From Lincoln to Nixon, Trump’s not the first US president to shock the UK on trade

Abraham Lincoln, whose cotton blockade of the southern states hit Lancashire’s mills. Photograph: Library of Congress

1862: Lancashire cotton famine

After the American civil war began in 1861, President Abraham Lincoln tried to hamstring the economy of the southern states by blockading cotton exports. Yet that cotton was mostly sent to northwest England, and when supplies dried up in 1862, around 60% of cotton mills of Lancashire stopped production, causing huge hardship, job losses and hunger – and a riot in Stalybridge.