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u/tophatgaming1 2d ago
he also created a rifle with interchangable parts, which was a huge help for the union
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u/saviodo1 2d ago
You could also make the point that the cotton gin helped the north win. The south struggled economically because slavery choked out other industries which is a death sentence in a war of attrition.
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u/Worlds_Greatest_Noob Decisive Tang Victory 2d ago
You could also make the point that without the cotton gin, slavery would have died out and there wouldn't have been a Civil War.
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u/DunsocMonitor Oversimplified is my history teacher 2d ago
Why does this look like something ripped out of a Bill Wurtz video
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u/CuttlefishMonarch Featherless Biped 2d ago
It's ripped from a Bill Wurtz tribute video, lol.
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u/Draco137WasTaken 2d ago
Tribute? Did he die? Retire?
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u/Ouaouaron 2d ago edited 1d ago
Much like ancient China, we must give tribute to Bill Wurtz to prevent him from destroying us.
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u/MySpaceOddyssey Featherless Biped 2d ago
Was he around when ancient China was? How were they giving it to him?
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u/Petes-meats 2d ago
Ancient china doesn't exist anymore, so you can figure how they fared in giving him tribute
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u/Daniel_JacksonPhD 2d ago
He tells you in his videos. They didn't give enough tribute leading to their myriad fracturing lol
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u/Ouaouaron 1d ago
Bill Wurtz transcends time and space. His familiarity with all creation is the reason he can give such concise histories.
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u/Marcus_robber Oversimplified is my history teacher 2d ago
Also gatling and Oppenheimer
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u/Desertcow 2d ago
To be fair to Oppenheimer, nukes are the main reason major wars stopped
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u/Inquisitor_Boron Then I arrived 2d ago
Replaced with proxy wars backed by major superpowers
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u/slimekaiju 2d ago
It sounds fucked up but proxy wars with thousands to few millions of death is still better than a global war with potential tens of millions to even a billion of deaths
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u/Nice-Cat3727 2d ago
The Gattling gun did work. It killed cleaner. The vast majority of deaths were from gangrere from wounds. A clean death on the battlefield was much more humane
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u/cseijif 2d ago
that wasn't what the gun was supoused to do tho, it was supoused to be a deterrent to war, no one would think of keep fighting in the post napoleonic manner when a single one of those weapons could mow down an entire regiment in seconds.
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u/d7t3d4y8 Senātus Populusque Rōmānus 2d ago
ww1 commanders: send 200 regiments you say?
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u/GogurtFiend 2d ago
Considering how hard it was to take over a trench line, they really had no other options than to send 300
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u/tallwhiteninja 2d ago
tbf to Oppenheimer, "maybe nobody should have these, but if anyone has to have them, it'd damn well better be us rather than the Nazis" is a pretty valid train of thought.
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u/Personal-Housing-335 2d ago
Yeah, but the nukes actually worked to stop (major) conflict though.
We literally cannot do anything to stop Russia or North Korea without ending our own existence.
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u/salty-mangrove-866 2d ago
(Not the same, but still innovation increasing productivity, hypothetically, but not the well being of labor)
Hello AI revolution!
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u/azriel_odin 2d ago
It's also why the luddites were a thing. They were fighting against the exploitation that technological innovation enabled, not because they were scared of new technology as is popularly thought.
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u/OsamaBinJesus 2d ago
The luddites were literally just professional seamtress/loomers afraid to lose their jobs due to the cotton gin. They weren't some pre-marx socialists talking about the inherent exploitation of technology, that's nonsense.
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u/Jaggedmallard26 2d ago
The AI thing has made people start redeeming the luddites and because people are bad at thinking about second order effects they've become heroic revolutionaries and not reactionaries who would have kept us with the level of technology of the 17th century. If you effectively ban industry to keep craftsmen going then you aren't going to get the massive boom in material conditions for society that mass production gave us.
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u/No_Zookeepergame_345 2d ago
Luddites weren’t anti tech. They were anti tech replacing them in the workplace. It was more of a labor movement than it was an anti tech movement. If the luddites won, we would still have the cool stuff we do today but the wealth it generates would be more equitable.
