Butchie Wrote:
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> Slavery was in motion Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Cotton Gin (Modern tech) did not eliminate
> slavery
>
> I don't buy the idea that modern technology would
> have eliminated the need for slavery.
>
> Take cotton first. The cotton gin did not
> eliminate slavery because it INCREASED the need
> for cotton by making it cheaper, which in turn
> increased the need for field hands to plant and
> pick the cotton (the cotton gin only reduced the
> labor involved in processing cotton that had
> already been picked).
>
> Antebellum industrialization in the NORTH
> similarly increased the need for cotton, which
> again meant more slaves were needed to plant and
> pick the cotton.
>
> The key to reducing the need for cotton picking
> labor - a commercially manufactured mechanical
> cotton picker - did not arrive until after WWII.
>
>
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/holley.cottonpi
> cker
>
>
> The subject of cotton aside, there remains the
> fact that if you are paying your labor, it's very
> difficult to compete with someone who doesn't have
> to.
>
> I think we would have seen large corporations in
> the south that owned entire labor forces. Some
> Confederate car company would have run Ford out of
> business in the 1920s by staffing assembly lines
> with slave labor.
>
> Slavery intact, the Confederacy would have become
> the manufacturing hub of the world, as China is
> today, along with other low-cost labor markets.
Your absolutely right. Economics and heavy profit motive would have been one hell of an inticing motive to keep it in motion.