What really is the future of the CSA?
- Thread starter EasternRomanEmpire
- Start date
Honestly after hearing both sides of the argument it seems to me that the CSA will have a similar ending to the South American States or be a superior Apartheid South Africa.
Ben Tillman, leading "some reforms to cool it down"?
This is the same guy who IOTL lead a blatant white supremacist coup d'etat and was a proud proponent of lynching, and was well known for his incendiary speeches. Not exactly a sober reformer.
His shift on agriculture IOTL was after the planter class in SC had been severely weakened by economic and political factors in the 1870s and early 1880s. That's never going to succeed in a successful Confederacy, without the Union occupation the planter class would absolutely be able to maintain control. Also, a shift to favor small-time farmers isn't going to fix the industrial issue.
Bol weevil? Anyone?
Yes. But it may be enough to avoid revolution.
Won't be present until the 1900s-1910s most likely (IOTL it only reached America in 1892, and its effects really started to cause crisis by the '20s).
Benjamin Tillman, preventing revolution? I doubt it.
Not Benjamin Tillman. Heck, he may not even enter politics. But agrarian populism in general.
I doubt it. Again, the planter class is going to be much stronger and with all the time and ability to entrench themselves structurally. More likely small-timers are going to continue to be forced out of the market, eventually being reduced to sharecropping and "underpaid overseer with a small family plot in the back corner of the landlord's property" status. Agrarian populism will be a more revolutionary than reformist force with the upper class so empowered.
It's hard to see a credible case for the Confederacy to industrialize. I can imagine that there'd be some genuine sentiment for industrializing in some portions of the Confederacy. But realistically?
The Confederacy's efforts at industrialization would be competing directly with the United States, Britain and France, both of which are much more advanced, with economies of scale and far better developed industries, and larger domestic and international markets. The Confederacy would be entering as a 'low tariff' state, without much in the way of protections, so Confederate manufactures would be competing with foreign imports on an equal scale or playing field. That equality wouldn't extend to other states allowing Confederate manufactures. So there's a systemic disadvantage there that will tell over time. Although I suppose these problems can be overcome by waving a magic wand.
Also, the Confederate states, while possessing plenty of navigable rivers, had some transport problems. Most of these navigable rivers lead to coastal ports on the Atlantic or Caribbean seaboard - that's perfect for an export oriented neocolonial economy. It's bad for an internally integrated economy. It literally costs more for the states to trade with each other, than to ship back and forth overseas. What you get is not a unified economy, but a lot of small, relatively autonomous economies. That makes building a manufacturing base or industrial base difficult. It's hard to develop genuine economies of scale, and internal travel issues raise incremental cost barriers. Of course, this can be overcome by waving a magic wand.
The plethora of navigable rivers also makes for a fairly entrenched low cost infrastructure, which tends to argue against investment in rails and railway infrastructure. Of course, this can be overcome by waving a magic wand.
That's far from an exclusive list. But there are a long list of cumulative structural deficits likely to undermine the Confederacy. It will simply never be an Industrial powerhouse, It will never be competitive to the United States. The most likely outcome is an advanced, relatively wealthy, neo-colonial economy.
There's a lack of sophisticated financial infrastructure and banking systems in the South, likely to carry over into the Confederacy. This in turn leads to issues of capital accumulation, investment choices, etc., all of which tend to argue against investment in industrialization. Of course, this can be overcome by waving a magic wand.
This doesn't mean that there won't be Confederate efforts at industrialization. But the cumulative likelilhoods is that they'll be starved of capital in comparison to alternative economic activities, they'll be small scale, have limited production runs and economies of scale, will have difficulty establishing internal markets and even more difficulty competing with foreign imports. I suspect what you'd have a a sporadic flurry of efforts which peter out over the long and the short term, with the most successful efforts being political projects subsidized by states as they become steadily less competitive.
The Confederacy's efforts at industrialization would be competing directly with the United States, Britain and France, both of which are much more advanced, with economies of scale and far better developed industries, and larger domestic and international markets. The Confederacy would be entering as a 'low tariff' state, without much in the way of protections, so Confederate manufactures would be competing with foreign imports on an equal scale or playing field. That equality wouldn't extend to other states allowing Confederate manufactures. So there's a systemic disadvantage there that will tell over time. Although I suppose these problems can be overcome by waving a magic wand.
