Dr. Brian Schoen. Photo courtesy of the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission
Dr. Brian Schoen‘s “Southern Wealth and Global Profits: Cotton, Economic Culture, and the Coming of the Civil War” will appear in The Transnational Significance of the American Civil War, edited by Jörg Nagler, Don Doyle, and Marcus Graeser (Palgrave-Macmillan Press, 2017).
Schoen is Associate Professor of History at Ohio University.
The chapter examines the ways in which cotton politics at home and cotton diplomacy abroad shaped the emergence of a transatlantic free trade movement, the politics of slavery, and the sectional crisis. By focusing on the ways in which U.S. control of international raw cotton supply was perceived to have shaped British policy toward the United States in the 1840s and 1850s, it demonstrates the confidence that secessionist brought into their dis-unionist agenda. Conversely it shows how northern political economists such as Henry Carey and Stephen Colwell ultimately rejected the King Cotton position, using it and early Confederate policies as support for taking a harder stance against Pro-Cotton, Pro-Slavery traitors they perceived as attacking northern interests.
For more on Schoen’s research and teaching, visit his History Department profile.
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