Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  The second momentous event in the history of cotton came five years later, in 1497, when Vasco da Gama sailed triumphantly into the port of Calicut, having pioneered a sea route from Europe to India around the Cape of Good Hope. Now Europeans could for the first time access the products of Indian weavers—the world’s dominant producers—without having to rely on the numerous middlemen who had transported Indian cloth by ship across the Indian Ocean, by camel across Arabia, and then by boat to European ports. Europeans began establishing formal trade relations on the Indian subcontinent when da Gama obtained permission from local rulers to trade in Calicut in 1498. By the early sixteenth century, the Portuguese had established a series of trading outposts on India’s west coast, most enduringly in Goa. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Netherlands and Great Britain began to challenge Portugal’s monopoly on trade with Asia by chartering joint-stock companies, hoping to catch a share of the highly profitable spice trade. After a series of Anglo-Dutch wars, the Dutch and the British agreed to divide their spheres of interest in Asia, with the Indian textile trade falling mostly into British hands.

  That expansion into South Asia, at first, was the most momentous intervention of European merchants and statesmen into the networks of the global cotton industry. With it, Europeans began to play a role in the transoceanic trade of Indian textiles, pioneered by the Portuguese, who brought large quantities of such cloth to Europe. They also tried to assert their dominance over the important trade between Gujarat and both the Arabian Peninsula and eastern Africa—first by violently restricting the access of Gujarati merchants to those traditional markets (with mixed success), and in the second half of the sixteenth century by regulating the trade. Other European merchants later joined in: In 1600, merchants established the British East India Company, in 1602 the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, and in 1616 the Danish Dansk Ostindiske Kompagni. By the early seventeenth century, the Dutch and British were replacing the Portuguese in violently regulating the trade in Gujarati textiles, seizing Gujarati ships, and limiting local merchants’ access to the markets of Arabia and, increasingly, Southeast Asia, which were supplied from factories in southern India, along the Coromandel coast, with Madras at its center.2 France was the last of the great European powers to launch trade with the East. In 1664, French traders founded the Compagnie des Indes Française and brought the first of what the French called indiennes—colorfully printed cotton cloth—into France. These companies tried to assert monopoly rights in certain areas, but facing each other as well as competing independent merchants, their project never succeeded completely.3

  What all these European trading companies had in common was that they purchased cotton textiles in India, to trade for spices in Southeast Asia, and also to bring to Europe, whence they might be consumed domestically or shipped to Africa to pay for slaves to work the plantations just beginning to take root in the New World. Cotton textiles, for the first time ever, became entangled in a three-continent-spanning trading system; the consequences of Columbus’s and da Gama’s momentous journeys fed on one another. European consumers and African traders hungered for the beautiful chintzes, muslins, and calicoes, or the simpler but useful plain cloths, spun and woven by South Asian householders and artisans.

  As a result, cotton textiles became central to European expansion into Asia. Already by the early seventeenth century, European traders and merchants played an important role in the trade at the Bengali port of Dhaka, which for centuries had been the source of some of the world’s highest-quality cottons. The East India Company as early as 1621 imported an estimated fifty thousand pieces of cotton goods into Britain. Forty years later, this number had increased by a factor of five. Cotton cloths, in fact, became the company’s most important trading good; by 1766 that cloth constituted more than 75 percent of the East India Company’s total exports. As a result, according to English writer Daniel Defoe—no friend of the imports—cotton “crept into our Houses, our Closets and Bed Chambers, Curtains, Cushions, Chairs, and at last Beds themselves were nothing but Calicoes or Indian stuffs.”4

  Armed European merchants inserted themselves successfully into the transoceanic trade of Indian cotton textiles. In India itself, however, European power was limited. It basically found its end at the outskirts of port cities, or the walls of the forts that these soldier-traders increasingly constructed along the coast. To secure the very large quantities of Indian textiles they exported, European merchants depended on local traders, banias, who guarded their crucial relationships with the inland farmers and weavers who grew, spun, and wove these increasingly valuable goods. Europeans set up warehouses—so-called factories—along the coast of India, in cities such as Madras, Surat, Dhaka, Cossimbazar, and Calicut, where their agents placed orders with banias for cloth and received the wares ready for shipment. Hundreds of leather-bound books, many of which are still extant, recorded each one of these transactions.5

  In 1676, the factory of the British East India Company in Dhaka detailed the mechanisms through which cloth was purchased, testifying to its dependence on indigenous traders. The English merchants subcontracted the task of securing cloth to a number of banias eight to ten months before the trading ships arrived, specifying the qualities, designs, prices, and delivery dates they desired. African and European consumers of cotton textiles demanded very particular goods at particular prices. Banias then advanced cash to various middlemen, who would travel from village to village to advance funds and contract for finished cloth with individual weavers.6 Eventually the cloth traveled the same chain back to the English factory in Dhaka, where merchants graded and prepared it for shipment.

