Empire of Cotton

Introduction

Edgar Degas views the empire of cotton: merchants in New Orleans, 1873.

In late January 1860, the members of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce assembled in that city’s town hall for their annual meeting. Prominent among the sixty-eight men who gathered in the center of what was then the most industrialized city in the world were cotton merchants and manufacturers. In the previous eighty years, these men had transformed the surrounding countryside into the hub of something never before seen—a global web of agriculture, commerce, and industrial production. Merchants bought raw cotton from around the world and took it to British factories, home to two-thirds of the world’s cotton spindles. An army of workers spun that cotton into thread and wove it into finished fabrics; then dealers sent those wares out to the world’s markets.

The assembled gentlemen were in a celebratory mood. President Edmund Potter reminded his audience of the “amazing increase” of their industry and “the general prosperity of the whole country, and more particularly of this district.” Their discussions were expansive, touching on the affairs of Manchester, Great Britain, Europe, the United States, China, India, South America, and Africa. Cotton manufacturer Henry Ashworth added superlatives of his own, celebrating “a degree of prosperity in business which has probably been unequalled in any previous time.”¹

These self-satisfied cotton manufacturers and merchants had reason to be smug: They stood at the center of a world-spanning empire—the empire of cotton. They ruled over factories in which tens of thousands of workers operated huge spinning machines and noisy power looms. They acquired cotton from the slave plantations of the Americas and sold the products of their mills to markets in the most distant corners of the world. The cotton men debated the affairs of the world with surprising nonchalance, even though their own occupations were almost banal—making and hawking cotton thread and cloth. They owned noisy, dirty, crowded, and decidedly unrefined factories; they lived in cities black with soot from coal-fueled steam engines; they breathed the stench of human sweat and human waste. They ran an empire, but hardly seemed like emperors.

Only a hundred years earlier, the ancestors of these cotton men would have laughed at the thought of a cotton empire. Cotton was grown in small batches and worked up by the hearth; the cotton industry played a marginal role at best in the United Kingdom. To be sure, some Europeans knew of beautiful Indian muslins, chintzes, and calicoes, what the French called indiennes, arriving in the ports of London, Barcelona, Le Havre, Hamburg, and Trieste. Women and men in the European countryside spun and wove cottons, modest competitors to the finery of the East. In the Americas, in Africa, and especially in Asia, people sowed cotton among their yam, corn, and jowar. They spun the fiber and wove it into the fabrics that their households needed or their rulers demanded. As they had for centuries, even millennia, people in Dhaka, Kano, and Teotihuacán, among many other places, made cotton cloth and applied beautiful colors to it. Some of these fabrics were traded globally. Some were of such extraordinary fineness that contemporaries called them “woven wind.”

Instead of women on low stools spinning on small wooden wheels in their cottages, or using a distaff and spinning bowl in front of their hut, in 1860 millions of mechanical spindles—powered by steam engines and operated by wage workers, many of them children—turned for up to fourteen hours a day, producing millions of pounds of yarn. Instead of householders growing cotton and turning it into homespun thread and hand-loomed cloth, millions of slaves labored on plantations in the Americas, thousands of miles away from the hungry factories they supplied, factories that in turn were thousands of miles removed from eventual consumers of the cloth. Instead of caravans carrying West African cloth across the Sahara on camels, steamships plied the world’s oceans, loaded with cotton from the American South or with British-made cotton fabrics. By 1860, the cotton capitalists who assembled to celebrate their accomplishments took as a fact of nature history’s first globally integrated cotton manufacturing complex, even though the world they had helped create was of very recent vintage.

But in 1860, the future was nearly as unimaginable as the past. Manufacturers and merchants alike would have scoffed if told how radically the world of cotton would change in the following century. By 1960, most raw cotton came again from Asia, China, the Soviet Union, and India, as did the bulk of cotton yarn and cloth. In Britain, as well as in the rest of Europe and New England, few cotton factories remained. The former centers of cotton manufacturing—Manchester, Mulhouse, Barmen, and Lowell among them—were littered with abandoned mills and haunted by unemployed workers. Indeed, in 1963 the Liverpool Cotton Association, once one of cotton’s most important trade associations, sold its furniture at auction.² The empire of cotton, at least the part dominated by Europe, had come crashing down.

