Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  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.

  Chapter One

  The Rise of a Global Commodity

  Aztec woman spinning cotton (illustration credit 1.1)

  Half a millennium ago, in a dozen small villages along the Pacific coast of what is today called Mexico, people spent their days growing maize, beans, squash, and chiles. There, between the Río Santiago to the north and the Río Balsas to the south, they fished, gathered oysters and clams, and collected honey and beeswax. Alongside this subsistence agriculture and the modest crafts they produced by hand—small painted ceramic vessels decorated with geometric motifs were their most renowned creation—these men and women also grew a plant that sprouted small tufted white bolls. The plant was inedible. It was also the most valuable thing they grew. They called it ichcatl: cotton.

  The cotton plant thrived among the maize, and each fall, after they harvested their food crops, the villagers plucked the soft wads of fiber from the pyramidally shaped, waist-high plants, gathering the numerous bolls in baskets or sacks, then carrying them to their mud-and-wattle huts. There they painstakingly removed the many seeds by hand, then beat the cotton on a palm mat to make it smooth, before combing out the fibers into strands several inches long. Using a thin wooden spindle fitted with a ceramic disk and a spinning bowl to support the spindle as it twirled, they twisted
the strands together into fine white thread. Then they created cloth on a backstrap loom, a simple tool consisting of two sticks attached by the warp threads; one stick was hung from a tree, the other on the weaver herself, who stretched the warp with the weight of her own body and then wove the contrasting thread (the weft) in and out between the warps in an unending dance. The result was a cloth as strong as it was supple. They dyed the cloth with indigo and cochineal, creating a rich variety of blue-blacks and crimsons. Some of the cloth they wore themselves, sewn into shirts, skirts, and trousers. The rest they sent to Teotihuacán as part of an annual tribute owed to their distant Aztec rulers. In 1518 alone, the people of these twelve coastal villages provided the emperor Moctezuma II with eight hundred bales of raw cotton (each weighing 115 pounds), thirty-two hundred colored cotton cloths, and forty-eight hundred large white cloths, the product of thousands of hours of backbreaking and highly skilled labor.1

  For hundreds of years both before and after, similar scenes unfolded across vast stretches of the world’s inhabited land. From Gujarat to Sulawesi, along the banks of the Upper Volta to the Rio Grande, from the valleys of Nubia to the plains of Yucatán, people on three continents had grown cotton in their fields, and then manufactured cotton textiles in the houses next door, just as their ancestors had done for generations prior. The plant is stubborn, seemingly able to thrive with little help from farmers, given the right natural conditions. It grows in a wide range of environments thanks to its “morphological plasticity,” that is, in the words of plant scientists, its ability to “adapt to diverse growing conditions by shortening, lengthening, or even interrupting its effective bloom period.”2