b'were a virus that attached to our intention at the cellular level, divorcing heart from mind, blinding us to all that compassion would see. What else can it be called but economic madness, the affliction that enabled the guilt-free sale of those first 20 and odd African slaves near Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619? And all that followed, from plantation to mill to bank to power, from colony to country to corporation to credit default swap, from pound of flesh to pound of pesticide, from community to commodity, from hand of slave to invisible hand of market? Cotton proved as ruthless a king as any that had come before. As it became the first global consumer commodity, it catapulted America into prominence as a global economic power. The key to cottons kingdom was unpaid slave labor. Cotton was the most important raw material of the industrial revolution that created our modern world economy. . . Cotton also drove U.S. expansion, enabling the young country to grow from a narrow coastal belt into a vast, powerful nation with the fastest-growing economy in the world. 3The combination of slave labor, virgin land and navigable waterways undercut other world cotton producers; most of what was produced in America was exported, and most of that to Great Britain. Fortunes made by Southern plantation owners fed fortunes made by Northern mill owners, which fueled fortunes in finance and trade. In 1836, the total amount of economic activitythe value of all the goods and services producedin the United States was about $1.5 billion. . .More than $600 million derived directly or indirectly from cotton produced by a million-odd slaves. 4By 1860, two million slaves were harvesting two billion pounds of cotton, roughly two-thirds of the world supply. If that werent enough, King Cotton proved over time to be the cruelest of kings in other ways, too. It takes 1,320 pounds of water to produce 3 The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Edward E. Baptist (Basic Books, 2014), p. 1134 Baptist, p. 32214'