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Yeah Germans have contributed alot. It is no surprise to me the entire white civilized world comes out of there. Anglo saxons, angles and saxony, tribes from germany originally. Its no accident they dominated the world while the scotts just made a drink. Look at the rest of east europe. Austria hungary, look at what austria is today (modern 1st world germanic nation) and hungary (3rd world ghetto where pornstars come from)
It may surprise you but western civilization generally has its origins traced to Greece and Rome. All of those German tribes were basically trying to be Romans and later adopted many Roman customs and institutions. I like Germany, I travel there a lot and have several close friends who live there...they would get a big laugh out of you calling Germany the cradle of western civilization. As for Austria and Hungary, you want to know the real difference...Austria was on the western side of the iron curtain...Hungary wasn't. If you've ever been to East Germany in the years following the collapse it was pretty much a third world ghetto full of future pornstars. The one thing East Germany had was vibrant West Germany to drag them kicking and screaming into the modern age.
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Originally Posted by Frihed89
It's both a crazy and interesting question. Slavery was profitable, but the garment industry would certainly have evolved differently. Europe was the biggest source of demand prior to the conflict, but as the Union grew they would have had to make some sort of accommodation in order to import cotton and or cotton goods, depending where the processing grew.
However, had the Union caved in, a lot of what happened in the short-term would have depended upon whether the Radical Republicans and old Whig Republicans maintained their power over the more accommodating Democrats.
Would slavery have survived? For a while, probably, but the pressure to end slavery would have been strong from the South's European trading partners. The question is how could the South have modernized to cope with this? That's an interesting question.
The cotton industry was a very important part of the Northern and Southern economies. There would have been tremendous short-term economic adjustment problems up North, too. How would the Union have modernized?
Also, once slavery did end, wouldn't there still have been a mass exodus of former slaves to the more-developed North? Or would the North have clamped down on immigration?
So many questions to answer, to answer the question. But I think, on the whole, the economic consequences in the short-, and perhaps the long-, term to both economies would have been problematic.
The economic problem a victorious South would have faced was that the people who used to buy all of their cotton had found new sources that they controlled and were more stable. When the British managed to grow a hybrid cotton strain in India around 1862/3 that was as high quality as what the South produced, it was the end of the Southern cotton empire. Britain now had a stable supply of cotton that they controlled and an almost unlimited labor source to cultivate it. The South's number one customer now had no need for Southern cotton.
Weird replies, namely the ones assuming that the states of the Confederacy wouldn't do rational things for its national self-preservation.
1. Just the same as the United States junked the Articles of Confederation after the Revolution, the Confederacy would probably recognize the need for some kind of more powerful central authority, particularly with the United States as the convenient bogeyman on its northern border.
2. Slavery would have ultimately been recognized as economically untenable. How that would have affected the lot of blacks in the South is anyone's guess.
3. If the South had indeed prevailed, that would mean that the long, destructive campaigns of Sherman, et al, would not have occurred. Therefore it's reasonable to believe that cities, rail networks and the region's nascent industry would have been preserved. What's more, assuming that the vital cotton farming industry was not destroyed in the war, the South would have been able to rely on that as a source of capital.
4. The Southern states would have probably wound up carving out their own mini sphere of influence in places such as Cuba and Central America, possibly even annexing large chunks of Mexico after the overthrow of Maximilian. The South and the North might have even had unwritten agreements in place.
5. The Southern states would have played catch up in industrial development. To be sure, the states of the Confederacy would not have caught up with the North, but it almost certainly wouldn't have been content remaining a largely agricultural region. What's more, the location of a large proportion of the country's domestic oil reserves in the South would have put an interesting spin on the future economic development of the North.
disagree with the maximilian part, they would have never won
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