(fwd from Rakesh) reply to DMS on Post

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

dms writs:

>In an earlier post not on Post I believed I
>reproduced data from the census of 1850 and other periods about the
>absolute values of manufactured instruments used by each state in
>agricultural production, total agricultural output, total manufacturing
>output.  It isn't
>just farmers buying and using articles, its the reorganization of property
>that allows for expanded reproduction of the system as a whole. That is the
>critical import of the US Civil War, and that is why slavery was
>destroyed...If the output, the productivity, and the rate of growth don't
>seal the deal then I have no way of convincing anyone.


please repost the data.  Post attempts refutation of Fred Bateman and
Thomas Weiss' finding that "the market for industrial goods was not
substantially different in the South and the Midwest before the Civil War."
They also argue that both markets were narrow. p. 324 in Post.

Post neither summarizes their data nor offers his own data to resolve the
dispute.

Counterhypothesis:

If the South's importance was no longer primarily as market or source of
merchant activity but as a supplier of cotton to the growing textile
industry, then wouldn't that explain why the Union could not let it secede
and rather had to turn through military force into a dependency.

Is that what partially distinguishes American capitalism from its European
counterparts--that its colonial, raw material supplying dependencies  were
within its territorial borders (including mining in the Southwest)? Of
course American industrial capitalism had little problem with unfree, if
not defacto slave, forms of exploitation within its 'internal' and
'external' colonies. See for examle Eveyln Nakano Glenn's book on Unequal
Freedom, a history of the racialization of the formally unfree status
of  American minority workers.

Yours, Rakesh



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