by Sven Beckert
These manufacturing networks connecting rural spinners and weavers with urban merchant capital, especially in Asia, created a gradual but significant expansion of output for markets. They did so, however, largely without exploding older social structures, without altering production as it had been organized for centuries. The household, and the technology associated with it, remained at their center. This premodern world was safe behind two bulkheads: first, the markets for finished goods, which were growing but, compared to the world after 1780, only at a modest pace, and second, the great obstacles to sourcing raw cotton across long distances. A great countervailing force would be needed to break through those ancient constraints.
For a very long time, in this remarkably diverse, fabulously vibrant, and economically important world of cotton, Europe was nowhere to be found. Europeans had remained marginal to networks of cotton growing, manufacturing, and consumption. Even after they began importing small quantities of cotton cloth during Greek and Roman times, they remained of little importance to the global cotton industry as a whole. People dressed, as they had since the Bronze Age, in clothing made from flax and wool. As Mahatma Gandhi put it, while India supplied Europe with cottons, Europeans themselves “were submerged in barbarism, ignorance and a state of wilderness.”36
Cotton, quite simply, was exotic to Europe. The fiber grew in faraway lands, and many Europeans reportedly imagined cotton as a mixture of a plant and an animal—a “vegetable lamb.” Stories circulated in medieval Europe about little sheep growing on plants, and bending down at night to drink water; other fables told of sheep attached to the ground by low stems.37
Cotton’s first serious incursion into Europe, as in West Africa, was the result of the spread of Islam. By 950 CE, cotton was manufactured in such Islamic cities as Seville, Córdoba, Granada, and Barcelona, as well as Sicily; some of those textiles were exported to the rest of Europe. During the twelfth century, the Seville botanist Abu Zacaria Ebn el Awam published a treatise on agriculture that included a detailed description of how to cultivate cotton.38 So tight was the association between Islam and cotton that most western European languages borrowed their words for the fiber from the Arabic qutun. French coton, English cotton, Spanish algodón, Portugese algodão, Dutch katoen, and Italian cotone all derive from the Arabic root. (The German Baumwolle and the Czech bavlna—translated roughly as “tree wool”—are the exceptions that prove the rule.) While the Christian Reconquista of Iberia in the first half of the second millennium seriously contracted the region’s cotton production, the centuries-long exposure to Arab technology and culture left behind a familiarity with and appreciation for cotton textiles in large areas of Europe.
The vegetable lamb: Europeans imagine the cotton plant. (illustration credit 1.2)
By the twelfth century, small pockets of Europe—particularly northern Italy—returned to the world of cotton production, and this time to stay. While Europe’s climate was largely unsuited for cotton growing, the Crusaders had extended European power into the Arab world, and thereby into areas where cotton grew naturally.39 The first endeavors to manufacture cotton were modest, but the beginning of a trend that would alter the continent’s history, and the world’s economy.
The first center of a non-Islamic cotton industry in Europe emerged in northern Italy, in cities such as Milan, Arezzo, Bologna, Venice, and Verona. The industry grew quickly, starting in the late twelfth century, and came to play a vital role in these urban economies. In Milan, for example, by 1450 the cotton industry employed a full six thousand workers making fustians, fabrics using both cotton and linen.40 These northern Italians became the dominant producers in Europe, and they retained their position for about three centuries.41
Cotton manufacturing blossomed in northern Italy for two reasons. First, these cities looked back on a long history of still vibrant wool production, which had left them with skilled workers, capital-rich merchants, and expertise in long-distance trade. Once entrepreneurs decided to engage in cotton manufacturing, they could draw on those resources. They advanced raw cotton to women in the surrounding countryside to have it spun. They contracted with urban artisans, organized in guilds, to weave the yarn. They branded and standardized their goods, and drew upon their long-distance trade networks to export goods to foreign markets throughout the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary.42
Second, northern Italy had easy access to raw cotton. Indeed, the northern Italian industry was from the beginning entirely dependent on eastern Mediterranean cotton from such places as western Anatolia and what today is Syria. Already in the eleventh century, cotton yarn and cotton cloth had been imported into the ports of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, giving people a taste for cottons. Raw cotton imports followed in the wake of the Crusades, with the first such trade documented for the year 1125.43
As improvements in shipping allowed for the cheaper transportation of bulk commodities, Venice became Europe’s first cotton entrepôt, the Liverpool of the twelfth century. Some traders became dedicated cotton merchants, buying low-grade raw cotton from Anatolia, while procuring better-quality fiber from Syria. This supply was supplemented by Genovese imports from Anatolia, Sicily, and Egypt. But despite importing large quantities, European merchants had little if any impact on the specific ways in which raw cotton was grown in the Levant: They bought cotton from local merchants, loaded it on their ships, and transported it across the sea. Nevertheless, Venice’s ability to insert itself into and eventually dominate Mediterranean trade was crucial to the success of the northern Italian cotton industry. Moreover, it was a harbinger of the wedge that European states and capitalists would later drive into the heart of the ancient cotton centers.44
