cotton economy
Slave-dependent cash crop
An economy built on cotton cultivation and export, particularly the antebellum American South, where enslaved labor made cotton the dominant cash crop and shaped regional society, politics, and infrastructure.
The term emphasizes how a single commodity can define an entire economic system: The cotton economy collapsed after emancipation changed the labor structure.
- slaveryOwnership of people
- slave laborCoerced unpaid servitude
- boll weevilBeetle infesting cotton plants
- spinning jennyEarly multi-spool thread maker
- plantation systemLabor-intensive colonial farming model
chattel slavery · field hands · racial hierarchy · Jim Crow laws · monoculture · sectionalism · textile mills · antebellum South · rural poverty · labor exploitation · Missouri Compromise · cash crop · plantations · triangular trade · African American heritage · loom · mercantilism · abolition movement
- US HistoryAmerican Revolution, US history, Civil War, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln
- economic historystock market crash, Industrial Revolution, trade routes, Great Depression, gold standard
- Antebellum Americaantebellum era, Compromise of 1850, sectionalism, states' rights, Fugitive Slave Act
- Antebellum Southplantation, overseer, slave quarters, big house, plantation owner
- Mississippi HistoryMississippi Delta, Mississippi River, Vicksburg, Jackson, Natchez
- Reconstruction Southsharecropping, tenant farming, freedmen, Freedmen's Bureau, carpetbaggers
cotton economyindustrial manufacturing
Large-scale goods fabrication
industrial economy · factory system · service economy · knowledge economy · subsistence economy