Feast and Famine

This chapter presents a picture of the British cotton trade on the eve of the American Civil War, describing both the pre-eminence of that trade and how it had been attained over the previous century and a half. The relative merits of three major recent studies of the history of cotton, notably Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, are discussed. This is followed by a consideration of how the issue of slavery, and the threat to its survival, influenced the British trade before the war. There is a detailed description of how the Liverpool brokerage system controlled the trade in raw cotton and how it was intended to operate.