What was the effect of the Civil War on the cost of cotton?

Question

Contemporary economics warns us that if you make goods significantly more expensive to produce, the costs will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. So that makes me wonder: what data do we have available on the effects of the Civil War, and particularly the liberation of the slaves, on the price of cotton? How big of a difference did it actually make?

Answer 1

The price was indeed affected greatly by the liberation of slaves, so much so that it almost directly aligns with what you would expect intuitively. In England, the price soared from $.10/pound to $1.89/pound from just 1862-1863, which shows the impact it had on the world economy. In 1860, the American South produced 2 billion pounds of cotton, a scale that was unprecedented in those times and still a gigantic figure nowadays. It truly crippled not only the Southern economy but the world economy and could definitely argue that it attributed to the industrial revolution.