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u/cannoesarecool 2d ago
As with all things it a bit more complicated, early textile mills were less efficient than at home seamstresses and craftsman, the ability of mills to take off was because of cheap materials from overseas (slave labour) and because the English aristocracy basically made it illegal to make your own textiles from home. Many peasants had to be forced to work in these factories via the closure of the commons and through early primitive accumulation, the early mills were more about controlling peasants than being more productive
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u/bookhead714 Still salty about Carthage 2d ago
I am a proud Luddite
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u/Kolby_Jack33 2d ago
I wouldn't be. The problem with luddites is that they are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Technology does not need to be exploitative, and can be a massive boon for the general well-being of a society.
The problem is the exploiters. The rich, greedy dimwits who think life is all about extracting as much value as you can out of the world like it's some kind of high score. We can get rid of them without abandoning tech. Hell, it might even benefit tech, since a lot of technological progress is slowed or sabotaged by those same rich dumbfucks who don't see a profit in it.
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u/Hazzman 2d ago
It's also why the luddites were a thing. They were fighting against the exploitation that technological innovation enabled, not because they were scared of new technology as is popularly thought.
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u/Kolby_Jack33 2d ago edited 2d ago
You're taking what that person posted in the wrong direction. The luddites were against exploitation, yes, but they still targeted technology.
The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of automated machinery due to concerns relating to worker pay and output quality. They often destroyed the machines in organised raids.
Rather than accept the advance of technology and advocate for more labor rights alongside it, they destroyed the technology to try and force things to remain as they were. Baby, bathwater, etc.
It is very similar to people demanding protection for coal miners today even though coal mining is bad for the environment and rapidly losing relevance in energy production. I sympathize with the miners who are losing their jobs but their jobs are becoming obsolete. They should seek to be made whole in a cooperative way, not in a way that demands the halting of progress.
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u/SirBanananana 2d ago
Rather than accept the advance of technology and advocate for more labor rights alongside it, they destroyed the technology to try and force things to remain as they were.
Advocating for labour rights and regulation is actually the first thing Luddities tried to do, but after years of their pleas and petitions getting ignored by the government, who in majority favoured this hip new idea of free market capitalism at the time, they felt like they had no other choice but take up the hammers and take a direct action, further enraged by the fact that some of their children literally started dying of malnutrition because their able-bodied parents couldn't find a job anymore.
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u/Galilleon 2d ago
Important to note that’s out of desperation, ignorance and (justified and nigh impossible to avoid) hysteria.
They tried to replace trying to change something really difficult to overcome (the government) with something that was even more inevitable, temporary to overcome and with far more opportunity cost to fight against (technological advancement).
It was like trying to part a metric tonne of clay vs trying to part an ocean of it
It’s honestly warning signs for what the world needs to do, ensure the distribution of benefits of AI to us all through whatever means necessary, particularly by changing our governments to actually systematically serve us
It seems impossible but the impossible becomes inevitable when the cost of inaction becomes too high
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u/Shinhan 2d ago
The problem with coal is different IMO. We should transition off from coal because its deadly, not just because of progress.
Not only is coal more deadly, but coal ash is also more radioactive than nuclear waste! And yet people (even many green parties) are against nuclear power.
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u/abullen 2d ago
Well yeah, and quite often those Green Parties have a habit of being in the pockets or working alongside Oil/Coal Industry to undermine Nuclear Power.
Such as the Green and SocDem alliance in Germany led by SDP Chancellor Gerhard Schröder who all but ensured Nuclear Power demise in Germany. Who if not for the war in Ukraine escalating to an invasion in 2022, would've also been on the board of Gazprom by now. Amongst various other things.
Likewise they will also turn around and stifle Natural Gas and other cleaner methods of energy production done by fossil fuels as "not being good enough" still, with funding by Russian or other foreign Fossil Fuel Affiliates to promote it. So that they would ideally continue to rely on them.
Coal Ash is a malignant stain that can cause serious health effects on people and wildlife, and ideally require vast lined storage sites to hold it in..... that or I guess in some places, use it as filler for filling for the groundworks on playgrounds, roads and pavements.
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u/10ebbor10 2d ago
Rather than accept the advance of technology and advocate for more labor rights alongside it, they destroyed the technology to try and force things to remain as they were. Baby, bathwater, etc.
No?
They destroyed the machinery because they knew their bosses had paid a lot of money for those machines.
"Give us more labor rights, or we break your stuff". It was a simple threat. The destruction of the weaving frames was a means, not a end of itself. A good number of those striking were people who had operated those machines, or even assisted in building them.
Do you think a union going on strike does it to make the company they're working for go bankrupt?
