Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd
Debatable. The thing that allowed slavery to really boom in the US is that the industrial revolution drove a boom in demand for cotton (and to an extent other agricultural products as it generated urban populations who could afford to buy and ship them from far away) but hadn't yet mechanized agricultural *production*. Britannica-6 is a tech heavy world-line though, it's doubtless filled with all kinds of (admittedly not very standardized) agricultural machinery that will do who knows what to the economics of cotton plantations.
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At the end of the Civil War, slavery just shifted to a different name and slightly different structure. Rather than outright legal ownership of other human beings who had no rights whatsoever, the southern planters shifted to a system of sharecropping, in which rights were never respected and black labor was kept in line by informal pressure that included "company stores," systemic debt, and lack of education, as well as terror and murder.
The fact is, cotton remained a labor intensive crop throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and that meant the planters used any means necessary to keep labor cheap. If the institution of slavery hadn't been destroyed through violence, it would have persisted until the labor was no longer required.
That took place at the end of WWII, with the development by International Harvester of a mechanical cotton harvester that cut labor needs by more than 75 percent. That freed up lots of black labor who, no longer needed or wanted in the rural south, began to migrate in large numbers to northern cities -- especially the feed yards and meat-packing plants of southern Chicago.
So, the key thing is the presence of mechanical harvesting of a labor-intensive, highly valuable, cash crop. If that exists, then the economic incentive for slavery ends -- but until that ends, slavery will exist in some form.