and Georgia enslavers started to use a new machine called the “cotton gin.” That enabled the speedy processing of short-staple cotton, a hardier and more flexible crop that would grow in the backcountry where the long-staple
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of land speculators and con men, the region was called “the Yazoo,” after a river in present-day Mississippi.32 Image 1.1. “The First Cotton Gin,” Harper’s Weekly, December 18, 1869, p. 813. This image of the creation of one of the founding technologies of slavery’s post-Revolution expansion
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interior, on the other hand, had thousands of acres of possible cotton fields, thousands for each one in the Caribbean. And the invention of the cotton gin in the early 1790s helped to uncork one of the bottlenecks to production by allowing the easy separation of cotton fiber from seeds. But even
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that July morning at Congaree.9 The best-known innovation in the history of cotton production, as every high-school history student knows, is the cotton gin. It allowed enslavers to clean as much cotton for market as they could grow and harvest. As far as most historians have been concerned, the
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the mechanical cotton picker in the 1930s, which ended the sharecropping regime. But here is the question historians should have asked: Once enslavers had the cotton gin, how then did enslavers produce (or have produced, by other hands) as much as the gin could clean? For once the gin shattered the processing
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. The branches grew “squares,” or buds. And white people began to dole out pennies to slaves in exchange for baskets woven by firelight. They inspected cotton-gin machinery. They checked the weighting of whips. They went to town and bought sacks, new slates, chalk, ledgers, pens, and ink. And they mailed off
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as functionaries of the expanding cotton empire—began to imitate and demonstrate what they had learned on the Ohio River or in New Orleans. Former cotton-gin mechanics, flatboat pilots, and apprentice clerks sang, bucked, and jived while frailing their banjos in the most authentic way, often while (weirdly) blacked-up, “playing
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: John Springs III and Other ‘Gentlemen Dealing in Slaves,’” South Carolina Historical Magazine 97 (1996): 6–29, esp. 22. For the complex origins of the cotton gin, see Joyce Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2013); Angela Lakwete, Inventing the
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Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore, 2003). 32. Cf. New York Advertiser, September 24, 1790. 33. “Charleston” from Pennsylvania Packet, February 25, 1790; C.
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from the Best Authorities on the Culture of Cotton; Its Natural History, Chemical Analysis, Trade, and Consumption; And Embracing a History of Cotton and the Cotton Gin (New York, 1857), 36; L. C. Gray and Esther K. Thompson, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Washington, DC, 1933), 2
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and, 329–331 Constitutional Convention of 1787, 9–10, 40 Corn-shucking competitions, and enslaved people, 158–160, 161 (photo) Cornish, Samuel, 194–195, 198 Cotton gin, 18, 19 (photo), 82, 116 Cotton mills, northern, 312, 317 Cotton picker, mechanical, 116 Cotton picking, 125 (photo), 130 (photo) skill/experience in, 136–139
Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture
by Ellen Ruppel Shell · 2 Jul 2009 · 387pp · 110,820 words
through sophisticated mechanization. Whitney, the better known of the two, was nearly broke at the time, having failed to retain financial control over his famous cotton gin. He desperately needed the gun-making contract but was so distracted by ensuing litigation that he neglected to pay much attention to the enterprise. A
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the middle of the nineteenth century. Once the gin made cleaning cotton fiber so cheap, the expectation grew that cotton itself would be cheap. The cotton gin reduced the labor required to extract and remove seeds, but planting and picking remained a distinctly human chore. To meet the expectation of low price
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to be cheap as well, and this meant cheap labor. There is no cheaper labor than the slave variety, and it makes sense that the cotton gin led to an emphatic boost to the slave trade. The American South was by then growing 60 percent of the world cotton supply, and nearly
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and other “dry goods” was well under way, and the expectation of cheap fabric was deeply ingrained in the American psyche. To imply that the cotton gin or interchangeable revolver parts changed everything would be to overreach. North’s and Whitney’s innovations planted the early seeds of systematized mass production, but
