Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2014 by Sven Beckert

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto,

  Penguin Random House companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Beckert, Sven.

  Empire of cotton : a global history / Sven Beckert.—First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-375-41414-5 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-385-35325-0 (eBook) 1. Cotton textile industry—History. 2. Cotton trade—History. 3. Cotton plantation workers—History. 4. Slavery—Economic aspects. 5. Slaves. 6. Textile workers. 7. Capitalism—History. 8. Labor—History. I. Title.

  HD9870.5.B43 2014

  338.4767721—dc23 2014009320

  Maps by Mapping Specialists

  Jacket images: (top to bottom) Spinning Mill at Dornach by Jean Mieg. Musée Historique de Mulhouse; Cotton-making, Dutch Antilles, East Indies by Paolo Fumagalli. Private Collection. The Stapleton Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library; A Loom © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Jacket design by Eric White

  First Edition

  v3.1

  For Lisa

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  The Rise of a Global Commodity

  Chapter 2

  Building War Capitalism

  Chapter 3

  The Wages of War Capitalism

  Chapter 4

  Capturing Labor, Conquering Land

  Chapter 5

  Slavery Takes Command

  Chapter 6

  Industrial Capitalism Takes Wing

  Chapter 7

  Mobilizing Industrial Labor

  Chapter 8

  Making Cotton Global

  Chapter 9

  A War Reverberates Around the World

  Chapter 10

  Global Reconstruction

  Chapter 11

  Destructions

  Chapter 12

  The New Cotton Imperialism

  Chapter 13

  The Return of the Global South

  Chapter 14

  The Weave and the Weft: An Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Illustration Credits

  Other Books by This Author

  Introduction

  Edgar Degas views the empire of cotton: merchants in New Orleans, 1873. (illustration credit itr.1)

  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 remak
ing 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 interve
ntionist 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.