Um, it didn’t. I was sort of agreeing with post 12, that invention, imports, technology, trade are disruptive, even destroying of old orders, and economies.
The gin did destroy, for the most part, black cotton picking. But, they went on, or were released to do other things, and especially after the Civil War, rebuild the destroyed South.
For example, the Erie canal, was dug by hand. It gave work to ten’s of thousands for years. The steam shovel, burning wood and later coal, put those guys out of work.
I once worked in a automated golf ball making plant. Only a handful had anything to do with making a million near always perfect golf balls. With in memory of a few older workers were memories of a hundred women working in cold rooms winding rubber around cores, that were then covered with the skin.
Japan has what they call dark factories. They are dark because no one is in them. They are 100 percent automated, unless something breaks, then they turn the lights on.
This is what technologhy does.
I could imagine some day, no one working on wheat farms. All the machines being controlled from a desk in New York or Tokyo.
Just the opposite is true. The Cotton Gin made cotton, and slavery the most profitable business on earth.
The Cotton Gin didn't pick cotton. It just removed the seeds from cotton balls after they were picked by hand.
“The gin did destroy, for the most part, black cotton picking.”
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Wrong! Do you really know what a gin is? I go back to WWII, I was born in ‘44, I have crawled the rows with a cotton sack while being stung by the green caterpillars and driven mad by gnats in the hot sun.
The gin CREATED the demand for slaves to pick cotton. The cotton PICKER ended the demand for people to pick cotton and it didn’t end totally until I was in high school. When I entered first grade in 1950 we had a full classroom but two or three years later I noticed that many of my classmates who were now just big enough to pick cotton would miss the first six weeks of school. These were WHITE children of course. Many farmers in those days refused to use the mechanical picker because it left so much cotton unpicked, yields were much lower then and sometimes the whole crop was little more than what a mechanical picker leaves unpicked today but cotton is much cheaper because of the picker and the gin and the multi row tractor so no human can pick enough by hand to be worth trying. If cotton were not so cheap you would have seen people in the fields picking what the mechanical picker left on the stalk.