When we think of cotton, the plantations of the southern states of America come to mind. Films such as Gone with the Wind and 12 Years a Slave have made common knowledge the suffering of slaves working in the cotton plantations of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana in the nineteenth century. Yet the association with the American South obscures the fact that as late as the end of the eighteenth century, little cotton was cultivated in the USA.
In the eighteenth century, cotton plantations exploiting slave labour were already in existence in the West Indies. Cotton cultivation was first practised in Barbados in the 1620s, spreading to the Bahamas in the 1630s and Jamaica in the 1670s. Even here production remained small as late as the 1730s. For example, the French possession of St Domingue produced less than 300 tonnes of cotton a year.
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