This book is the story of the rise and fall of the European-dominated empire of cotton. But because of the centrality of cotton, its story is also the story of the making and remaking of global capitalism and with it of the modern world. Foregrounding a global scale of analysis we will learn how, in a remarkably brief period, enterprising entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen in Europe recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry by combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers. The very particular organization of trade, production, and consumption they created exploded the disparate worlds of cotton that had existed for millennia. They animated cotton, invested it with world-changing energy, and then used it as a lever to transform the world. Capturing the biological bounty of an ancient plant, and the skills and huge markets of an old industry in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, European entrepreneurs and statesmen built an empire of cotton of tremendous scope and energy. Ironically, their shocking success also awakened the very forces that eventually would marginalize them within the empire they had created.

Along the way, millions of people spent their lives working the acres of cotton that slowly spread across the world, plucking billions of bolls from resistant cotton plants, carrying bales of cotton from cart to boat and from boat to train, and working, often at very young ages, at “satanic mills” from New England to China. Countries fought wars for access to these fertile fields, planters put untold numbers of people into shackles, employers abbreviated the childhoods of their operatives, the introduction of new machines led to the depopulation of ancient industrial centers, and workers, both slave and free, struggled for freedom and a living wage. Men and women who had long sustained themselves through small plots of land, growing cotton alongside their food, saw their way of life end. They left behind their agricultural tools and headed to the factory. In other parts of the world, many who had worked at their looms and who wore clothing that they themselves had woven found their products overwhelmed by the ceaseless output of machines. They left their spinning wheels and moved into the fields, now trapped in a cycle of endless pressure and endless debt. The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a site of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, farmers and merchants, workers and factory owners. In this as in so many other ways, the empire of cotton ushered in the modern world.

Today cotton is so ubiquitous that it is hard to see it for what it is: one of mankind’s great achievements. As you read this sentence, chances are you are wearing something woven from cotton. And it is just as likely that you have never plucked a cotton boll from its stem, seen a wispy strand of raw cotton fiber, or heard the deafening noise of a spinning mule and a power loom. Cotton is as familiar as it is unknown. We take its perpetual presence for granted. We wear it close to our skin. We sleep under it. We swaddle our newborns in it. Cotton is in the banknotes we use, the coffee filters that help us awaken in the morning, the vegetable oil we use for cooking, the soap we wash with, and the gunpowder that fights our wars (indeed, Alfred Nobel won a British patent for his invention of “guncotton”). Cotton is even a component of the book you hold in your hands.

For about nine hundred years, from 1000 to 1900 CE, cotton was the world’s most important manufacturing industry. Though it now has been surpassed by other industries, cotton remains important in terms of employment and global trade. It is so ubiquitous that in 2013 the world produced at least 123 million cotton bales, each weighing about four hundred pounds—enough to produce twenty T-shirts for each living person. Stacked on top of one another, the bales would create a tower forty thousand miles high; laid horizontally the bales would circle the globe one and a half times. Huge cotton plantations dot the earth, from China to India and the United States, from West Africa to Central Asia. The raw strands they produce, tightly packed in bales, are still shipped around the globe, to factories employing hundreds of thousands of workers. The finished pieces are then sold everywhere, from remote village stores to Walmart. Indeed, cotton might be one of the very few human-made goods that is available virtually anywhere, testifying both to cotton’s utility and to capitalism’s awe-inspiring increases in human productivity and consumption. As a recent advertising campaign in the United States announced, quite accurately, “Cotton is the fabric of our lives.” ³

Take a moment and imagine, if you can, a world without cotton. You wake up in the morning on a bed covered in fur or straw. You dress in woolens or, depending on the climate and your wealth, in linens or even silks. Because it is hard to wash your clothes, and because they are expensive or, if you make your own, labor-intensive, you change them irregularly. They smell and scratch. They are largely monochromatic, since, unlike cottons, wool and other natural fibers do not take colors very well. And you are surrounded by sheep: it would take approximately 7 billion sheep to produce a quantity of wool equivalent to the world’s current cotton crop. Those 7 billion sheep would need 700 million hectares of land for grazing, about 1.6 times the surface area of today’s European Union.⁴

Hard to imagine. But in a patch of land on the westernmost edge of the Eurasian landmass, such a world without cotton was long the norm. That land was Europe. Until the nineteenth century, cotton, while not unknown, was marginal to European textile production and consumption.

