Coercion and Resistance in the Colonial Market: Cotton in Britain’s African Empire

Throughout the nineteenth century, the American South was the world’s leading producer of raw cotton. European — especially British — textile firms used American cotton to supply the world with cheap manufactured cloth. The African continent was on the periphery of this transatlantic circuit: forced into slavery and transported to the Americas, African peoples supplied much of the agricultural labour on which the cotton industry rested, but the African continent itself remained isolated from the expanding reach of the ‘empire of cotton’