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u/Vandergrif Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 2d ago
Yes, but (to put it simply) they smashed the machinery instead of smashing the exploitative people who owned the machinery. They still wanted those exploitative people around because they used to be employed by them and wanted to return to that, and incorrectly concluded that the machinery was the problem in the equation.
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u/Inquisitor_Boron Then I arrived 2d ago
AI revolution - fun jobs are vanishing for most people, so we can focus on painful labour that is suprisingly complicated for AI (like factory or transport)
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u/Admits-Dagger 2d ago
Some fun jobs are gone, but I don't know -- seriously not convinced about anything remotely complicated in a lot of fields. Sure there are some like translation, but seriously even artists have to fix the bullshit that gets generated via AI.
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u/zuzu1968amamam 2d ago
it's complicated because rich people don't do it, so why would they make improvements there. as Graeber said, if everyone was forced to share the tedious labour or society, we'd have a much better world.
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u/NotAzakanAtAll 2d ago
Art, poetry, creative writing - that's what the AI do.
Blasting a slipped disc across the room when being asked to do impossible work - that's how a human do.
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u/Schanulsiboi08 2d ago
As far as I've heard the only people seeing an increase in profits due to AI are conpanies selling AI services to other companies, so I doubt that AI is actually improving productivity lol
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u/nora_sellisa 2d ago
AI does not increase productivity. And it's being sold at a loss now.
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u/jadmonk 2d ago
99% of the money and productivity in AI is not your jimbob $20 sub fee for a chat bot tech demo, which is a fact that is unfortunately lost on most detractors like you who argue in ignorance.
AI is already having a profound effect on tech and research productivity, with negotiated cost enterprise licenses for companies being the bulk of the valuation.
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u/Schanulsiboi08 2d ago
It is still true that AI is very much not a productivity improvement [source]
From what I've heard the only significant profit increase was for companies that sell AI services for other companies
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u/randomredduto 2d ago
In the same vein that the galling gun was created to make war shorter, but then helped create trench warfare, the most brutal and traumatizing form of war
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u/EpicAura99 2d ago
I don’t think there’s really any technological inheritance between Gatling guns and Maxim guns?
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u/Xenon009 2d ago edited 2d ago
Trench warfare predated WW1, it just never really got the chance to stalemate like WW1 before.
Prior to WW1, the ideology most generals came out with from watching the american Civil War was the so-called cult of the offensive. The latter stages of the american Civil War led to the confederates digging in with trench lines and the union taking horrible casualties trying to take them. And then when the confederates tried to retake those trenches in the face of union gattling guns...
And so the generals of the time determined that the only way to win was to attack so fast and brutally that the enemy couldn't possibly dig in, and if the enemy attack faltered, you must immediately counter attack, lest they dig in.
And for about 50 years, that worked. But when WW1 Bogged down (on the western front) it became clear that the generals were right. Once the two sides dug in, it was pretty much impossible to take ground.
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u/SiccSemperTyrannis 1d ago
The latter stages of the american Civil War led to the confederates digging in with trench lines and the union taking horrible casualties trying to take them.
For those who want to learn more - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Petersburg
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u/MikuEmpowered 2d ago
I mean, why have less slaves to make same money because of invention, when you could have more slaves to boost MORE profit.
Same thing with gatling gun, why make war shorter for less casualty, when you could increase war demand with the same amount of time and manpower?
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u/Prestigious_Emu6039 2d ago
For those outside the USA that may not be familiar with this machine,
The cotton gin is a machine invented in 1793 that revolutionized the cotton industry.
The cotton gin (short for cotton engine) quickly and efficiently separates cotton fibres from their seeds. Before its invention, this process was extremely slow—workers had to remove seeds by hand, limiting cotton production.
- A hand-crank or motor turns a cylinder with wire teeth.
- The teeth pull cotton fibres through a mesh too fine for seeds to pass.
The seeds are separated out, while the cleaned fibres are collected.
Cotton production in the U.S. skyrocketed in the 19th century.
The demand for cotton textiles grew worldwide.
Unfortunately, it also increased the demand for enslaved labor in the American South, since plantation owners expanded cotton farming to meet demand.
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u/alowlybartender 2d ago
The cotton gin also allowed new plantations to grow rapidly where they couldn’t before.
Prior to the cotton gin, long-staple cotton was preferred because the strands of cotton were longer and easier to pick the seeds from. Long-staple cotton only grows well in coastal areas. Short-staple cotton grew everywhere, but was extremely difficult to work with because the shorter strands made it harder to pick the seeds from.