  In this system of production, the weavers themselves had control over the rhythm and organization of their work, owned their tools, just as they had for centuries, and even retained the right to sell their products to whomever they pleased. As European demand grew, weavers were able to increase production and raise prices, which was clearly beneficial to them. In fact, the arrival of European traders in the Gujarati town of Broach, just as much as in Orissa and Dhaka, gave a new impetus to the regional cotton industry. Weavers were still poor, yet they could take advantage of competition for their cloth, as did indigenous banias and even Indian rulers, who quickly established taxes and duties on the production and export of cotton cloth.7 The power of European merchants in India was hence significant, but far from all-encompassing: The English complained that the system was frequently disrupted by “Arabians and Moguls who trade in Dacca cloth carrying yearly very considerable quantities of the same overland some so far as the great Turks Dominions,” as well as by the “contest, trouble and Charge” of the weavers and local banias.8

  This “factory” system, with its continuing dependence on local traders and local capital, persisted for roughly two centuries. As late as 1800, the British East India Company agreed to purchase piece goods from Pestonjee Jemsatjee and Sorabje Jevangee, two merchants in Bombay, for more than 1 million rupees, while the Surat bania Dadabo Monackjee entered into contracts with weavers north of the city to deliver cloth for the British. Indeed, at first, Portuguese, English, Dutch, and French traders were merely the latest arrivals to an old and vibrant market, taking their place alongside hundreds of merchants from all over South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. In Dhaka, as late as the 1700s, European traders acquired only about one-third of all the cloth traded. And the trading capacity of Europeans in India remained dependent on South Asian bankers and merchants who financed cotton growing and manufacturing.9

  The insertion of armed European merchants into the Asian trade, however, slowly marginalized these older networks, as they muscled the once dominant Indian and Arab traders out of many intercontinental markets. In 1670, one British observer could still note that Middle Eastern merchants “carried off five times as many calicoes as the English and the Dutch.” Yet with bigger, faster, and more reliable boats, and more damaging firepower, “the old pattern of the Indian-Levant trade as the princ
ipal artery for world exchange underwent a complete structural change,” one historian concludes, with “the Ottoman Empire…the chief loser.” Gujarati merchants trading with East Africa also began facing European competition. Just as European merchants became increasingly common in India, they also established themselves in the East African markets; as a result, on both sides of the Indian Ocean, Europe’s dominance grew. With the eighteenth-century decline of Surat and the rise of British Bombay, merchants in western India became even more dependent on British power.10

  The growing influence of European merchants and their sponsoring states in India eventually began to have important repercussions in Europe itself. As much larger quantities of Indian cottons traveled to Europe, new markets and fashions emerged. Beautiful chintzes and muslins attracted the attention of the growing class of Europeans who had the money to purchase them and the desire to flaunt their social status by wearing them. As Indian cottons became ever more fashionable in the eighteenth century, the desire to replace these imports was a powerful incentive to ramping up cotton production in England and eventually to revolutionize it.11

  Moreover, domination in Asia dovetailed with expansion into the Americas. As Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and Dutch powers captured huge territories in the Americas, they took away the continent’s movable wealth: gold and silver. It was indeed some of these stolen precious metals that had funded the purchase of cotton fabrics in India in the first place.

  Eventually, however, European settlers in the Americas could not discover sufficient gold and silver and they invented a new road to wealth: plantations growing tropical and semitropical crops, sugar in particular, but also rice, tobacco, and indigo. Such plantations needed large numbers of workers, and to secure these workers, Europeans deported at first thousands and then millions of Africans to the Americas. European merchants built fortified trading stations along the western coast of Africa—Goree in present-day Senegal, Elmina in present-day Ghana, Ouidah in present-day Benin. They paid African rulers to go on a hunt for labor, exchanging captives for the products of Indian weavers. In the three centuries after 1500, more than 8 million slaves were transported from Africa to the Americas, first mostly by Spanish and Portuguese traders, to be joined in the seventeenth century by the British, French, Dutch, Danish, and others. During the eighteenth century alone, they deported more than 5 million people, mostly from west-central Africa, the Bight of Benin, the Gold Coast, and the Bight of Biafra.12 Slaves arrived almost daily on Caribbean islands, as well as along the coasts of both Americas.

  Such trade increased the demand for cotton fabrics, since African rulers and merchants almost always demanded cotton cloth in exchange for slaves. Although it is often imagined that the slave trade was animated by simple exchanges of guns and gewgaws for human export, slaves were more frequently traded for a far more banal commodity: cotton textiles. One study of 1,308 barters of British merchant Richard Miles between 1772 and 1780 for 2,218 Gold Coast slaves found that textiles constituted over half of the value of all traded goods. Portuguese imports to Luanda in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tell a similar story: Woven goods constituted nearly 60 percent of imports.13

  African consumers became notorious for their discerning and dynamic tastes, much to the consternation of European merchants. Indeed, one European traveler observed that African consumer tastes were “most varied and capricious,” and that “scarcely two villages concur in their canons of taste.” When the slave ship Diligent sailed from its French port in 1731, it carried in its hold a careful assortment of Indian textiles to cater to the particular demands at the Guinea coast. In the same way, Richard Miles sent very specific instructions on what colors and types of textiles were currently in demand on the Gold Coast to his British suppliers, down to the very manufacturers that should be utilized. “Mr Kershaw’s [manufactures] are by no means equal to [Knipe’s],” he told a British contact in one 1779 letter, “at least not in the eyes of the Black traders here, & it is them that are to be pleased.”14