Not only did the Mediterranean networks give Italian manufacturers relatively easy access to raw cotton, but they also provided them with access to “Eastern” technologies. Northern Italian entrepreneurs appropriated technologies from the Islamic world—some of which had in turn come from India and China. The twelfth century witnessed a “massive infusion of outside technology into the European textile industry”—most importantly the spinning wheel. Before the spinning wheel was introduced into Europe in the middle of the thirteenth century, Europeans, like Americans and Africans, had spun with hand spindles. It was a slow process: A skilled spinner produced about 120 meters of thread per hour. At that rate, it took about eleven hours to spin enough yarn for one blouse. The spinning wheel increased the output of European spinners tremendously, tripling productivity. Thus the availability of a new material—cotton—led to the embrace of the new manufacturing technique, which is why in medieval Europe the spinning wheel was also called the “cotton wheel.” If less dramatic than the spinning wheel, improvement also came to weaving with the horizontal treadle loom. First used in Europe in the eleventh century, it enabled the weaver to change the sheds—the device that separates some of the warp threads to allow the shuttle to pass through—with his feet, freeing the hands to insert the weft, and thus allowing for the production of finer-quality textiles. It came to Europe from India or China via the Islamic world.45
The growth of the northern Italian cotton industry rested principally on its access to raw cotton and manufacturing technology from the Islamic world. Yet these linkages and dependencies would become Italy’s principal vulnerabilities; the industry remained distant from the sources of raw materials, and lacked control over the growing of cotton. Northern Italy’s industry eventually suffered both from the strengthening of the Islamic cotton industry and the marginalization of its own trade networks with the Islamic world.46
Yet even before the disruption of these crucial networks, the Italian industry faced another challenge: the rise of nimbler competitors north of the Alps, in the cities of southern Germany. They drew, like their Italian counterparts, on cotton from the Levant. But while Italian manufacturers faced high taxes, high wages, well-organized urban weavers, and guild restrictions, German producers enjoyed the advantage of the mo
re tractable German countryside, where they gained access to cheap labor. By the early fifteenth century, German manufacturers had used this cost differential not only to capture many of the Italian export markets, including eastern and northern Europe, Spain, the Baltic region, the Netherlands, and England, but to make inroads even into the Italian market itself.47
Horizontal treadle loom, Milan, middle of the fourteenth century (illustration credit 1.3)
One such enterprising manufacturer arrived in the southern German town of Augsburg in 1367. The young weaver Hans Fugger at first tried to sell his father’s cotton fabrics, but in due course set up as a master weaver himself. In the next decades, he expanded his investments, eventually employing a hundred weavers in Augsburg to supply the long-distance trade. By the time of his death, he was among the fifty wealthiest citizens of Augsburg, and had laid the foundation for the rise of one of the wealthiest merchant and banking families of medieval Europe.48
Hans Fugger furthered the rapid establishment of a dynamic cotton industry in southern Germany in the span of just one generation. Between 1363 and 1383, the output of German weavers effectively supplanted Lombardy fustians on European markets. Fugger and others like him succeeded because they had access to skilled textile workers, capital, and trade networks. With its long history of linen production, southern Germany had powerful long-distance traders with sufficient capital to fund a new industry. But these traders also had access to cheap labor, northern European markets, and the ability to enforce regulations guaranteeing the quality of their products. As a result, cities such as Ulm, Augsburg, Memmingen, and Nuremberg became major centers of fustian production. The industry eventually spread east along the Danube and south to Switzerland.49
The control of a rural workforce was crucial. In Ulm, for example, one of the most important manufacturing centers, only about two thousand people were busy with cotton production in the city itself, while eighteen thousand workers labored on cottons in the hinterland. Indeed, most of the weaving was done in the countryside, not the city, as merchants provided money, raw materials, and even tools to spinners and weavers—another putting-out network like the ones that characterized the Indian countryside. This organization of production was much more flexible than urban production, since no guilds regulated it and since rural weavers continued to have access to their own land and thus grew their own food.50
With the emergence of a cotton industry in northern Italy and southern Germany, small regions of Europe for the first time became a minor part of the global cotton economy. Yet within Europe, the industry was not yet particularly prominent. Europeans still largely dressed in linen and woolens, not cottons. And hardly any European cotton goods were consumed outside the continent itself. Moreover, after the early sixteenth century, the Venice-dependent European industry declined, as the Thirty Years War disrupted the industry and trade shifted away from the Mediterranean and toward the Atlantic. In the sixteenth century, indeed, Venice lost control over the Mediterranean trade to a strengthened Ottoman Empire, which was encouraging domestic industries and restricted the export of raw cotton. When Ottoman troops consolidated their hold on the realm in the 1560s, the effects were felt in distant German cotton textile towns. The rise of the Ottoman Empire, a powerful state capable of controlling raw and manufactured cotton flows, ruined the northern Italian and German cotton industries. To make matters worse for the once dominant Venetians, by the end of the sixteenth century British ships called ever more frequently in ports such as Izmir (Ottoman Smyrna); in 1589 the sultan granted the English merchants far-reaching trading privileges.51