Also, the Confederate states, while possessing plenty of navigable rivers, had some transport problems. Most of these navigable rivers lead to coastal ports on the Atlantic or Caribbean seaboard - that's perfect for an export oriented neocolonial economy. It's bad for an internally integrated economy. It literally costs more for the states to trade with each other, than to ship back and forth overseas. What you get is not a unified economy, but a lot of small, relatively autonomous economies. That makes building a manufacturing base or industrial base difficult. It's hard to develop genuine economies of scale, and internal travel issues raise incremental cost barriers. Of course, this can be overcome by waving a magic wand.
The plethora of navigable rivers also makes for a fairly entrenched low cost infrastructure, which tends to argue against investment in rails and railway infrastructure. Of course, this can be overcome by waving a magic wand.
That's far from an exclusive list. But there are a long list of cumulative structural deficits likely to undermine the Confederacy. It will simply never be an Industrial powerhouse, It will never be competitive to the United States. The most likely outcome is an advanced, relatively wealthy, neo-colonial economy.
There's a lack of sophisticated financial infrastructure and banking systems in the South, likely to carry over into the Confederacy. This in turn leads to issues of capital accumulation, investment choices, etc., all of which tend to argue against investment in industrialization. Of course, this can be overcome by waving a magic wand.
This doesn't mean that there won't be Confederate efforts at industrialization. But the cumulative likelilhoods is that they'll be starved of capital in comparison to alternative economic activities, they'll be small scale, have limited production runs and economies of scale, will have difficulty establishing internal markets and even more difficulty competing with foreign imports. I suspect what you'd have a a sporadic flurry of efforts which peter out over the long and the short term, with the most successful efforts being political projects subsidized by states as they become steadily less competitive.
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I find that there's a weird trend on this site where in any "bad guys win" scenario there's a crowd of people eager to argue that the bad guys will regress to agrarianism because "ideological impetus".
>Himmler idealized the "soldier peasant" therefore we can be certain that a victorious Nazi Germany would go Pol Pot on itself and force its urban population to become farmers in the east at gun point
>one of the Kodoha's founders boasted that the Japanese could defeat the Soviets with bamboo pikes therefore we can be certain that they would replace their rifles with Yari if they won the power struggle in the IJA
>the CSA was dominated by a planter elite so therefore any meaningful degree of industrialization was completely impossible!
Guys, the antebellum south was industrializing, and the South Industrialized quite a bit under the wartime pseudo-command economy.
>Himmler idealized the "soldier peasant" therefore we can be certain that a victorious Nazi Germany would go Pol Pot on itself and force its urban population to become farmers in the east at gun point
>one of the Kodoha's founders boasted that the Japanese could defeat the Soviets with bamboo pikes therefore we can be certain that they would replace their rifles with Yari if they won the power struggle in the IJA
>the CSA was dominated by a planter elite so therefore any meaningful degree of industrialization was completely impossible!
Guys, the antebellum south was industrializing, and the South Industrialized quite a bit under the wartime pseudo-command economy.
I don't think that's the sole factor on CSA's discussions.
The way I see it's more people responding to this underline idea that if we have some White people speaking English, they must become a global powerhouse. Hence we have all those tropes about CSA, after leaving a total war, with 1/3 of its population enslaved, just to turn around to proceed the conquest the whole Latin America. Failure is for others.
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I don't think we're going to see 0 industry anywhere kind of scenarios, that would be absurd, but suggesting that the CSA is going to have manufacturing even remotely comparable to agriculture as far as the dominant part of the economy is quite a huge stretch. The entire CSA's industrial power in 1860 is very much consistent with a agrarian economy where the planter elite is not interested in transforming the economy so that its dominated by industrialists and bankers - not of somewhere about to blossom into being any sort of industrial power.
Given that what happened during the war saw the government fail to be able to even maintain the existing rail system (as far as simply not being able to produce enough wheels and rails, for example), I think that supports this:
rather more than the idea of some tightly centralized Confederacy having both the means and desire to become anything more than an industrial lilliputian. Not because "bad guys" (if "bad guys" meant "agrarian", OTL would not be how history unfolded), but because the factors favoring meaningful industrial development are pretty overwhelmed by the factors hindering it.
Tredegar for example is very credible. So is the Augusta Powder Works. It's not typical, however.
