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How Did a Bale of Cotton Connect Slavery to Global Capitalism? - Enslaved Labor and the Financial Architecture of the Cotton Trade | Sleepy Facts About History
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In the decades before the American Civil War, a single bale of cotton compressed on a Mississippi dock represented far more than agricultural produce. It was a unit of global commerce, a financial instrument, and the physical result of coerced human labor. This episode follows one bale of cotton from a plantation in the American South to a textile mill in Manchester, tracing the complex network of credit, insurance, and international trade that bound enslaved laborers to Northern bankers…
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