Some shrewd observers surely noted that the first European cotton producers, both the northern Italians and the southern Germans, failed at least in part because they had not subjugated those people who supplied them with cotton. It was a lesson that would not be forgotten. As the sixteenth century came to a close, an entirely new cotton industry arose that focused on the Atlantic, not the Mediterranean. Europeans took for granted that only the projection of state power would ensure success in these new trade zones.52
Chapter Two
Building War Capitalism
Capturing global cotton networks: the British East India Company “factory” in Cossimbazar, West Bengal, c. 1795 (illustration credit 2.1)
Though impressive, the emergence of cotton production in twelfth-century northern Italy, and later in fifteenth-century southern Germany, did not seem world-altering. In each instance, boom was followed by bust. And the larger cotton industry, already well established on three continents, continued to hum along as it had for centuries. World production still centered on India and China, and intercontinental trade was still dominated by the products of Indian weavers. No significant technological or organizational departures characterized the European industry: Asian producers remained at the cutting edge of textile technology. To be sure, Europe’s new manufacturing endeavors produced an unprecedented quantity of cotton cloth for that continent, spread a taste for cotton fabrics, and established widespread knowledge about the principles of cotton manufacturing—all factors that eventually became exceedingly important. But for now those small shifts were irrelevant to the global cotton industry, because Europeans lacked the ability to compete in transoceanic markets, not least because the quality of their output was much inferior to that of India. Unlike Indian or Chinese producers, moreover, Europeans depended on the import of raw cotton from distant regions of the world—regions over which they enjoyed little control. And in 1600, most Europeans continued to clothe themselves in linens and woolens.
Over the next two hundred years, however, all that was to change. The change was slow, at first hardly perceptible, but the momentum built, faster and faster and then exponentially. The ultimate result was a radical reorganization of the world’s leading manufacturing industry: an explosion in how and where cotton was grown and manufactured, and a shocking vision of how the crop could yoke the world together. This recasting of cotton did not at first derive from technical advances, nor from organizational advantages, but instead from a far simpler source: the ability and willingness to project capital and power across vast oceans. With increasing frequency, Europeans inserted themselves, often violently, into the global networks of the cotton trade—within Asia as well as between Asia and the rest of the world—before using that same power to create entirely novel networks between Africa, the Americas, and Europe.1 Europe’s first incursion into the world of cotton had collapsed in the face of superior power; new generations of European capitalists and statesmen took heed and built a comparative advantage with a willingness and ability to use force to extend their interests. Europeans became important to the worlds of cotton not because of new inventions or superior technologies, but because of their ability to reshape and then dominate global cotton networks.
European capitalists and rulers altered global networks through multiple means. The muscle of armed trade enabled the creation of a complex, Eurocentric maritime trade web; the forging of a military-fiscal state allowed for the projection of power into the far-flung corners of the world; the invention of financial instruments—from marine insurance to bills of lading—allowed for the transfer of capital and goods over long distances; the development of a legal system gave a modicum of security to global investments; the construction of alliances with distant capitalists and rulers provided access to local weavers and cotton growers; the expropriation of land and the deportation of Africans created flourishing plantations. Unbeknownst to contemporaries, these alterations were the first steps toward the Industrial Revolution. Centuries before the “great divergence” of per capita economic output between Europe and East Asia, a small group of Europeans seized control of the heretofore episodic and gradual process of forging global economic connections, with dramatic consequences not only for the cotton industry but for human societies across the globe. The “great divergence” was at first a divergence of state power as well as a peculiar relationship between these states and
capital owners. In the process, the many worlds of cotton became a European-centered empire of cotton.
Christopher Columbus’s landing in the Americas in 1492 marked the first momentous event in this recasting of global connections. That journey set off the world’s greatest land grab, with Hernán Cortés attacking the Aztec Empire in 1518 and establishing vast territorial claims for the Spaniards in America, spreading into South America and also farther north. By the mid-sixteenth century, Portugal had followed suit and acquired what is today Brazil. The French set out to the Americas in 1605 and acquired Quebec; parts of the modern-day midwestern and southern United States, which were grouped into a French administrative unit called Louisiana; and a number of Caribbean islands, including, in 1695, Saint-Domingue, the western third of Hispaniola. England established its first successful American settlement in Jamestown, which became a part of the colony of Virginia, in 1607, soon to be expanded with further colonies in North America and also the Caribbean. Eventually, as we will see, controlling huge territories in the Americas allowed, among other things, the monocultural growing of large quantities of cotton.
