Did the cotton gin increase slavery?

Before the invention of the cotton gin, the production of cotton for textile was very labor-intensive and uneconomical. The way a cotton boll grows, the fibers are interspersed with the seeds. To make useful material, the seeds would have to be picked from the bolls by hand which expended a great deal of man-hours. The cotton gin allowed cotton fibers to be separated from the seeds mechanically without a great deal of supervision. This allowed for industrial scale production of cotton at a time when texile mills in Great Britain were also becoming mechanized. The demand for cotton and the ability to process cotton in quantity meant that cotton needed to be produced in volume. Slaves were imported as a means of providing the manpower necessary to plant and harvest the large quantity of cotton.