Why was it that the part of the world that had the least to do with cotton—Europe—created and came to dominate the empire of cotton? Any reasonable observer in, say, 1700, would have expected the world’s cotton production to remain centered in India, or perhaps in China. And indeed, until 1780 these countries produced vastly more raw cotton and cotton textiles than Europe and North America. But then things changed. European capitalists and states, with startling swiftness, moved to the center of the cotton industry. They used their new position to ignite an Industrial Revolution. China and India, along with many other parts of the world, became ever more subservient to the Europe-centered empire of cotton. These Europeans then used their dynamic cotton industry as a platform to create other industries; indeed, cotton became the launching pad for the broader Industrial Revolution.

Edward Baines, a newspaper proprietor in Leeds, called cotton in 1835 a “spectacle unparalleled in the annals of industry.” He argued that analyzing this spectacle was “more worthy the pains of the student” than the study of “wars and dynasties.” I agree. Following cotton, as we shall see, will lead us to the origins of the modern world, industrialization, rapid and continuous economic growth, enormous productivity increase, and staggering social inequality. Historians, social scientists, policy makers, and ideologues of all stripes have tried to disentangle these origins. Particularly vexing is the question of why, after many millennia of slow economic growth, a few strands of humanity in the late eighteenth century suddenly got much richer. Scholars now refer to these few decades as the “great divergence”—the beginning of the vast divides that still structure today’s world, the divide between those countries that industrialized and those that did not, between colonizers and colonized, between the global North and the global South. Grand arguments are easily made, some deeply pessimistic, some hopeful. In this book, however, I take a global and fundamentally historical approach to this puzzle: I begin by investigating the industry that stood at the very beginning of the “great divergence.”⁵

A focus on cotton and its very concrete and often brutal development, casts doubt on several explanations that all too many observers tend to take for granted: that Europe’s explosive economic development can be explained by Europeans’ more rational religious beliefs, their Enlightenment traditions, the climate in which they live, the continent’s geography, or benign institutions such as the Bank of England or the rule of law. Such essential and all too often unchangeable attributes, however, cannot account for the history of the cotton empire or explain the constantly shifting structure of capitalism. And they are often also wrong. The first industrial nation, Great Britain, was hardly a liberal, lean state with dependable but impartial institutions as it is often portrayed. Instead it was an imperial nation characterized by enormous military expenditures, a nearly constant state of war, a powerful and interventionist bureaucracy, high taxes, skyrocketing government debt, and protectionist tariffs—and it was certainly not democratic. Accounts of the “great divergence” that focus exclusively on conflicts between social classes within particular regions or countries are just as flawed. This book, in contrast, embraces a global perspective to show how Europeans united the power of capital and the power of the state to forge, often violently, a global production complex, and then used the capital, skills, networks, and institutions of cotton to embark upon the upswing in technology and wealth that defines the modern world. By looking at capitalism’s past, this book offers a history of capitalism in action.⁶

Unlike much of what has been written on the history of capitalism, Empire of Cotton does not search for explanations in just one part of the world. It understands capitalism in the only way it can be properly understood—in a global frame. The movement of capital, people, goods, and raw materials around the globe and the connections forged between distant areas of the world are at the very core of the grand transformation of capitalism and they are at the core of this book.

Such a thorough and rapid re-creation of the world was possible only because of the emergence of new ways of organizing production, trade, and consumption. Slavery, the expropriation of indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed trade, and the assertion of sovereignty over people and land by entrepreneurs were at its core. I call this system war capitalism.

We usually think of capitalism, at least the globalized, mass-production type that we recognize today, as emerging around 1780 with the Industrial Revolution. But war capitalism, which began to develop in the sixteenth century, came long before machines and factories. War capitalism flourished not in the factory but in the field; it was not mechanized but land- and labor-intensive, resting on the violent expropriation of land and labor in Africa and the Americas. From these expropriations came great wealth and new knowledge, and these in turn strengthened European institutions and states—all crucial preconditions for Europe’s extraordinary economic development by the nineteeth century and beyond.

