There's cheap land and there's cheap land, what you should compare it to are the price of land in Europe, also a farmer in Tennessee doesn't need the same amount of land as a farmer in Dakota. It wasn't like there was massive amount of land in Brazil either, at least not land Europeans cared to use. Remember the Europeans immigrants doesn't care about the land in the cotton belt, they want land, which was pretty secondary in the Southern economy.
The Confederacy "pulls a Meiji"
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There's cheap land and there's cheap land, what you should compare it to are the price of land in Europe, also a farmer in Tennessee doesn't need the same amount of land as a farmer in Dakota. It wasn't like there was massive amount of land in Brazil either, at least not land Europeans cared to use. Remember the Europeans immigrants doesn't care about the land in the cotton belt, they want land, which was pretty secondary in the Southern economy.
Except there still isn't much. The land is settled. The CS can't compete with the US in cheap land, it just can't. A lot of the US was practically empty outside of Native Americans who nobody cared about at the time outside of the natives themselves. You don't have much of that in the CSA. Brazil had a lot more empty land than the CS did.
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Topography divided the Old South into three (or more) regions with distinct economies.
Tide water saw plenty of fishing and shipping.
Those ships served plantation that owned the best bottom land.
The best bottom land produced agricultural surpluses that could be sold overseas in exchange for foreign-made tools and luxuries. Most slaves worked lucrative bottom lands.
Finally, rugged, mountainous lands had soil too thin for extensive farming. They were inhabited by late Scots-Irish immigrants who moved farther and farther up "hollers" in search of small patches of fertile land barely big enough for kitchen gardens. These "hillbillies" and "white trash" were poor, semi-skilled, recent immigrants who had to resort to hunting, fishing, moonshining, etc. to eke out a living.
The few free blacks who moved to mountainous parts of the Old South also struggled to fish, hunt and garden enough food to feed their families.
There were few slaves in "them thar hills" because the soil was too poor to support large corn or tobacco or cotton plantations.
Industrializing the Old South would start with trade embargoes, then "rice mining" and finally small, water-powered factories along up-country rivers. Those small factories would start building agricultural tools.
Second generation, large factories would be coal-powered and produce rails and rolling stock.
As factories became more sophisticated, literacy became more important, while slaves declined in value.
"The term "rice mining" originated during the Meiji Restoration when rice farmers starved to feed new factory workers. Joseph Stalin starved Ukrainian farmers to pay for industrializing the (new) Soviet Union. Mao Tse Tung imposed similar misery on Chinese peasants. Hitler worked slave labourers to death to prop up his overly ambitious Third Reich .... but slaves only helped Hitler for a few years.
In conclusion, you can shift assets from farms to factories, but "rice mining" is a painful process and not practical in a democracy.
Plus, the products being made....
Well, if you think they're going to be good quality, you got another thing coming.
Particularly if you have a large, rich neighbor to run to. The people in those areas had no where to run to really. Japan was an island, China was surrounded by nations about as poor. The Ukraine is in the middle of nowhere. None of its neighbors were particularly rich.
I think there's massive evidence of different European population settling place after place which was denser populated than CSA and with poorer soil. But let's agree that CSA are somewhat the great exception, because reasons.
Sometimes I don't think Americans understand how big USA truly are, compared to Europe. CSA was three times as big as Austria-Hungary and had less than 1/3 of the population. Austria-Hungary got continued immigration from the rest of Europe through the 19th century, many arriving for the cheap land.
But t let ignore that, let's ignore the large number of Europeans migrating to other areas with very marginal land and simply say together CSA are the great exception.
If we limit it to Oklahoma and Texas, we still have an amount of land (877,536 km2) slightly larger than Pakistan and bigger than Ukraine and Belarus combined. Of course, not all of Texas in the 1860s would count as "open for settlement", and you do still have to clear out the Comanche and others, but that's still a hell of a lot of land.
Yes it easy to forget when you live in a American context where things are bigger. CSA was also something like 20 times the size of Denmark at the same time, had had only slightly above 3 times the population, after Denmark lost a quarter of its territory, it was able remark a area bigger than what was lost of Heath, swamps and marsh in the remnant kingdom into farmland , imagine a country with 1/20th the size of CSA and with 1/3 of the population had around 1/3 of the country which wasn't under the plough, she it have a significant worse climate for agriculture (wheat can only be grown in a relative few places in Denmark before the introduction of artificial fertilizer). While there's a lot of land with inferior agricultural potential in CSA, Europeans was pretty used to transform such areas into more productive land. Also CSA have some benefit over the American west, it's closer to the coast, so people won't have to travel so far, also the warmer climate offer the potential for other crops. We will likely see much more traditional European mixed agriculture than the monoculture of cereal which was popular in the North.
missouribob
Banned
By the time the South paid its war debt, continued paying a standing army to deter Northern aggression, tried to build a modern Navy, and dealt with market shocks that come from having a commodity based economy I have a feeling their industrialization will be very slow. A lot of remaining capital would be tied up in slaves, which while they could be used for industrialization, means foreign direct investment would have to be the way to go for any CSA.