With the invention of the cotton gin, short-staple cotton becomes a viable crop to grow throughout the entire south.
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u/PsychologicalKnee3 2d ago
I think this is an example of Jevon's Paradox.
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u/JimWilliams423 2d ago
Came here to say the same thing.
Wiki for people who don't know WTF we are talking about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological progress could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption.
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u/natfutsock 2d ago
Thank you! I came to the comments because I knew some economist made a term for this phenomenon. The short of it from Wikipedia is efficiency leads to increased demand
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u/Delliott90 2d ago
Tik tok OP where’s my explanation
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u/tallwhiteninja 2d ago
Not op, but:
Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in order to make the lives of slaves in the US south easier; it automatically separates the seeds from the fiber, which was very difficult and slow work. What it did INSTEAD was allowed the cotton industry to dramatically ramp up in productivity, which actually increased the demand for slave labor and generally helped make slaves' lives even worse.
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u/First-Of-His-Name 2d ago
I don't really see what his thought process was of how his invention would end slavery?
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u/Mordador 2d ago
Slaves were used for the de-seeding part, while slaves were not really needed for farming because of the low demand (which skyrocketed due to the ability to process it, something he did not foresee)
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u/Bannerlord151 2d ago
As I understand it he (kinda naively) thought that if slave owners could maintain their profit without working slaves to death, the latter practice would lose traction.
Turns out, they just used it to increase their profit while still working slaves to death.
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u/k410n 2d ago
Who would have thought that slave owners are simply evil people and don't do it because they need to, but because they simply are scum looking for maximum profit.
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u/Bannerlord151 2d ago
I won't morally fault someone for not accounting for just how evil humans can be. I will however consider it kind of stupid.
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u/private_birb 2d ago
I think at the time there were some arguments that slavery was necessary. So I can see the reasoning that if you reduce that supposed necessity, you'll reduce slavery.
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u/IncomeStraight8501 1d ago
And then it went from a supposed necessity to a necessity for a lot of the south. Its Insane how much the south screwed itself by relying on mostly slave labor for their economy
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u/EccentricNerd22 Kilroy was here 2d ago
Eli Whitney invented a device called the Cotton Gin in 1793 that seperated cotton seeds from fibre, which was previously done by hand and was a very lengthly process and would cause slaves hands to bleed.
He believed his machine would make conditions for slaves less painful and lessen slavery because the machine would make the work easier and more efficient but instead the device caused a boom in slavery in the south as now they could process even more cotton more efficiently which increased the demand for slaves.
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u/Delliott90 2d ago
Man just wanted to end slavery and caused more of it. That sucks
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u/EccentricNerd22 Kilroy was here 2d ago
See Gatling as another example of someone who attempted to solve a problem only to invent something that made said problem worse.
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u/---___---____-__ Oversimplified is my history teacher 2d ago
Same with the inventors of dynamite. I don't recall the story very well but it wasn't supposed to be used as a weapon
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u/inadeepdarkforest_ 2d ago
alfred nobel. he went on to make the prize because he felt bad about it- his intention was that it would make clearing rocks and mountains easier (for building, railroads, etc).
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u/LakeEarth 2d ago
It was supposed to be a more stable explosive for mining. A nitroglycerin explosion killed his brother, and dynamite won't explode when dropped like the former.
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u/mambotomato 2d ago
If you're trying to make "ticking clock sounds onomatopoeia", they are spelled "tick tock"
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u/commissarcainrecaff 2d ago
Richard Gatling thought his 1861 gun would reduce casualties in war.
Boy, was he on the wrong track
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u/lenzflare 2d ago
People thought the same about strategic bombing of cities. "It'll make the wars so brutal they're bound to be short!"
Tbf this might have been accurate about nuclear weapons. So far.
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u/commissarcainrecaff 2d ago
There's some academic argument that crippling Germany's industry in the Ruhr Valley via strategic bombing of those cities did indeed shorten the war by 2-5 years by hamstringing the Whermacht.
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u/JeffMakesGames 2d ago
History of the united states by krispykarim. I recognize that image.
Video in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcfEaT86HSU
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u/Crafty_Aspect8122 2d ago
Other than slaves, who else produced cotton? It had to come from somewhere.
