Swarthout’s Reviews > The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery to Abolition, 1776-1888 > Status Update

"For the slave-holders, the most vital alliance was with non-slave-owning whites in the South, who not only had to be kept from rebelling against slave-owner rule, but also represented the first line of defence against slave and Indian revolt."

They had great political influence, and could have offered credit only to yeoman farmers, who could have used family labour to cultivate cotton, coffee and sugar....they did none of these things because slave-less farms were not a good credit prospect – they lacked ‘collateral’. Slave-holding planters, on the other hand, had liquid assets at their disposal.

The Second Slavery was increasingly dragged by the Industrial Revolution under way in Europe, creating an intense demand for raw cotton, as European finance transformed the relationship between slave owner and merchant. To understand the Second Slavery it is necessary to see it as the prodigious counterpart to the rise of capitalism in Europe

There was something fetishistic about the preoccupation with whiteness. White sheets, white petticoats, white shirts and blouses, white sugar, white bread, white rice, white ‘icing’ on the cake, white milk and so-called white or ‘blonde’ coffee helped to create a magical world of purity and closure.

Once able to mobilize a subjected labour force to cultivate cotton on the stolen ‘ghost acreage’ of the US South, the cotton capitalists were on their way to achieving a global commercial ascendancy, opening the global "great divergence" between rich and poor countries.