Editing Cotton gin (section)

===Effects in the United States===
[[Image:17 09 024 jarrell.jpg|thumb|left|Cotton gin at [[Jarrell Plantation]]]]
Prior to the introduction of the mechanical cotton gin, cotton had required considerable labor to clean and separate the fibers from the seeds.<ref>Hamner, Christopher. [http://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/24411 teachinghistory.org], "The Disaster of Innovation", retrieved July 11, 2011.</ref> With Eli Whitney's gin, cotton became a tremendously profitable business, creating many fortunes in the [[History of the United States (1789–1849)|Antebellum South]]. Cities such as [[New Orleans, Louisiana]]; [[Mobile, Alabama]]; [[Charleston, South Carolina]]; and [[Galveston, Texas]] became major shipping ports, deriving substantial economic benefit from cotton raised throughout the South. Additionally, the greatly expanded supply of cotton created strong demand for textile machinery and improved machine designs that replaced wooden parts with metal. This led to the invention of many [[machine tool]]s in the early 19th century.<ref name="Roe1916"/>

The invention of the cotton gin caused massive growth in the production of cotton in the United States, concentrated mostly in the South. Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850.  As a result, the region became even more dependent on [[plantations in the American South|plantations]] that used black slave labor, with plantation agriculture becoming the largest sector of its economy.<ref>{{cite journal|author=Pierson, Parke |url=http://www.historynet.com/seeds-of-conflict.htm|title=Seeds of conflict|journal=America's Civil War|date=September 2009|volume=22|issue= 4|page=25}}</ref> While it took a single laborer about ten hours to separate a single pound of fiber from the seeds, a team of two or three slaves using a cotton gin could produce around fifty pounds of cotton in just one day.<ref>Woods, Robert (September 1, 2009). "A Turn of the Crank Started the Civil War." ''Mechanical Engineering''.</ref> The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850.<ref>{{cite journal|author=Smith, N. Jeremy|title=Making Cotton King|journal=World Trade|date= July 2009|volume=22|issue=7|page=82}}</ref> The invention of the cotton gin led to increased demands for slave labor in the [[Southern United States|American South]], reversing the economic decline that had occurred in the region during the late 18th century.<ref>{{cite journal|author=Robert O. Woods|title=How the Cotton Gin Started the Civil War|journal=The American Society of Mechanical Engineers |date=December 28, 2010|access-date=17 September 2020|url=https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/how-the-cotton-gin-started-the-civil-war}}</ref> The cotton gin thus "transformed cotton as a crop and the American South into the globe's first agricultural powerhouse".<ref>{{cite journal|author=Underhill, Paco|title=The cotton gin, oil, robots and the store of 2020|journal=Display & Design Ideas|volume=20|issue=10 |year=2008|pages=48}}</ref>
[[Image:Lummus Cotton Gin Advertisement.JPG|thumb|right|An 1896 advertisement for the Lummus cotton gin]]

The invention of the cotton gin led to an increase in the use of slaves on Southern plantations. Because of that inadvertent effect on American slavery, which ensured that the South's economy developed in the direction of plantation-based agriculture (while encouraging the growth of the textile industry elsewhere, such as in the North), the invention of the cotton gin is frequently cited as one of the indirect causes of the American Civil War.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Follett |first=Richard |title=Plantation kingdom: the American South and its global commodities |last2=Beckert |first2=Sven |last3=Coclanis |first3=Peter A. |last4=Hahn |first4=Barbara |date=2016 |publisher=Johns Hopkins University Press |isbn=978-1-4214-1940-4 |series=The Marcus Cunliffe lecture series |location=Baltimore}}</ref><ref name=WarCause>{{Cite web |last=Kelly |first=Kelly |date=July 21, 2020 |title=What Were the Top 4 Causes of the Civil War |url=https://www.thoughtco.com/top-causes-of-the-civil-war-104532 |access-date=September 11, 2023 |website=ThoughtCo}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last=Ryan |first=Joe |title=What Caused the American Civil War |url=https://americancivilwar.com/kids_zone/causes.html |access-date=September 11, 2023}}</ref>