Many historians have called this the age of “merchant” or “mercantile” capitalism, but “war capitalism” better expresses its rawness and violence as well as its intimate connection to European imperial expansion. War capitalism, a particularly important but often unrecognized phase in the development of capitalism, unfolded in a constantly shifting set of places embedded within constantly changing relationships. In some parts of the world it lasted well into the nineteenth century.

When we think of capitalism, we think of wage workers, yet this prior phase of capitalism was based not on free labor but on slavery. We associate industrial capitalism with contracts and markets, but early capitalism was based as often as not on violence and bodily coercion. Modern capitalism privileges property rights, but this earlier moment was characterized just as much by massive expropriations as by secure ownership. Latter-day capitalism rests upon the rule of law and powerful institutions backed by the state, but capitalism’s early phase, although ultimately requiring state power to create world-spanning empires, was frequently based on the unrestrained actions of private individuals—the domination of masters over slaves and of frontier capitalists over indigenous inhabitants. The cumulative result of this highly aggressive, outwardly oriented capitalism was that Europeans came to dominate the centuries-old worlds of cotton, merge them into a single empire centered in Manchester, and invent the global economy we take for granted today.

War capitalism, then, was the foundation from which evolved the more familiar industrial capitalism, a capitalism characterized by powerful states with enormous administrative, military, judicial, and infrastructural capacities. At first, industrial capitalism remained tightly linked to slavery and expropriated lands, but as its institutions—everything from wage labor to property rights—gained strength, they enabled a new and different form of integration of the labor, raw materials, markets, and capital in huge swaths of the world.⁷ These new forms of integration drove the revolutions of capitalism into ever more corners of the world.

As the modern world came of age, cotton came to dominate world trade. Cotton factories towered above all other forms of European and North American manufacturing. Cotton growing dominated the U.S. economy throughout much of the nineteenth century. It was in cottons that new modes of manufacturing first came about. The factory itself was an invention of the cotton industry. So was the connection between slave agriculture in the Americas and manufacturing across Europe. Because for many decades cotton was the most important European industry, it was the source of huge profits that eventually fed into other segments of the European economy. Cotton also was the cradle of industrialization in virtually every other part of the world—the United States and Egypt, Mexico and Brazil, Japan and China. At the same time, Europe’s domination of the world’s cotton industry resulted in a wave of deindustrialization throughout much of the rest of the world, enabling a new and different kind of integration into the global economy.

Yet even as the construction of industrial capitalism, beginning in the United Kingdom in the 1780s and then spreading to continental Europe and the United States in the early decades of the nineteenth century, gave enormous power to the states that embraced it and to capitalists within them, it planted the seeds of further transformation in the empire of cotton. As industrial capitalism spread, capital itself became tied to particular states. And as the state assumed an ever more central role and emerged as the most durable, powerful, and rapidly expanding institution of all, labor also grew in size and power. The dependence of capitalists on the state, and the state’s dependence on its people, empowered the workers who produced that capital, day in and day out, on the factory floor. By the second half of the nineteenth century, workers organized collectively, both in unions and political parties, and slowly, over multiple decades, improved their wages and working conditions. This, in turn, increased production costs, creating openings for lower-cost producers in other parts of the world. By the turn of the twentieth century, the model of industrial capitalism had traveled to other countries and was embraced by their modernizing elites. As a result, the cotton industry left Europe and New England and returned to it origins in the global South.

Some may wonder why the claims made here for the empire of cotton do not apply to other commodities. After all, before 1760, Europeans had traded extensively in many commodities in the tropical and semitropical areas of the world, including sugar, rice, rubber, and indigo. Unlike these commodities, cotton, however, has two labor-intensive stages—one in the fields, the other in factories. Sugar and tobacco did not create large industrial proletariats in Europe. Cotton did. Tobacco did not result in the rise of vast new manufacturing enterprises. Cotton did. Indigo growing and processing did not create huge new markets for European manufacturers. Cotton did. Rice cultivation in the Americas did not lead to an explosion of both slavery and wage labor. Cotton did. As a result, cotton spanned the globe unlike any other industry. Because of the new ways it wove continents together, cotton provides the key to understanding the modern world, the great inequalities that characterize it, the long history of globalization, and the ever-changing political economy of capitalism.

