by Sven Beckert
As early as 1621, only a little more than two decades after the creation of the East India Company, London wool merchants protested against the growing importation of cotton cloth. Two years later, in 1623, Parliament debated Indian textile imports, calling them “injurious to the national interests.” Indeed, agitation against cotton imports became a constant feature of the English political landscape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A 1678 pamphlet, “The Ancient Trades Decayed and Repaired Again,” warned that the woolen trade was “very much hindered by our own people, who do wear many foreign commodities instead of our own.” In 1708, Defoe’s Review printed a bitter editorial that looked “into the real Decay of our Manufactures,” ascribing the decline to the import of ever increasing quantities of “Chints and painted Callicoes” by the East India Company. The result was that “the Bread taken out of [the people’s] Mouths, and the East-India Trade carry away the whole Employment of their People.” Usually it was woolen and linen manufacturers who agitated against Indian imports, but sometimes cotton manufacturers chimed in as well: In 1779, calico printers, fearful that the East India Company would ruin their business, wrote to the Treasury that “if there is not a Prohibition put to the East India Company’s going on with their printing Manufactory in the East Indies a great many more must also leave off this Branch of Business.”41
Such agitation led to protectionist measures. In 1685, England imposed a 10 percent duty on “all calicoes and other Indian linen and all wrought silks which are manufactures of India.” In 1690, the tariff was doubled. In 1701, Parliament outlawed the import of printed cottons, leading to the importation of plain calicoes for further processing in England, giving a huge boost to British calico printing. A 1721 law went so far as to ban people from wearing printed calicoes if the white calicoes themselves originated from India, a measure that gave an impetus to calico fabrication in Britain. Selling Indian cottons was eventually criminalized altogether: In 1772 Robert Gardiner of London rented an apartment to one W. Blair, who “brought illegal goods into his house,” namely Indian muslins. He was sent to jail. In 1774, Parliament decreed that cotton cloth for sale in England had to be made exclusively of cotton spun and woven in England. Only goods destined for reexport were permitted from the East Indies. The Indian cotton goods not subject to these bans, such as plain chintz and muslins, were subject to heavy tariffs. In the end, all of these protectionist measures did not help the domestic woolen and linen industry, but did spur domestic cotton manufacture.42
Like Britain, France took pains to outlaw the import of Indian cottons. In 1686, in response to pressure from silk and wool industrialists, it outlawed the manufacture, use, and sale of cottons. Over the next seventy years, no fewer than two royal edicts and eighty rulings of the king’s council attempted to repress cottons. Penalties were made ever more severe, with imprisonment and, starting in 1726, even the death penalty awaiting offenders. In 1755, France again outlawed the import of Indian printed textiles for consumption in France, and in 1785 the king reconfirmed the prohibitions in order to protect a “national industry.” Twenty thousand guards worked on enforcing these laws, sending as many as 50,000 violators to forced labor on French galleys. Explicitly excluded from the long list of prohibited Indian textiles, however, were those destined for Guinée, that is, textiles used in the slave trade. Slaves, after all, could only be gotten by exchanging them for the cottons from India.43
Other European countries followed suit: Venice disallowed the import of Indian cottons in 1700, as did Flanders. In Prussia, a 1721 edict of King Friedrich Wilhelm outlawed the wearing of printed or painted chintz and cottons. Spain outlawed the import of Indian textiles in 1717. And in the late eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Abdulhamid I prohibited subjects from wearing certain Indian cloths.44
What began as a policy to protect domestic wool, linen, and silk makers evolved toward an explicit program of encouraging the domestic production of cotton textiles. “The prohibition that the industrial nations imposed on printed textiles in order to encourage their own national production,” the French traveler François-Xavier Legoux de Flaix argued in 1807, provided European manufacturers who could not yet freely compete with Indian weavers with a sense of how promising the market for cottons would be. Domestic as well as export markets were potentially huge and extremely elastic. And just as protectionist measures limited access to European textile markets for Indian producers, European states and merchants increasingly dominated global networks that allowed them to capture markets for cotton textiles in other parts of the world. These markets, in fact, provided an outlet for cottons secured in India as well as for domestic producers. Thus Europeans could both increase cloth purchases in India and protect their own uncompetitive national industries—a miraculous feat possible only because war capitalism had allowed Europeans to dominate global cotton networks while at the same time constructing new kinds of ever more powerful states whose constant warfare demanded ever greater resources and thus embraced domestic industry.45
Imperial expansion and the increasing dominance of Europeans in the global cotton trade allowed, furthermore, for an increasing transfer of Asian knowledge to Europe. Manufacturers in Europe felt more and more pressure to appropriate these technologies in order to compete both on price and on quality with Indian producers. Europe’s movement toward manufacturing cotton textiles was based, in fact, on what might be considered one of history’s most dramatic instances of industrial espionage.
