Saphroneth
Banned
In the first place, how do you imagine that's going to work? Canada produced enough food to feed itself and also exported enough food for over a million people - if you seriously think that Canadian food production is going to go down by over a third by the enlistment of a hundred thousand people (of which a fair fraction are going to be town dwellers) then you seem to think that (1) Canada had less than 300,000 farmers and (2) the British would recruit from the proportionately small fraction of the population (in that case) living on farms.In an Anglo-American War, the typical plan is to use 100,000 Canadian militia, plus anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 British regulars. All of these people will be consuming, not producing food, so there will probably be little or no excess Canadian wheat for them to ship to Britain. OTOH, the only year-round ice-free port available to British North America was Portland, Maine, which will not be available to the British in an Anglo-American War.
There is no way I can possibly see that recruiting 100,000 militia out of a population of 2.5 million causes the food output of the province to drop by nearly a third. If you've got a way, show me by showing your assumptions - number of farmers in Canada, how much food produced per capita, how many farmers enlisted into the militia and how this results in a need to import food rather than export.
In the second place, yes, Portland was the only year-round ice-free port. But when do you think most export shipping took place?
It wasn't during the time when the St Lawrence was frozen, because the way of getting grain to market was as much about lake and canal traffic as about rail lines.
And in the third place, capturing Portland is not impossible - it's an operation similar in nature to New Orleans, though with much less preparation time for the Union to defend Portland. There were plans for it, and I've discussed in the past how I think the landing would likely be done (landing east of Saco to cut the rail line, then marching roughly parallel with it to reach Portland the same day).
Yes, they'll go up - but OTL in the Civil War they were abnormally low. How high do you estimate they'd go, in rough terms?None of this refutes my point that British food prices will go up in an Anglo-American War.
To within ten shillings a Qr would do.
Oddly enough, it'll rise back to how it was outside the Civil War. That is, the price of living (due to the price of food) will not be low rather than being high.I and others have simply pointed out that an Anglo-American War means that cheap American wheat will not be available to Britain, so the cost of living will rise in Britain.
Seems at least one person did:No one has advocated "the starvation blockade of US farms", and I'm not sure what you even mean by the phrase. No one said that depriving Britain of American wheat was a strategy, let alone a war winning strategy.
As did another, imagining a kind of anti-British pressure group of grain producing countries:1848 would be the most effective time for the USA to embargo food exports to England.
Did you at any point look at the figures for exports and grain production provided in this thread? The French, Germans and Russians are the next three big producers until after the mid 1870s and the Russians have every reason to cooperate with American economic pressure on Britain after 1854.
It's also an idea that's been floating around for decades.
I'll admit it doesn't fit the technical definition of dumping, but it is selling an excess at a lower price than normal. US grain captured more of the market than normal in the first half of the Civil War, and at the same time the price went down.Hardly seems like 'dumping' (as Saph put it) or unfairly undercutting.
That has much the same impact as dumping, though in a short-term sense.
The US was selling externally what they weren't selling internally, producing a glut.
I'm not so sure it is. The amount of money needed to offset spending is (as I've calculated above) $27 million a year.The money on the American side to offset losses from Grain exports is clearly there
The amount of money the US Federal Government made through customs is $69 million in 1862-3. The amount of money produced from the goldfields in California is about $30M a year.
What this means is that a grain embargo and replacement of income to farmers ($27M) is added to the costs, and the amonut of money from the goldfields and from customs ($99M totalled) is removed from the profits. OTL in 1862-3 the Union had a governmental revenue of $111 million (including customs, but I'm not sure if it included gold fields) and gained $596M from loans and printing money, as against $715M expenditures - resulting in the treasury reserves declining from $13M to $5M. (The fact that the amount of money in the treasury was not sufficient to pay for the grain export replacement compensation should be taken as indicative that an embargo by itself, without any kind of blockade or indeed war, would mean the US would have to raise more money some other way.)
Assuming a war with Britain involved no extra expenditures whatsoever apart from the grain payment, the US governmental expenditure would jump to $742 million and the revenue would drop to $42 million (assuming a perfect blockade, which may not be the case, but the extra expenditures I've not factored in make up for this). This would mean that to avoid bankruptcy the Union would need to borrow and print money to the tune of ~ $700M, while having $30M less in gold available to back it.
This means the ratio of earned income to borrowed income would go from the OTL (15.7% of income earned) to the TTL (5.7% of income earned) - the latter being the situation which caused the Confederacy serious economic problems with the viability of their currency. Essentially the compensation to farmers adds to the economic woes of the Union because the economy is already seriously stretched - Lincoln in OTL was making comments like "the bottom is out of the tub", and that was after the resolution of Trent without a war.
There would certainly be economic hardship to both sides from a blockade and embargo - but to the British it would merely cut off a small fraction of governmental revenue (that from direct trade with the Union, about 5% of total governmental income at about £4M out of £70M) and would result in a cost-of-living increase from food (the price of wheat would go up to that in the disorder-wracked years of, say, 1868?), while to the Union it would be materially worse in terms of lost revenue (customs alone being 62% of US governmental revenue, and customs on trade with Britain bein 36% of governmental revenue) than if the British had become completely unable to collect any kind of customs duties at all (which would cost them 34% of British governmental revenue).
For the British, the embargo/blockade puts them in the situation from the 1850s in terms of grain prices and supply; for the US, the embargo just adds a further non-trivial cost onto an already strained system under as much stress as would happen for a couple of decades either side.