One reason it is hard to see cotton’s importance is because it has often been overshadowed in our collective memory by images of coal mines, railroads, and giant steelworks—industrial capitalism’s more tangible, more massive manifestations. Too often, we ignore the countryside to focus on the city and the miracles of modern industry in Europe and North America while ignoring that very industry’s connection to raw material producers and markets in all corners of the world. Too often, we prefer to erase the realities of slavery, expropriation, and colonialism from the history of capitalism, craving a nobler, cleaner capitalism. We tend to recall industrial capitalism as male-dominated, whereas women’s labor largely created the empire of cotton. Capitalism was in many ways a liberating force, the foundation of much of contemporary life; we are invested in it, not just economically but emotionally and ideologically. Uncomfortable truths are sometimes easier to ignore.

Nineteenth-century observers, in contrast, were cognizant of cotton’s role in reshaping the world. Some celebrated the amazing transformative power of the new global economy. As a Manchester Cotton Supply Reporter put it in 1860, rather breathlessly, “Cotton seems to have been destined to take the lead among the numerous and vast agencies of the present century, set in motion for human civilization. … Cotton with its commerce has become one of the many modern ‘wonders of the world.’ ”⁸

When you look at the cotton plant, it seems an unlikely candidate for one of the wonders of the world. Humble and unremarkable, it grows in many shapes and sizes. Prior to Europe’s creation of the empire of cotton, different peoples in different parts of the world cultivated plants quite unlike one another. South Americans tended to grow G. barbadense, a small bushy tree that sprouted yellow flowers and produced long-staple cotton. In India, by contrast, farmers grew G. arboretum, a shrub about six feet in height, with yellow or purple flowers, producing a short-staple fiber, while in Africa the very similar G. herbaceum thrived. By the mid-nineteenth century, one type dominated the empire of cotton—G. hirsutum—also known as American upland. Originating in Central America, this variant, as described by Andrew Ure in 1836, “rises to the height of two or three feet, and then divaricates into boughs, which bristle with hairs. The leaves are also hairy on their inferior surfaces, and are three- or five-lobed. The upper leaves are entire and heart-shaped; the petioles are velvety. The flowers near the extremities of the boughs are large, and somewhat dingy in colour. The capsules are ovate, four-celled, nearly as large as an apple, and yield a very fine silky cotton wool, much esteemed in commerce.”⁹

This fluffy white fiber is at the center of this book. The plant itself does not make history, but if we listen carefully, it will tell us of people all over the world who spent their lives with cotton: Indian weavers, slaves in Alabama, Greek merchants in the Nile Delta towns, highly organized craft workers in Lancashire. The empire of cotton was built with their labor, imagination, and skills. By 1900 about 1.5 percent of the human population—millions of men, women, and children—were engaged in the industry, either growing, transporting, or manufacturing cotton. Edward Atkinson, a mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts cotton manufacturer, was essentially correct when he pointed out that “there is no other product that has had so potent and malign an influence in the past upon the history and institutions of the land; and perhaps no other on which its future material welfare may more depend.” Atkinson was speaking of the United States and its history of slavery, but his argument could be applied to the world as a whole.¹⁰

This book follows cotton from fields to boats, from merchant houses to factories, from pickers to spinners to weavers to consumers. It does not separate the cotton history of Brazil from that of the United States, Great Britain’s from Togo’s, or Egypt’s from Japan’s. The empire of cotton, and with it the modern world, is only understood by connecting, rather than separating, the many places and people who shaped and were in turn shaped by that empire.¹¹

I am centrally concerned with the unity of the diverse. Cotton, the nineteenth century’s chief global commodity, brought seeming opposites together, turning them almost by alchemy into wealth: slavery and free labor, states and markets, colonialism and free trade, industrialization and deindustrialization. The cotton empire depended on plantation and factory, slavery and wage labor, colonizers and colonized, railroads and steamships—in short, on a global network of land, labor, transport, manufacture, and sale. The Liverpool Cotton Exchange had an enormous impact on Mississippi cotton planters, the Alsatian spinning mills were tightly linked to those of Lancashire, and the future of handloom weavers in New Hampshire or Dhaka depended on such diverse factors as the construction of a railroad between Manchester and Liverpool, investment decisions of Boston merchants, and tariff policies made in Washington and London. The power of the Ottoman state over its countryside affected the development of slavery in the West Indies; the political activities of recently freed slaves in the United States affected the lives of rural cultivators in India.¹²

