When the Industrial Revolution arrived, the UK expanded its Empire in the following century--the 19th. It built roads and railways all over its Empire, and in general brought the process of industrialisation to many parts of the world. But, you say, if America had remained in the British Empire, it would have also remained an agricultural and raw materials supply base, the British would not have brought industrial practices to the Americas. You seem to have no justification for this except that Britain wanted to protect its textile industry. But America was an independent country, it developed British technology independently and it did industrialise, or at least the North did. The reasons the South did not, seem to be obscure for now. Although having a well-established slave population and trade might have been one of the reasons, is what I think some historians are saying.
It built roads and railways to transport its raw materials. It brought industrialization nowhere. Contrast the Great Lakes regions of the US and Canada, in the century after American independence. Colonial empires do not normally build up their colonies to be economic rivals, and their colonized peoples to be the new wealthy and ruling classes. Britain was a very good country to have been a colony of - witness the fates of Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Dutch colonies - but it was not some kind of qualitatively aberrant geopolitical entity never before or after seen on the planet. Again: the slave plantations of the Confederacy were enormously profitable. The Confederacy was rich, dominant, successful, growing, with future expansion to the west promising even greater wealth and power. The wealth being made and accumulated by the plantation owners far outweighed the meagre and dirty returns to their counterpart capitalists of northern industry - whose treatment of their labor forces was not exactly an exemplification of moral virtue and high ethical standards either, btw. You might as well ask why the Princes of Saudi Arabia do not abandon their oil wells and genteel lives to invest their money in shoe factories or take over management of steel mills.
The Industrial Revolution started in Britain. The British were a colonial power, and they couldn't prevent European countries from industrialising. It's difficult to imagine what an American colonial system would be that the colonial power prevents from industrialising. It would have to, for instance, prevent any Europeans from emigrating to the colonies who were educated enough about the new technologies to become "start-ups". That aside, and whether the War of Independence was a mistake, the US was basically two different countries with different infrastructure by the time of Lincoln. The South looked like a colony that had been prevented from industrialising, but it prevented itself, or rather, didn't perceive a need to do so. The industrialised (and industrialising) North had something the South didn't so much, which was factories and mass production. Yes, enormously. Being a slave trader was usually profitable too. The South was politically powerful, enough to support the elites in the South and maintain a slave market. But the South lost because it couldn't outproduce the North. You can't make bullets out of cotton.
No, it isn't. Until 1776, that's what we had. Besides, you don't have to imagine, or read the standard theories and analyses: you can compare the progress of US industrialization with that of large, resource rich areas that remained under colonial domination for many years into the 1800s - India, Brazil, China, Indonesia, Mexico, SubSaharan Africa, Canada is especially interesting because it shared a border with the center of US industrialization. So is Texas. You can make canvas with it. The need for cotton in the North was such that the Union traded with the Confederacy for it during the Civil War itself, paying high prices: http://www.civilwarhome.com/kingcotton.htm and European countries - especially Britain - were happy to provide weapons and ammo and clothing and even naval warships in trade for cotton. Had Britain not built up a reserve of cotton in readiness prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, they might even have been induced to throw in on the Confederate side. http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/291/cotton-and-the-civil-war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_and_the_American_Civil_War The Civil War was not the industrial production contest the later World Wars became. Both the Union and the Confederacy faced ammunition shortages during the Civil War, for example. The fact that it was by initial circumstance fought mostly in the Confederacy, destroying the railroads and factories etc of the Confederacy rather than the Union, was a bigger factor on the material side. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Confederate_States_of_America https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/drw01 The contrast in manpower side of things had the larger effect: The South lost mostly because it had an army half the size of the Union's and had to deplete its labor base to field even that (which was the real penalty of Confederate slavery, more than the industrialization delay), a navy relatively even smaller, and the best experienced Naval officers of the US did not commit treason and join the Confederacy in the large numbers the Army officers did. The fact that the Confederate soldiers were taller and stronger and better fit and better led might have made more of a difference in past eras, but in the world's first modern war it turned out that a rifle doesn't care how tall you are. https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/facts.htm
But was the lack of industrialisation in those colonies because Britain actively suppressed it? They didn't or couldn't suppress the industrialisation of other European countries, and I don't think they would have succeeded in suppressing it in their American colonies if they still held them. Places like India and China weren't industrialised when they could have been. What did the British have to protect, and why would colonial industries have been competitors, when the British government could control them? I think it really goes back to the conditions needed for an agricultural industry to transition to mechanisation. These earlier industries were present in the parts of the Americas settled by people who wanted to build towns and centres of, initially agricultural, trade and industry. The Southern plantation states were not settled by people who had the same outlook, there were few dense population centres. One theme of the North vs South conflict was that it was about the South having been left behind. What real chance did the Confederacy have? They thought they would be fighting an "old-fashioned" war, and it wasn't--the importance of the new railroads as a strategic asset perhaps wasn't appreciated fully, like it might have been.
