This begins to change in the early 19th century, when “the rapid expansion of Mississippi Valley slave labor camps enable the United States to seize control of the world export market for cotton” (82), with cotton accounting for forty-two percent of the value of US exports by 1820. However, technical innovation counts for nothing if the machines do not have raw products to process, and the US is struggling to meet the growing demand. A “new class of factory-owning entrepreneurs” extract “massive profits” and “textile revenues” (80), significantly boosting the British economy. He asserts that slavery was neither inherently inefficient nor a counterpoint to capitalism. Baptist takes passionate issue with such assumptions. Cotton cloth had previously been a hand-woven luxury product but “mechanical innovations and a new division of labor” (80) swiftly turn it into a booming industry in 19th-century Britain. In 'The Half Has Never Been Told,' Edward E. This shift is variously known as “modernization, the industrial revolution, the Great Divergence” (80). At the turn of the 19th century, a small number of countries, “beginning with Great Britain, shifting onto a path of sustained economic expansion that produce higher standards of living and vastly increased wealth for some-and poverty for others” (79).
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