Comment by tomdell
11 days ago
Industrialization relied heavily upon raw materials generated cheaply with slavery - cotton picked in the American South was exported and was a necessity to fuel the industrialization of textile production in England, for example. There is a reason that industrializing and industrialized countries that relied on slavery and other exploitative economic relationships have achieved greater wealth than more newly industrializing countries have. America's wealth is largely supported by cheap labor and raw materials in other countries, opened up for the use of international corporations by state-sponsored violence - see America's history of interfering in South American politics or Chiquita's recent guilty verdict for sponsoring paramilitary forces in Colombia.
It is not true that "cotton . . . was a necessity to fuel the industrialization of textile production in England".
England produced so much wool that it exported most of it (to other European countries). Flax was also very common.
Factories full of steam-powered machines were going to replace the existing arrangement in which most households on farms and in villages manually spun their own yarn and wove their own cloth with or without access to cheap cotton.