It might be worth considering the mining of coal in this discussion. It was coal mining for steam engines and for steel production that got Britain off to a head start. Manufacture of any sort depended on steam (or sometimes water) power and steam soon came to require high quality steel (to avoid burst boilers).
We know that colonial powers do attempt to suppress rival industrialization and maintain dependency - the whole point of having a colony is to profit by it, after all. We know that once freed of colonial rule, but not until, the former colonies often industrialized rapidly. Has there ever been an example of a colonized people rapidly industrializing? There are many examples of economic development following freedom from colonial rule. There are essentially no examples of industrialization of a colony - the reverse, usually. The profits. The profits accrue to those who add value. The imperial power makes sure that value is added, and the profit obtained, by itself. The entire purpose of a colony is to feed the homeland industry with the raw materials necessary for manufacture and other high profit endeavors, for the enrichment of the imperial power and its economic elites. That's why colonies are established. They aren't charities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India_under_the_British_Raj https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cotton The South was ahead - richer, better educated, trading internationally, more civilized and more powerful, and looking forward to an expansion of its wealth and power into western lands. The descendants of those people, whose wealth was taken from them ("freed") by the Union Army, make up the electoral base and voting power of the Republican Party.
Afraid I have to take issue with this. It doesn't jibe with this, for example: --http://rjensen.people.uic.edu/cw-2.htm Which was in the third year of hostilities. I think one needs to bear in mind that this was the first ever military conflict which involved factories and mass production, it also involved the new railway systems and the North had more of both than the South did. If it was going to be a war of attrition (it was), the South's initial strategy of effecting a quick victory would have to depend on something other than just men with guns. Part of the Confederacy's confidence was because of something you mentioned, better trained and more willing troops, better officers etc. But they didn't have better resources or ways to make cotton into bullets. You can trade cotton for munitions, but not if your enemy has blockaded every major port. So initially, yes, the South was "better educated, trading internationally, more civilised (or its white population was at least) and more powerful (politically, but as it turned out, not militarily), and looking forward to expansion . . . ". So I think my statement that the North outproduced the South (as the Civil War progressed towards a Total War situation) is accurate. But the Republican Party was initially those industrialised states in the Northwest and Midwest. So now those states are mostly Democrat? So what happened (apart from two world wars)?
Absolutely. But not decisively. The South traded for its ammo, etc. But so did the North, to a significant degree. The North, although far more industrialized than the South, was forced to buy weapons and ammunition (and cotton) from others, and was continually plagued by shortages. It was a matter of degree, not kind. What the South was most short of was manpower - its army was less than half the size, and even then represented far more of a depletion of the civilian labor force than the North's. It wasn't so much the factories of the North, but the densely populated cities, that most overwhelmed the South. Notice that in the World Wars of the next century, which were industrial production wars, smaller armies backed by bigger industrial bases won, and the attrition of the enemy's industrial base was key. In the Civil War the bigger army won, and the significant attrition was of healthy fighting men - as well as farm workers back home. The South had railroads enough, at the beginning. The North wrecked them or seized them. The key factor there was that the War was fought in Confederate territory, for the most part. The blockade was damaging, but not enough to prevent the South from trading cotton for whatever it needed. There were plenty of blockade runners - especially from Britain, which had the munitions and needed the cotton and of course had decades of commercial relations with the richest sector of its former colony. The increasing shortage of cotton to trade was a a factor- as manpower was bled into the army, increasingly even the young and old, cotton production fell. That was also a cause of food shortages, draft animal shortages, and so forth. At one point in the Civil War, the Confederacy was trading cotton for food and supplies - with the Union. Cotton was the oil of its day. Many of the Rust Belt and Midwestern States are reliable Republican votes, and have been since Reagan broke the unions. It's a long story, but the key event that structured the current demographics of the two Parties was the co-option of the racially bigoted Confederacy by the Republican Party beginning with Nixon's campaign in 1968, which was designed to appeal especially to racially prejudiced white men in the South, but was expected to and did pick up a lot of the bigot vote in the North as well. It was called the "Southern Strategy". This was in direct reaction to Democrat President Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights initiatives in the mid '60s, which created the opportunity by alienating the white men in the Confederacy. Nixon's behavior set it back a term, but it recovered with great success under Reagan and remains the basic Republican Party campaign approach to this day. There are other factors as well - such as the migration of the disproportionately Republican upper middle class and elderly from the North to the South in retirement, the fantastically huge flight of black people from the Jim Crow South (may still hold the record for human migration on this planet), the demographic trends associated with wealth and ethnicity, and so forth. But the Southern Strategy is what led to Donald Trump, Republican Presidential Nominee.
