The cotton gin Eli Whitney
Don’t forget James Watt, he perfected the steam engine which then enabled steam-driven looms. Turns out long-staple cotton fiber worked really well in those looms.
Before that, even your socks were expensive, you had to pay all that labor which went into making them. Cheap machine-made cotton cloth, a clothing miracle, and England had an empire to sell it to the world.
They bought all their raw cotton fiber from the American South. Suddenly the fastest way to a million dollars was your own cotton plantation. Slave-grown cotton. 80% of the Southern economy.The South got stuck in a time warp that would ultimately destroy it.
