IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fednls/87081.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Crisis Chronicles: The Cotton Famine of 1862-63 and the U.S. One-Dollar Note

Author

Abstract

When the U.S. Civil War broke out in 1861, cotton was king. The southern United States produced and exported much of the world’s cotton, England was a major textile producer, and cotton textiles were exported from England around the world. At the time, many around the world depended on cotton for their livelihood. The South believed this so deeply that when the North blocked Southern ports to cut off the South’s primary means of financing war—cotton sales—Southern leaders were sure that Britain would enter the war on their side. That never happened. So when cotton supplies dried up in late 1862, thousands in Manchester and Lancashire who either directly or indirectly depended on cotton for a living found themselves without work. In this post, we describe the British cotton famine of 1862-63 and the stoic British national response. We draw primarily from a fascinating BBC Radio broadcast on the subject and John Watts’ matter-of-factly named Facts of the Cotton Famine, published in 1866.

Suggested Citation

  • Donald P. Morgan & James Narron, 2015. "Crisis Chronicles: The Cotton Famine of 1862-63 and the U.S. One-Dollar Note," Liberty Street Economics 20151120, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
  • Handle: RePEc:fip:fednls:87081
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2015/11/crisis-chronicles-the-cotton-famine-of-1862-63-and-the-us-one-dollar-note.html
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    famine; king cotton; cotton;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • N2 - Economic History - - Financial Markets and Institutions

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fednls:87081. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Gabriella Bucciarelli (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbnyus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.