That is all assuming the CSA remains stable into the 20th century AND deters a Northern invasion which are big ifs in their own right.
I'm sure by ATL 2017 the CSA would be as rich as OTL Mexico though.
That is all assuming the CSA remains stable into the 20th century AND deters a Northern invasion which are big ifs in their own right.
I'm sure by ATL 2017 the CSA would be as rich as OTL Mexico though.
It's not economically impossible assuming the rational agent homo economicus repreasents 99.96667% of the population. The population... doesn't. Now I'm not saying that's a requriment, but it helps.
An independent CSA will stard off agrarian based on a cash crop with an expiration date such societies do not usually advance in productive ways. In Japan's case, they had to be shocked out of it, and a CSA that won independence, even with British intervention, won't have such a shock. So they have a backwards minded culture.
However, people do die off. So I imagine this won't happen while anyone who fought the ACW is alive, or their children, or even their great grand-children are alive. But I can imagine them reforming themselves afterwards.
An independent CSA will stard off agrarian based on a cash crop with an expiration date such societies do not usually advance in productive ways. In Japan's case, they had to be shocked out of it, and a CSA that won independence, even with British intervention, won't have such a shock. So they have a backwards minded culture.
However, people do die off. So I imagine this won't happen while anyone who fought the ACW is alive, or their children, or even their great grand-children are alive. But I can imagine them reforming themselves afterwards.
Oh, they'll get a shock at some point. Not ACW round 2, but a major war scare combined with a collapsing economy would do wonders for people's mindset. Or, hell, a limited war with the US, if that's even possible. Or trying to attack Mexico and getting their teeth kicked in by, say, Porfirio Diaz, before the United States yells at them to knock it off.
So there's certainly ways to have this happen between 1861 and 1900.
missouribob
Banned
Problem with this is that by the time the CSA leadership wants to really pull a Meiji it might be too late. I don't think its unimaginable to think of ATL 1910 industrialized USA kicking the South's teeth in for instance. Or the CSA going through its own Civil War.
Basically the stability of the CSA is but one of many problems and they may not productively recover from those shocks you mentioned.
Eh... they might only be 10 years behind today if that happened
The two obstacles that need to be overcome for modernization are infrastructure and ideology.
That would take a miracle. They would be starting in debt 1000% of their entire tax revenue, near hyperinflation, slave labor and all the costs involved with that, a hostile Great Power right next to it, a reactionary culture and reforming itself at least 60 years behind OTL according to your own calculation. It had at least some reform after the ACW. At a guess it would be a half century + behind.
I'll admit they would start major around after 60-70 years after falling even more behind thanks to arrogance from winning the war and the whole racism mentality. And not concered about a "hostile great power" north of them because... well let's be honest. During the War, the North could put anything at their disposal to reunited the country. Post war, people will consider the fight with the South "we lsot, let's get over it." And around this time, OTL America had a few internal troubles they would focus on anyways. So yes, the CSA will be quite far behind before they realize major reforms are nessary and not just "eh, tweak that production method, import a new machine and we're back on track." But pre-Meij Japan was easily more than 300 years behind before the Restoration and in one generation they were, while on par with Britain, at least more efficient economy than say... Italy. OK, the restoration might have helped. It made Japan temporarily an absolute monarchy and the first few reagents were competent and the monarch was competent. Then the next generation it de facto turned into a military junta while de jure monarchy, but the modernization job was almost done. The big thing they never seemed to learn from the British is that "Bread and Circuses" is a better colonizing tool than sexual assaulting civilians. So why can't CSA take a single generation
Although the US may not invade it will be a threat and it will put a large number of troops on its Southern border for a variety of reasons. The CS would have to do the same.
I agree. A Confederacy will look an awful lot like Tsarist Russia in more than a few ways - with some levels of industrialization, sure, but by and large, most of the population is agrarian, as well as holding tremendously backwards and outdated economic and political structures.
You could get an industrial South with an early 1800s POD, but that's not the Confederacy.
Because then they'd be totally destroyed by other powers and blocked from industrializing by the US. It's like if Japan tried to pull a Meiji with a China having long since Meiji'd. Trying to catch up to the much greater industrial power is literally impossible.