ABSTRACT
As the rate of growth speeds up, merchandise and capital imports increase, and the balance of trade turns unfavorable. Seigneurial display that rested upon consumer debt, whether that debt was held within the South or by northern financiers, was inconsistent with growth, as "productive" or at least producers' debt would not have been. This inequality need not have restricted income growth in the presence of strong demand pressures in the world cotton markets. The analysis of slavery and plantation agriculture, and their implications for growth, in particular, ought to be set in a structural context of fairly continuous gradations from subsistence agriculture, at one extreme, to large-scale, fully urbanized industrialization, at the other. The more important questions relate to the kinds of agriculture that can support growth and to the population density that can be sustained as development gains momentum.
