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The Lancashire Cotton Famine

In Our Time

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The Confederate South's Embargo on Cotton Is a Miscalculation

Lawrence Goldman asks why the Confederate South was so confident that if they stopped cotton going to this country, Britain would crumble. Why were they so confident of that? Well there's a phrase which they used in the 1850s, King Cotton, or Cotton is King, and it goes back to speeches made by a Senator Henry Hammond. So many people depend upon it, that civilization itself would collapse in Britain, and it was a miscalculation. The determination to make as it were Britain pay through stopping the cotton flowing comes spontaneously.

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