war zone ensured the system would be ruined at war's end. The enormous cost of the Confederate war effort took a high toll on the South's economic infrastructure. The direct costs to the Confederacy in human capital, government expenditures, and physical destruction totaled perhaps $3.3 billion. By 1865, the Confederate dollar was worthless because of high inflation, and people in the South had to resort to bartering for goods or services to use scarce Union dollars. With the emancipation of the slaves, the entire economy of the South had to be rebuilt. Having lost their enormous investment in slaves, white planters had minimal capital to pay freedmen workers to bring in crops. As a result, a system of sharecropping was developed in which landowners broke up large plantations and rented small lots to the freedmen and their families. The main feature of the Southern economy changed from an elite minority of landed gentry slaveholders to a tenant farming agriculture system. The disruption of finance, trade, services, and transportation nodes severely disrupted the prewar agricultural system and forced Southerners to turn to barter. The entire region was impoverished for generations. World War I The British used their greatly-superior Royal Navy to cause a tight blockade of Germany and a close monitoring of shipments to neutral countries to prevent them from being transshipped to there. Germany could not find enough food since its younger farmers were all in the army, and the desperate Germans were eating turnips by the winter of 1916–17.The alternative theories of Nicholas A. Lambert, Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War (2012) are refuted by John W. Coogan, "The Short-War Illusion Resurrected: The Myth of Economic Warfare as the British Schlieffen Plan," Journal of Strategic Studies (2015) 38:7, 1045-1064, DOI: 10.1080/01402390.2015.1005451 US shipping was sometimes seized, and Washington protested. The British paid monetary compensation so that the American protests would not escalate into serious trouble. World War II Clear examples of economic warfare occurred during World War II when the Allied powers followed such policies to deprive the Axis economies of critical resources. The British Royal Navy again blockaded Germany although with much more difficulty than in 1914. The US Navy, especially its submarines, cut off shipments of oil and food to Japan. In turn, Germany attempted to damage the Allied war effort via submarine warfare: the sinking of transport ships carrying supplies, raw materials,