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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2010
A low rate of growth of world demand for cotton figures prominently in recent attempts to understand the post-bellum retardation of the southern economy. Gavin Wright, especially, stresses this factor in several articles and a recent book.1 Using-sophisticated regression techniques to estimate the rate of growth of demand for American cotton during both the ante- and post-bellum eras and the magnitude of the change in the rate between them, Wright finds a decline of more than two thirds. Such an occurrence could hardly have helped the South make a prompt recovery from the Civil War.
1 Wright, Gavin, “Cotton Competition and the Postbellum Recovery-of the American South,” this Journal, 34 (Sept. 1974), 610–35Google Scholar; “Prosperity, Progress, and American Slavery” in David, Paul et al. , Reckoning With Slavery (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; The Political Economy of the Cotton South (New York, 1978)Google Scholar; “The Efficiency of Slave Agriculture: Another Interpretation,” American Economic Review, 69 (Mar. 1979), 219–26Google Scholar.
2 Wright, The Political Economy, p. 97.
3 Ibid., p. 96.
4 Wright, “The Efficiency of Slave Agriculture,” 225.
5 Wright, “Cotton Competition,” 632–33.
6 Hammond, Matthew B., The Cotton Industry (New York, 1897), pp. 270–71Google Scholar.
7 An attempt to replicate some of Wright's regression equations for both the ante- and post-bellum periods was highly successful. The objections to Wright's methodology in this paper refer in part to his concepts and in part to his non-econometric statistical work.
8 Watkins, James L., King Cotton (New York: 1908), pp. 29–31Google Scholar. Wright has used other sources in his work, including Hammond, The Cotton Industry, U. S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1960)Google Scholar, and an earlier work by Watkins (see appendix). In my calculations (not all of which are reported here) I have also used several different sources and modifications of the U.S. supply data (for example, including and excluding the previous year's stocks) but have found the general conclusions to be insensitive to these changes in procedure.
9 Fogel, Robert and Engerman, Stanley, “The Economics of Slavery” in The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York, 1971)Google Scholar. These scholars use commercial rather than crop year price and quantity data to make their estimates.
10 Sundbärg, Gustav, Aperçus Statistiques Internationaux (New York, 1908), p. 286Google Scholar. It should be noted that the estimates of the rate of growth of world demand shown in the table probably are too low since they are based on data that do not include consumption in the Far East. By the end of the nineteenth century, according to Sundbärg, Asian consumption represented about 15 percent of world consumption and was growing faster than world consumption because of the rapid development of the Indian and Japanese textile industries. But even if it were possible to extend Asian consumption data backward far enough for inclusion with the rest of the Sundbärg data, the decade-bydecade impressions of world demand after the 1860s would probably not be changed very much since the most significant developments in the Far East occurred after 1885.
11 World consumption data for the nineteenth century, or at least parts of it, are not hard to come by. See, for example, Ellison, Thomas, The Cotton trade of Great Britain (London, 1886), Ch. 8Google Scholar. Rates of growth of combined U.S., U.K., and other European consumption calculated from Ellison's data are nearly identical to those calculated from Sundbärg's data.
12 Wright, The Political Economy, p. 94.
13 Wright, “Cotton Competition,” 630.
14 Ibid., 611.
15 These results also were tested for plausibility by computing the rate of growth of demand for American cotton by means of the year-to-year averaging method for the periods 1866–70, 1866–79, and 1870–80. A price elasticity of demand of 1.5 was assumed. The estimates were, respectively: –2.88, 0.91, and 3.03 percent per year.
16 Saul, S. B., The Myth of the Great Depression, 1873–1896 (London, 1972), p. 37Google Scholar.
17 The main source for the data and analysis in this paragraph is Ahmed, R., The Progress of the Jute Industry and Trade, 1855–1966 (Dacca, 1966)Google Scholar.