The difference is that the Nazis didn't give a shit about their slaves, since the jews and slavs were disposable. Ditto for the Japanese. It'll be a different scenario for the South, although I do get your point (and did consider it possible) but with the rise of Marxism the presence of an indentured class around industry could be very dangerous for the CSA.
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I understand the push back to the old tropes, especially the Golden Circle lunacy, but there's a fair few steps between "industrial powerhouse" and "banana republic" which are probably more likely. IMO it being a Spain-tier industrializing economy in the year 1900 seems more likely than either extreme.
The planters weren't a monolith, and there were some who realized that their longterm prosperity and the longterm value of slavery as an institution required diversifying their investments. The camphene (a terpentine-based flammable fluid) industry was basically the result of Georgian planters looking for other applications of their slaves, and it was actually out competing oil for lighting in antebellum America. Similarly, the Georgian textile industry was relatively healthy because planters realized its booms and busts were the inversion of their own (low cotton prices resulted in high returns from the mills) allowing them to stabilize their income by buying into them. This doesn't mean the CSA would be industrially prosperous by any means, but I think there'd probably be quite a bit of light industry (textiles, lumber, distilleries) similar to Canada prior to the wheat boom.
Not sure why people act like the planters wouldn't just move towards conventional agriculture or industrialization. I mean in most cases even in places where people say the planter class did everything in their power to stop industrialization isn't fully true as in many cases they did try to diversify. In many cases there were more issues to deal with, or in some cases just regressed due to economic and political circumstances. I mean for a time South America had several nations that could in theory take on the US in a naval war with thing becoming worse later on as the US rose.
I can totally see the CSA at least becoming strong enough that the US simply trying to conquer it and annex it would be so difficult that the US decides not to do so.
I can totally see the CSA at least becoming strong enough that the US simply trying to conquer it and annex it would be so difficult that the US decides not to do so.
They weren't a monolith, but the general trend does not suggest much movement towards "industrial power" for the CSA on the whole - emphasis used because it's probably going to be really easy to find areas of "but these guys in this state did this" for just about anything one would want to argue and I don't want to suggest that.
Table 1 - The Productivity Differential Between the Canadian and U.S. Manufacturing Sectors: A Perspective Drawn from the Early 20th Century
Table 1 for The Productivity Differential Between the Canadian and U.S. Manufacturing Sectors: A Perspective Drawn from the Early 20th Century
www150.statcan.gc.ca
These are not large numbers even considering Canada's population in 1900 is five and a half million.
It's not so much, IMO, "doing everything in their power to stop industrialization" as "doing very little to encourage industrialization" - industrializing is going to take capital, and my money is on the planters not seeing "the CSA needs to industrialize" as preferable to their own incomes - so you might see more of what SealTheRealdeal mentioned in Georgia, but probably not massive increases in rail production out of something like how it would be "good for the CSA" to be not be dependent on imports there.
Can you provide some evidence to the contrary? You’re saying that as a whole it wouldn’t be supported. What do you base this claim on.
I don’t know. Pre war they were starting to invest heavily into the railroad and iron industries particularly in the Alabama-Georgia-East Tennesse area. The seeds which would later grow into Birmingham, for instance, had already been planted before the war through planter investment in the Northeast and Southwest Alabama railroad. I’d like to see some evidence that this trend wouldn’t continue.
I believe a worsened Brazil is the most likely scenario (and I don't think Brazil is that bad: I'm actually being quite positive regarding CSA).
By the 1860's, slavery was a dying institution in Brazil whereas on CSA was still universal. The Great European immigration to Brazil only picked up for good after the abolition of slavery something that would happen much later on CSA if ever. Therefore, mass European immigration seems unlike and mass White immigration northwards to the US would be a factor.
It was an extremely brutal society and uprisings, revolutions would be a constant threat. I don't see such society thriving and having the bare minimum of societal stability to move forward.
The economic data (looking at the census for example) is pretty strong evidence of how much investment was put into Southern industry as a whole, I think. It certainly doesn't indicate that the planters were generally speaking eager to build railroads and iron mills over growing cotton.
Nothing every anywhere would be an exaggeration, but even in California there's technically some industry related to producing locomotives for example. It's not rea
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This is the kind of thing that is why I don't think the overall trend is suggesting this region is moving towards being something other than an industrial illiputian. Some people some of the time in some places is not enough for "would absolutely industrialize just fine".
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