From these volatile opposites, we see how cotton made possible both the birth of capitalism and its subsequent reinvention. As we explore the twinned paths of cotton and capitalism across the world, and the centuries, we are reminded again and again that no state of capitalism is ever permanent or stable. Each new moment in capitalism’s history produces new instabilities, and even contradictions, prompting vast spatial, social, and political rearrangements.

Writing about cotton has a long history. Indeed, cotton might be the most fully researched of all human industries. Libraries are filled with accounts of slave plantations in the Americas, the beginnings of cotton manufacturing in Britain, France, the German lands, and Japan, and the merchants who connected one to the other. Much less common are efforts to link these diverse histories; in fact, what is perhaps the most successful such effort is now nearly two centuries old. When Edward Baines penned his History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain in 1835, he concluded that “the author may be permitted to express … that his subject derives interest not merely from the magnitude of the branch of industry he has attempted to describe, but from the wonderful extent of intercourse which it has established between this country and every part of the globe.”¹³ I share Baines’s enthusiasm and his global perspective, if not all of his conclusions.

As a Leeds newspaper editor living close to the center of the empire of cotton, Baines could not help but take a global perspective on these matters.¹⁴ However, when professional historians turned to cotton, they almost always focused on local, regional, and national aspects of this history. Yet only a global viewpoint allows us to understand the great realignment that each of these local stories was part of—the huge global shifts in labor regimes in agriculture, the spread of state-strengthening projects by nationalist elites, and the impact of working-class collective action, among others.

This book draws on the vast literature on cotton, but places it in a new framework. As a result, it contributes to a vibrant but often stultifyingly presentist conversation on globalization. Empire of Cotton challenges excited discoveries of an allegedly new, global phase in the history of capitalism. It shows that capitalism has been globe-spanning since its inception and that fluid spatial configurations of the world economy have been a common feature of the last three hundred years. The book argues also that for most of capitalism’s history the process of globalization and the needs of nation-states were not conflicting, as is often believed, but instead mutually reinforced one another. If our allegedly new global age is truly a revolutionary departure from the past, the departure is not the degree of global connection but the fact that capitalists are for the first time able to emancipate themselves from particular nation-states, the very institutions that in the past enabled their rise.

As its subtitle suggests, Empire of Cotton is also part of a larger conversation among historians trying to rethink history by looking at it within a transnational, even global, spatial frame. History as a profession emerged hand in hand with the nation-state, and played an important part in its constitution. But by assuming national perspectives, historians have often underemphasized connections that transcend state borders, settling for explanations that can be drawn from events, people, and processes within particular national territories. This book is intended as a contribution to efforts to balance such “national” perspectives with a broader focus on the networks, identities, and processes that transcend political boundaries.¹⁵

By focusing on one specific commodity—cotton—and tracing how it was grown, transported, financed, manufactured, sold, and consumed, we are able to see connections between peoples and places that would remain on the margins if we embarked upon a more traditional study bounded by national borders. Instead of focusing on the history of a particular event, such as the American Civil War, or place, such as the cotton factories of Osaka, or group of people, such as West Indian slaves growing cotton, or process, such as rural cultivators turning into industrial wage workers, this book uses the biography of one product as a window into some of the most significant questions we can ask about the history of our world and to reinterpret a history of huge consequence: the history of capitalism.¹⁶

We are about to embark on a journey through five thousand years of human history. Throughout this book, we will look at a single, seemingly inconsequential item—cotton—to solve a vast mystery: Where does the modern world originate? Let’s begin by traveling to a small farming village in what is today Mexico, where cotton plants bloom in a world utterly unlike our own.

Sven Beckert

EMPIRE OF COTTON

A New History of Global Capitalism

ALLEN LANE

Contents

THE BEGINNING

Introduction