One reason that Indian textiles were so popular among European and African consumers was their superior design and brilliant colors. In order to match the fabulous qualities of their Indian competitors, European manufacturers, supported by their various national governments, collected and shared knowledge about Indian production techniques. French cotton manufacturers, for example, devoted great effort to copying Indian techniques by closely observing Indian ways of manufacturing. In 1678, Georges Roques, who worked for the French East India Company, wrote what quickly became an invaluable report on Indian woodblock printing techniques, based on his observations in Ahmedabad. Forty years later, in 1718, Le Père Turpin followed suit, and in 1731 Georges de Beaulieu, the second lieutenant on a French East India Company ship, reached Pondicherry to investigate how Indian artisans produced chintz. As a result of these and other efforts, by 1743 French manufacturers were capable of copying all but the very finest Indian textiles. Yet despite this rapid appropriation of Indian techniques, even in the late eighteenth century cloth from the subcontinent still defined quality. Legoux de Flaix admired in 1807 the qualities of Indian yarn and cloth (“a degree of perfection far beyond what we are familiar with in Europe”) and once again reported in minute detail on Indian manufacturing techniques, in the hopes of enabling French artisans to copy them: “All the weaving combs in France should be made according to the model used in Bengal,” he advised, among other things. “Then we will succeed in equaling the Indians in the manufacture of their muslin.”46
Other European manufacturers followed suit. In the late eighteenth century, Danish travelers ventured to India to understand and appropriate Indian technology. And throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English cotton printers collected and then copied Indian designs using Indian cotton printing expertise. Publications such as the “Account of the Manufactures carried on at Bangalore, and the Processes employed by the Natives in Dyeing Silk and Cotton,” or the similarly oriented “The Genuine Oriental Process for giving to Cotton Yarn, or Stuffs, the fast or ingrained Colour, known by the Name of Turkey or Adrianople-Red,” exemplified a persistent interest in technology transfer. Just as was the case with the spinning wheel and the horizontal treadle loom in the centuries prior, Asia from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century remained the most important source of cotton manufacturing and, especially, printing technology. As European domination of the global networks of cotton quickened, so too did the pace of European assimilation of Indian technology.
47
Replacing Indian cotton cloth with domestic production, both for export markets and for local consumption, became a goal to aspire to. Glasgow cotton manufacturers pressured the government to help them gain access to export markets in 1780, since there was “a surplus of Goods which the Home Consumption cannot exhaust: and therefore a foreign Sale to a much greater extent becomes indispensably necessary, in order to occupy the Machinery (which must otherwise be lost) and also to keep alive the Industry of the People, who have been trained to this business.”48 Imperial expansion, moreover, had acquainted European, and especially British, merchants with global cotton markets. By 1770, it had become clear that markets for cotton textiles in Europe, but even more so in Africa, the Americas, and, of course, Asia, were huge—and the opportunities for profit to anyone able to produce for these markets on a competitive basis virtually limitless. Knowledge of the elasticity and profitability of these markets derived directly from merchants’ experience in the world’s long-distance cotton trade networks.49
Indeed, export markets eventually became central to Europe’s cotton textile manufacturers—markets that had been captured, at first, through the export of fabrics from India. “It is of very great importance to our Investment,” the London Commercial Department wrote to its counterparts in Bombay, “that we should be enabled to bring regularly to Sale a considerable amount of Surat Goods for the supply of the African Trade in particular.” West Africans turned into principal customers for cotton cloth secured by the French from Pondicherry not least because imports into France itself were illegal. As Legoux de Flaix observed in the late eighteenth century, “It was the establishment of colonies [in the West Indies] and the slave trade which gave birth to this branch of commerce with Indoustan…. But if the colonies of the Antilles cease to buy slaves, one can say without doubt, that this article will decline more and more.”50
English manufacturers and merchants had relied early on exports of domestic and Indian fabrics to Africa. This reliance on overseas markets became pronounced after 1750. As historian Joseph E. Inikori has shown, in 1760, Britain exported about one-third of its cotton cloth production. By the end of the eighteenth century the share going abroad had expanded to about two-thirds. Africa and the Americas were the most important markets. By mid-century, 94 percent of all cotton cloth exports from Britain went there. The sheer scale of this market meant that those able to compete there could reap fortunes. Adam Smith saw this clearly when he wrote in 1776 that by “opening a new and inexhaustible market to all the commodities of Europe, it gave occasion to new divisions of labour and improvements of art, which, in the narrow circle of the ancient commerce, could never have taken place for want of a market to take off the greater part of their produce.”51
Africans’ appreciation for these cottons was grounded in their own cotton industry and their much earlier exposure to Indian textiles. European slave merchants at first struggled to deliver exactly the type of cloth for which African demand already existed, especially indigo blue and white cottons. Around 1730 the East India Company remarked that a shortage of Indian cottons had “put people upon making goods in imitation of them here” in England—and European traders even exported cloth under their Indian names, because Africans usually preferred cloth “made in India.” In a memorandum for the Board of Trade, Elias Barnes hoped that British weavers could successfully copy Indian cottons. The potential market for such cloth, he believed, was immense: “Besides what is consumed in our Own Dominions, the whole World will be our customer.” As late as 1791 the Commercial Department of the East India Company urged Bombay to regularly ship cottons to England “for the supply of the African trade in particular.”52
