Answer:
1. What do you notice about cotton production before the civil war in 1861?
It had been on the rise/ increase.
2. What accounts for the dramatic increase or spike in cotton production?
The rise in Cotton production was due to a rise in cotton demand which came as a result of several inventions that made both sourcing the cotton and mass producing fabrics easier.
The first inventions were in Britain towards the end of the 18th century and they were the the spinning jenny, the Crompton’s spinning mule, and the Cartwright’s power loom. These made producing textiles so much more efficient that quality textiles could be mass produced and so were not just for the rich and this led to an explosion in the demand for cotton.
Meanwhile in America, Eli Whitney came up with the Cotton Gin which made separating cotton from its seed so much easier meaning that cotton could now be processed more efficiently leading to a rise in cotton production.
As you can see from the graph the invention and others that followed increased the production of cotton exponentially. Cotton however, was a labor intensive undertaking that required a lot of workers and to save costs the producers turned to slave labor such that slaves in the United States increased from 700,000 in 1790 to 4,000,000 in 1860 and were the backbone of the cotton industry.
Main points;
- Inventions fed demand
- Demand fed supply
- Supply was fed by inventions and massive slave labor