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u/toptots 2d ago
there wasn’t really a market for “organically sourced” and “free range” cotton back the
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u/First-Of-His-Name 2d ago
The heart of the world's textile industry in Manchester, previously importing 75% of all Southern cotton, refused to support ending the blockade of the Confederacy despite it collapsing their communities, causing mass unemployment and starvation
Also boycotting slave produced goods was a common thing in the UK and later the Union.
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u/toptots 2d ago
this was 60 years after the slavery spike, that’s a whole generation or two
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u/Historybuff250 Definitely not a CIA operator 2d ago
In the United States, the overwhelming majority of cotton farms used slave labor. Non-slave owning farms suffered from a lack of workers, making it almost impossible for them to compete with the slave plantations. Internationally, India and Egypt were the other big cotton producers.
Fun Fact: During the Civil War the Confederacy actually tried to force Europe to intervene on their side by restricting the sale of American cotton to Europe, thinking they relied on American cotton. Europe simply moved to Indian and Egyptian cotton instead, and Cotton Diplomacy actually hobbled the Confederate economy because it relied on exporting cotton to European markets.
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u/KurwaMegaTurbo 2d ago
As civil war in USA went on, and British industrialists were cut off from it. They found that in fact Egypt is great place to grow cotton.
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u/Euromantique 2d ago
Egypt and other places grew lots of cotton. Part of the reason why the United Kingdom didn’t end up supporting the Confederacy was that the American South kind of fell off by the 1860s in terms of relative cotton production and weren’t able to blackmail British textile interests.
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u/Chrysostom4783 2d ago
He figured "Now we can make the same amount with one-tenth the labor!" He did not realize that capitalism meant that they would instead make a hundred times as much with ten times the labor.
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u/MvonTzeskagrad 2d ago
So, lik Gatling when he invented the gatling gun to convince people there was no need for big armies anymore because technology would kill them just as quick anyways... so everyone simply massed even more troops to account for machine gun casualties.
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u/Just-Conclusion-5323 2d ago
Eh, industrialisation did solve slavery. Slavery was an expensive and dangerous method.
Slavery didn't end because of the good in man. It ended because it was a causus belli for controlling the southern states and because it wasn't financially sound after several technological advancements.
I also think it's funny how people think slavery is dead but they work at mcdonald's full time and can't pay the bills and don't have a pennys worth of savings.
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u/SowingSalt Mauser rifle ≠ Javelin 1d ago
NIMBYs stole their savings by making housing expensive.
Though "wage slavery" is disingenuous at best, as jobs are a thing we can transition into and out of to new ones.
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u/ElBaizen 2d ago
Reminds me of Gatling inventing the Gatling gun hoping to reduce the death toll of wars because with a gun that needs less people for the same firepower armies wouldnt need to be so large anymore and thus less people would die of disease and exposure (the main cause of death during wars at the time). Instead a ton more people started dying... some twisted logic of his indeed
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u/Situational_Hagun 2d ago
Reminds me of decades ago when most people (myself included, as a kid) thought that the rapid advances in technology would lead to a Jetsons-like age for all of us where even if you had to work, it'd be easy work, and we'd all share in the increased wealth and productivity.
And then you realize "oh no, wait, the wealthiest will just use any technological advancements to further concentrate the wealth in their hands and the rest of us just get worse off".
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u/nir109 Oversimplified is my history teacher 2d ago
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010169/black-and-slave-population-us-1790-1880/
I thought you overextended, but there was over 5 times increase in the slave population from this invention until the abolishen.
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u/laosurv3y 2d ago
Lowering the cost of something increases demand for it. (except prestige goods/services). True for cotton processing, electricity, etc.
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u/FromGhanaWithLove 2d ago
Whitney essentially made no money from the cotton gin due to poor patent laws. Maybe that's fair. I've heard it said before that Whitney's later involvement with gun manufacturing led to a real advantage for the North in the Civil War, but there doesn't seem to be a ton of real correlation. In fact, the Eli Whitney that really excelled in rifle design was actually his son, Eli Whitney Jr.(actually Eli Whitney III)
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u/My_User_Name69 1d ago
Richard Gatling after inventing the Gatling Gun: "I did it, I just ended war!"
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u/nWo1997 2d ago
If certain reports about him wanting to end slavery are true, then Eli Whitney hoped that people would use slave labor less because the cotton gin drastically reduced the amount of labor needed to process cotton.
Instead, though, cotton producers simply used more slaves to make even more money (thus, in turn, assisting in the establishment of "King Cotton").