The destruction of the civil war, the reconstruction afterwards, and the cost of transitioning social structures is definitely a confounder for your graph. Even then, there are more general reasons we might not expect total cotton production to increase despite increased efficiency per worker. The person you’re respond to didn’t provide any sources, but surely there are per-acre or per-person comparisons somewhere?
There is detailed analysis in the 1975 study Time on the Cross by Nobel winning economist Robert Fogel. The field has even better data or methods since then, but I’m not an economist and can’t point to them—all I know is that most secondary sources agree that plantation slavery had high agricultural productivity.
The destruction of the civil war, the reconstruction afterwards, and the cost of transitioning social structures is definitely a confounder for your graph. Even then, there are more general reasons we might not expect total cotton production to increase despite increased efficiency per worker. The person you’re respond to didn’t provide any sources, but surely there are per-acre or per-person comparisons somewhere?
There is detailed analysis in the 1975 study Time on the Cross by Nobel winning economist Robert Fogel. The field has even better data or methods since then, but I’m not an economist and can’t point to them—all I know is that most secondary sources agree that plantation slavery had high agricultural productivity.