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Now if you can explain to me how paid labor in India and Egypt could provide lower prices than slave labor, I would like to hear it, but it looks to me that without Lincoln stopping the trade, Cotton would have continued to be bought from the South in large quantities by the Europeans.

A similar topic is still discussed in our own day: whether peasant small cultivators of crops like cotton, coffee, tea, cocoa and rubber can compete with large plantations that pay poorly or not at all. There may be economies of scale that make the big operation cheaper per units produced. But living standards and costs in developing countries are low. An African, Asian or Latin American peasant family doesn't need to make big profits. They just need enough to stay alive and keep the farm going.

Rates of exchange matter a lot. If your currency isn't worth much on the international market, you might well be able to compete with large operations, even large slaveowner operations. Land and soil management is also a factor. A lot depends on whose operation degrades the soil and whose enriches it. American plantation owners could also count on having more land than the cultivated and moving to new plots when the old soil was exhausted. But all in all, whether Egyptians or Indians could outcompete the American slaveowners is not a simple question question to answer.

Cotton factors (also called cotton brokers or commission merchants) weren't all Northerners by any means. The idea that Yankees fanned out all over the South to buy up every last bole and bale and ship it away is a little silly. Most of the factors were Southern and had offices in Southern cities. Some of them bought and shipped cotton directly to Northern or European factories. But they also were looking to find the market where cotton would bring the most money.

New York City was the center of shipping, insurance, and finance. It was easier to finance and insure ships sailing from the place where the money was. There were other speculators in the city willing to buy the cotton in hopes of selling it for still more money. That was what they spent their lives doing, and it would have been foolish to expect them to buy high and sell low to satisfy the planters' ideas of economic justice. Ships that took cotton from New York city could count on bringing large quantities of European goods on the return trip. The New York metropolitan area had a large population and the city was connected to others by an extensive railroad network. No Southern city could compete with New York in terms of market size.

I believe Southerners had the option of using Canadian or West Indian ships for coastal shipping. My understanding is that these were exempt from the restrictions imposed on ships from the British Isles. But they don't appear to have used that option. They did ship directly to Britain and Europe. That they didn't ship more is as likely to be the result of New York City's commercial advantages than of any nefarious legislation. They could also have spun and woven their own cotton, but they chose not to do that on any large scale either.

Several chapters of a relevant book are available here: Fair to Middlin': The Antebellum Cotton Trade of the Apalachicola/Chattahoochee River Valley. Ships could leave the small port of Appalachicola directly to Europe or to Boston and Providence for the textile mills in the area. That so many went to New York was because of the economic advantages of doing so.

There's a shell game in which people enjoy the advantages of government policies that benefit them and cry "free market" about those that they believe don't benefit them. Don't be naïve and take such claims at face value.

Neo-Confederates refuse to accept that while the slave economy brought riches to the plantation owners, that success came with a price. A price that held back progress in industrialization and gave the North an advantage.

Banks in the UK invested heavily in the development of the United States. The faster pace of shipbuilding and laying rail lines in the North reflected industrialization that drove the denser population of big cities. That growth was aided by a cheaper cost of money.

“The dread of slave insurrection and civil discord,” the Cotton Supply Reporter complained, was ever present. Even the London money market reflected these concerns, as bonds for southern railroads carried higher interest than those for northern roads. “This mistrust arises,” reported the Westminster Review in 1850 “from a shrewd calculation of the dangers, in both a moral and physical sense, which hang over a state of society whose foundations are laid in injustice and violence.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/383660/

DiogenesLamp to x: "Now if you can explain to me how paid labor in India and Egypt could provide lower prices than slave labor, I would like to hear it, but it looks to me that without Lincoln stopping the trade, Cotton would have continued to be bought from the South in large quantities by the Europeans."

What we know is that Brits in 1860 bought something like 75% of their cotton from the US, the remainder from countries like Egypt & India.
This suggests that US cotton was more reliably & cheaply available than other sources.
As the Civil War began, before Lincoln's blockade kicked in, Confederate exporters decided to withhold their produce from markets as an act of "Cotton Diplomacy" in hopes of encouraging countries to recognize the Confederacy diplomatically.

However, early in the war Confederates withholding their cotton was not a huge problem for most countries because importers had previously accumulated reserve stocks of raw cotton they could draw down -- think of it a little like today's strategic reserves of oil.
But in time shortages of raw cotton did begin to bite, and that drove cotton prices high enough to encourage more production in places like Egypt & India.

After the Civil War US cotton production quickly recovered and doubled from pre-war levels by around 1880.
However, the US never recovered our dominant position in the cotton marketplace.
Today the US produces four times more cotton than in 1860 & exports about 20% of the world's raw cotton, we're #2 behind India, producing slightly more than China or Brazil.
India is the #1 producer, China the #1 exporter.

World cotton exports, US #2

World cotton production, US #2

There may be economies of scale that make the big operation cheaper per units produced. But living standards and costs in developing countries are low.

Lower than the South? If slavery cost more than free market labor, I have no doubt that all the slave holders would have suddenly had moral epiphanys about abolition.

I am assured by my knowledge of historical human greed, that the economics worked out to the favor of the existing system at that time.

The New York metropolitan area had a large population and the city was connected to others by an extensive railroad network. No Southern city could compete with New York in terms of market size.

What good is a large market that has no money to purchase your items? The way New Yorkers were getting their foreign money is by taking 60% of the total value of production of Southern exports.

Cut off that exploitation and they wouldn't have the money to purchase imports, big market or no. They had to get their hands on the European money, and their export values only amounted to About 28% of the total exports from the US, and some of that was due to textile exports dependent upon Southern cotton.