During the Civil War, cotton diplomacy was an attempt on the part of the Confederation to put the European powers in their favor in the conflict, generating scarcity of cotton to raise its price and demonstrate its theoretical capacity to influence European production.
By 1860, the south had four million slaves - a third of its population - who maintained their booming agricultural economy. This would be one of the triggers of the American civil war, since then the greater part of the North had prohibited the slavery to which the South did not renounce; without it, cotton production could not have been duplicated every decade since 1800, nor could seven states account for 75% of world production. With such credentials the doctrine of King Cotton was born.
When the war began, the south effectively paralyzed its exports and the manufacturing sectors of England and industrial Europe went into crisis. However, the Confederation overestimated the importance of cotton, since, although in England the textile sector was dependent on the American South, a quarter of its food supplies came from the North.