![]() ![]() The American South, though relatively wide and expansive, was the go-to source for rice and, most importantly, tobacco.įew knew that the seven bales sitting in Liverpool that winter of 1785 would change the world. Prior to this unscheduled, and frankly unwanted, delivery, European merchants saw cotton as a product of the colonial Caribbean islands of Barbados, Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Martinique, Cuba, and Jamaica. imported the first seven bales of American cotton ever to arrive in Europe. In November 1785, the Liverpool firm of Peel, Yates & Co. ![]() The world was slowly but surely coming closer together, and slavery was right in the middle. Ports that had once focused entirely on the importation of enslaved laborers and shipped only regionally became home to daily and weekly shipping lines to New York City, Liverpool, Manchester, Le Havre, and Lisbon. Systems of class-lower-, middle-, and upper-class communities-developed where they had never clearly existed. Populations became more cosmopolitan, more educated, and wealthier. Louis, Mobile, Savannah, and New Orleans, to name a few-doubled and even tripled in size and global importance. As a result, these cities-Richmond, Charleston, St. Quite the opposite the South actively engaged new technologies and trade routes while also seeking to assimilate and upgrade its most “traditional” and culturally ingrained practices-such as slavery and agricultural production-within a modernizing world.īeginning in the 1830s, merchants from the Northeast, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean flocked to southern cities, setting up trading firms, warehouses, ports, and markets. It did not, as previous generations of histories have told, sit back on its cultural and social traditions and insulate itself from an expanding system of communication, trade, and production that connected Europe and Asia to the Americas. Between the 1830s and the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, the American South expanded its wealth and population and became an integral part of an increasingly global economy. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the southern states experienced extraordinary change that would define the region and its role in American history for decades, even centuries, to come.
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