"How the British Caused the American Civil War"

This is 18 months old but fascinating.  I would say it's worth your time.  Here's the audio, and here is the transcript.

"Secret History of the Civil War: Noor Bin Ladin Interviews Richard Poe" is the title of Noor Bin Laden's podcast with Richard where they discuss Poe's article, "How the British Caused the American Civil War," @ Lew Rockwell, December 31, 2021.

1:03  So Richard, as you and I have both followed, there’s been a lot of talk the past few months on this question of, quote, “national divorce,” and, as you know as well, there’s been a recent poll, published, I think, by the University of Virginia. They claim that 41 percent of Biden supporters and 52 percent of Trump supporters are now supposedly in favor of secession. And, as you’ve seen as well, a lot of media, talking heads, and political pundits, they keep pushing this narrative over and over, also on social media. And, well, the last time there was talk of secession it led to the Civil War, which is the topic of your latest article, entitled, “How the British Caused the American Civil War.” And in your piece, you reveal fascinating aspects of the conflict, which have been suppressed and outright lied about. I’m quoting now from your piece, “War came for the same reason it always does, because powerful men wanted it, and stood to gain by it.” And you also rightly pointed out, “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.” For this reason, and, you know, considering the current predicament the U.S. finds herself in, I think it’s really crucial that this part of history be examined, and we can really all be grateful that you’ve endeavored to shine light on the true motives and instigators of this war. So I’d like you to tell us a bit what you’ve uncovered, and what you exposed in that latest article of yours.

Richard Poe: Sure. Basically, what I uncovered is that our Civil War was instigated by foreign, European powers, primarily by the British. They were the prime instigators and the ringleaders, and they got other European powers involved. The British, in particular, had a very strong economic interest in the South. British scholars Gallagher and Robinson, in their famous 1953 paper, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” they actually refer to the American South as a “colonial economy” of Britain. And that’s quite accurate.

What happened was, after the American Revolution, the British succeeded in reestablishing a classic colonial economy based on the cotton trade from the South. Basically how that worked is the South sold most of its cotton, about 70 percent, to England, and, in return for this, the British sold them manufactured goods.

This is a classic colonial relationship, in the sense that the raw materials and foods are created in the colonies, sent to the mother country, sold very cheaply, then the mother country sells manufactured goods back to the colony, which the colony needs because they can’t make their own manufactures, either because they’ve been forbidden by law to make them, as was the case in America before the Revolution, or, as in the case of the antebellum South, they couldn’t make their manufactures simply because all their resources and money were taken up in producing cotton to supply England, the mother country.

The South understood very well that the British did not want them building factories, and so they didn’t. They obeyed the British, as every good colony does, because it was in their economic interests.

The class of wealthy planters who raised cotton in the South, their interests were in doing whatever the British wanted them to, and what the British wanted was for them to produce cotton as cheaply as possible, which is why they had to use slave labor, because the British had other sources of cotton, and were constantly trying to develop other sources, in places like British India, Brazil, Egypt. The British always kept that price pressure on the South. The South understood they had to keep their prices low or they might lose their livelihood.

So these Southern planters, the kind of people we see in Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara, and her family, people like that, we see they were very wealthy. They were wealthy on English money, from selling their cotton to England. Now, typical of a colonial economy is that you have a colonial elite which are the Southern planters, but then everyone else is subsisting at a very low level, and these would be the slaves; these would be the poor whites. And so everyone else becomes a serf or a slave in some form or another. This is the colonial predicament, all over the world. Basically, the British had re-colonized the South after the Revolution and reestablished economic control over the South.

6:55  So the North was trying to cure this situation. The North was building its own textile mills, to compete with the British textile mills. What the North wanted was to replace England as the primary trade partner of the South, and the way the North put this pressure on the South was to impose tariffs on foreign trade which made it prohibitively expensive for the South and Britain to trade with each other. The South resented this very much, the British resented it even more, and this led directly to secret negotiations between the British government and the South, encouraging the South to secede from the Union and promising diplomatic and even military support, if necessary.