  European trade in cotton textiles tied together Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe in a complex commercial web. Never before in the four millennia of the history of cotton had such a globe-spanning system been invented. Never before had the products of Indian weavers paid for slaves in Africa to work on the plantations in the Americas to produce agricultural commodities for European consumers. This was an awe-inspiring system, speaking clearly to the transformative powers of a union of capital and state power. What was the most radical was not the particulars of these trades, but the system in which they were embedded and how different parts of the system fed upon one another: Europeans had invented a new way of organizing economic activity.

  This expansion of European trade networks into Asia, Africa, and the Americas did not rest primarily on offering superior goods at good prices, but on the military subjugation of competitors and a coercive European mercantile presence in many regions of the world. Depending on the relative balance of social power in particular places, there were variations on this central theme. In Asia and Africa, Europeans settled coastal enclaves and dominated transoceanic commerce, without at first much involvement in cultivation and manufacturing. In other parts of the world, most prominently the Americas, local populations were expropriated and often displaced or killed. Europeans invented the world anew by embarking upon plantation agriculture on a massive scale. Once Europeans became involved in production, they fastened their economic fortunes to slavery. These three moves—imperial expansion, expropriation, and slavery—became central to the forging of a new global economic order and eventually the emergence of capitalism.

  They combined with one other feature of this new world: states that backed these merchant and settler ventures, but that only weakly asserted their sovereignty over the places and peoples in distant territories. Instead, private capitalists, often organized in chartered companies (such as the British East India Company) asserted sovereignty over land and people, and structured connections to local rulers. Heavily armed privateering capitalists became the symbol of this new world of European domination, as their cannon-filled boats and their soldier-traders, armed private militias, and settlers captured land and labor and blew competitors, quite literally, out of the water. Privatized violence was one of their core competencies. While European states had envisioned, encouraged, and enabled the creation of vast colonial empires, they remained weak and thin on the ground, providing private actors the space and leeway to forge new modes of trade and production. Not secure property rights but a wave of expropriation of labor and land characterized this moment, testifying to capitalism’s illiberal origins.

  The beating heart of this new system was slavery. The deportation of many millions of Africans to the Americas intensified connections to India because it increased pressure to secure more cotton cloth. It was that trade that established a more significant European mercantile presence in Africa. And it was that trade that made it possible to give economic value to the vast territories captured in the Americas, and thus to overcome Europe’s own resource constraints. This multifaceted system certainly showed variation and changed over time, but it was sufficiently different from the world that came before and the world that would emerge from it in the nineteenth century that it deserves its own name: war capitalism.

  War capitalism relied on the capacity of rich and powerful Europeans to divide the world into an “inside” and an “outside.” The “inside” encompassed the laws, institutions, and customs of the mother country, where state-enforced order ruled. The “outside,” by contrast, was characterized by imperial domination, the expropriation of vast territories, decimation of indigenous peoples, theft of their resources, enslavement, and the domination of vast tracts of land by private capitalists with little effective oversight by distant European states. In these imperial dependencies, the rules of the inside did not apply. There, masters trumped states, violence defied the law, and bold physical coercion by priva
te actors remade markets. While, as Adam Smith argued, such territories advanced “more rapidly to wealth and greatness than any other human society,” they did so via a social tabula rasa, which, perhaps ironically, provided the foundation for the emergence of very different societies and states on war capitalism’s “inside.”15

  War capitalism had an unprecedented transformative potential. At the root of the emergence of the modern world of sustained economic growth, it created unfathomable suffering, but also a consequential transformation of the organization of economic space: A multipolar world increasingly became unipolar. Power long spread across multiple continents and through numerous networks increasingly became centralized through a single node, dominated by European capitalists and European states. At the core of this change stood cotton, as the multiple and diverse worlds of the production and distribution of this commodity increasingly lost ground to a hierarchical empire organized on a global scale.

  Within Europe itself, this reorganization of economic space had continent-wide repercussions. “Atlantic” powers such as the Netherlands, Great Britain, and France replaced the erstwhile economic powerhouses such as Venice and its northern Italian hinterland. As Atlantic trade superseded Mediterranean trade and as the New World became an important producer of raw materials, cities with links to the Atlantic also rose in prominence in the manufacturing of cotton textiles. Indeed, as early as the sixteenth century, expanded cotton manufacturing in Europe was contingent on a link to the rapidly expanding markets throughout the Atlantic world—from the cloth markets in Africa to the newly emerging sources of raw cotton in the Americas. In Flemish cities such as Bruges (starting in 1513) and Leiden (starting in 1574), cotton manufacturing burgeoned, as Antwerp began to carry a significant trade in raw cotton and overseas expansion that gave access to huge new markets. French manufacturers, for identical reasons, also embarked upon new cotton spinning and weaving ventures in the late sixteenth century.16