Could Cotton have been King without Slavery?

Well, cotton required a ton of slave labor in the South to be profitable to begin with. Yes, Egypt did it with free labor as did India, but their culture and economies were very different. The economy of the South was based on racial subordination and used human beings as property to make as much money as possible. The South without slavery would have had a different economy in the first place.

And yet cotton continued to be a major crop even after slavery was abolished. I’m not seeing many address that heffalump in the room. Sharecropping served the planters pretty well.
 
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