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some dispute over the role of his gin in the transformation of the history of the South. Notably, historian Angela Lakwete, author of Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), argues persuasively that the “invention” of the
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cotton gin was a complex process involving many players that began hundreds of years earlier in India and China, and that they were used in the South
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. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Henry Holt, 2007. Lakwete, Angela. Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Landman, Janet. Regret: The Persistence of the Possible. New York: Oxford University
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), in 2007- 2008 Consumer Reports consumers behavior of citizens as rise of consumerism union of context of transaction, and pricing Costco Wholesale Corporation cost reductions cotton gin Coughlan, Anne J. coupons Craftsman, The (Sennett) craftsmanship discounters and home construction and mass manufacture, impact of Crawford, Matthew B. creative destruction credit cards Crescent
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retailers optimization of seasonal variations setting amount of types of market value Marshall Field’s mass production adoption of European-style techniques and clothing market cotton gin Ford’s assembly line gun manufacture home construction Matlock, Larry Mattel mattress industry maximum price regulations, during World War II, Maxwell, Sarah May Department Stores
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loyalty education individuality of stores local producers as suppliers philosophy of wages and benefits ”What Prices Reveal About the Mind” (Schindler) White Sale Whitney, Eli cotton gin gun manufacture Whole Foods Market Wilburn, Chuck Wilson, Eric Wood, Robert E. Woolco Department Stores Woolworth, Frank W. Woolworth Company workers’ rights, in China working
Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan · 15 Oct 2018 · 585pp · 151,239 words
lot with industry, the South fell under the sway of King Cotton. In 1793, Eli Whitney, returning to Savannah from studying at Yale, invented his cotton gin (short for “engine”), which, as we’ve seen, speeded up the separation of seeds from fiber by a factor of twenty-five. This marked a
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. In 1833–34, abolitionist sentiment was given a further boost by Great Britain’s decision to abolish the slave trade across the empire. But the cotton gin gave an ancient evil a new lease on life across the South. We will never know whether slavery might have been abolished peacefully, as happened
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in the British Empire, were it not for the invention of the cotton gin. But slavery and cotton production certainly advanced in lockstep, as Sven Beckert demonstrates: the proportion of slaves in four typical South Carolina upcountry counties increased
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that was responsible for perfecting America’s greatest management breakthrough: mass production. Mass production was rooted in Eli Whitney’s “uniformity system” for manufacturing first cotton gins and then muskets in the late eighteenth century. Henry Ford took this philosophy to a new level, not only breaking every task down into its
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its new factories. The South might have belonged to a different historical era. The slave economy was more profitable than ever. The invention of the cotton gin had increased productivity. The Industrial Revolution in textile manufacture, particularly in Britain, had stimulated demand. And the expansion of the southern states westward, particularly into
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using scythes could now work while seated, like princes of the prairie. THE SOUTH WAS A SLAVE ECONOMY Eli Whitney’s patent application for the cotton gin, which revolutionized the productivity of the cotton economy. The Southern economy was based on the most inhuman of foundations: the ownership of human beings. The
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The Abilene Reflector (Abilene, Kansas), May 29, 1884. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. 8: Drawing from Eli Whitney’s patent for the cotton gin, March 14, 1794. Records of the Patent and Trademark Office, National Archives. 9: Broadside of Sheriff’s Sale, notice about a sale of slaves (facsimile
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, 156 advent of widespread ownership, 206–9 evolution of, 146–49 Great Merger Movement, 142–45 cotton, 73–79, 76, 86–89 Cotton, Calvin, 164 cotton gin, 15, 46, 74, 75 Coughlin, Charles, 204, 246 Council of Economic Advisers, 275, 302–3 Countrywide Financial, 378 cowboys, 113, 116 Cowen, Tyler, 4 Cox
USA Travel Guide
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