Imperial expansion, slavery, and land expropriations—war capitalism—laid the foundations for the still small and technologically backward domestic cotton industry in Europe. It provided dynamic markets and access to technology and to essential raw materials. It also became a significant engine of capital formation. Mercantile cities such as Liverpool, which derived their wealth largely from slavery, became important sources of capital for the emerging cotton industry, and cotton merchants in Liverpool provided ever more credit to manufacturers to enable them to work up the cotton. London merchants, in turn, who sold the yarn and cloth coming from British producers advanced credit to Lancashire manufacturers. In fact, they provided the very important and very significant working capital, as profits from trade were redirected toward manufacturing, “a flow of capital inwards from commerce.” Moreover, as these merchants gained wealth in long-distance trade, they could demand political protections from a government increasingly dependent on extracting revenue from them.53
Last but not least, war capitalism also nourished the emerging secondary sectors of the economy such as insurance, finance, and shipping, sectors that would become exceedingly important to the emergence of the British cotton industry, but also public institutions such as government credit, money itself, and national defense. These institutions originated in the world of war capitalism “as advanced industrial techniques and commercial practices” migrated from export businesses into the domestic economy.54
European—and especially British—merchants, with the willing partnership of the British state, had inserted themselves in unique ways into the global networks of cotton production, between growers and spinners, between spinners and weavers, between producers and consumers. Long before the advent of new cotton-producing technologies, they had in fact already rearranged the global cotton industry and global cotton networks. These networks were dominated by the joint venture of private capital and increasingly robust states. Together their commitment to armed trade, industrial espionage, prohibitions, restrictive trade regulations, domination of territories, capturing of labor, removal of indigenous inhabitants, and the state-sponsored creation of territories that were then left to the far-reaching domination of capitalists had created a new economic order.55
From these abundant exertions by merchants, manufacturers, and government bureaucrats alike, Europe by the eighteenth century enjoyed a fundamentally new place in the global networks of cotton. Most of the world’s cotton production was still located in Asia, and vibrant cotton industries remained throughout Africa and the Americas, but Europeans now decisively dominated its transoceanic trade. In the New World, they had built a regime for the production of agricultural commodities based on slave labor, a system of production that would ultimately make more and more Europeans into cotton growers, even though little cotton grew on European soil. Strong European states had simultaneously created barriers to the import of foreign textiles just as they built a system for the appropriation of foreign technology. By orchestrating economic processes in Asia, Africa, and the Americas as well as in Europe, Europeans gained the paradoxical ability to direct the global trade in Indian textiles while at the same time keeping Asian cloth increasingly out of Europe, instead trading the products in Africa and elsewhere beyond Europe’s shores. A globalized textile industry had emerged and Europeans, for the first time, had grasped the vast scope of the global demand for cotton goods.
What set European statesmen and capitalists apart from their counterparts elsewhere was their ability to dominate these global networks. Whereas trade in Africa, Asia, and the Americas had been characterized by networks fueled by the mutually advantageous exchange of goods, Europeans built transcontinental production systems that exploded existing social relations on their continent and elsewhere. The significance of this early history of global interaction was not global trade as such (which remained of limited quantitative importance to all economies), but instead the reshaping of how things were produced, both in time and in space, and the social and political ramifications of that production.56 India and China, or, for that matter, the Aztec and Inca empires, had not even come close to such global dominance, and even less so to reinventing how people produced things in the far-flung corners of the globe. And yet starting in the sixteenth century, armed European
capitalists and capital-rich European states reorganized the world’s cotton industry. It was this early embrace of war capitalism that was the precondition for the Industrial Revolution that eventually created an enormous further push toward global economic integration and continues to shape and reshape our world today.
What happened was a swift transition from the older world of cotton—discontinuous, multifocal, horizontal—to an integrated, centralized, and hierarchical empire of cotton. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, it would have seemed unlikely to contemporary observers that Europe, and especially Britain, would very soon turn into the world’s most important cotton manufacturer. Indeed, even in 1860, James A. Mann, a fellow at the Statistical Society of London and a Member of the Royal Asiatic Society, could still remember:
Our own condition, at a period very recent, would but ill-compare with the then inhabitants of the New World or of India; our moral condition with all the advantages of climate, was absolutely below the latter, and the position of the manufacturing art in America, at the date of its discovery, or in India, surpassed even that of our woolen manufacture; and to this day, with all our appliances, we cannot surpass in fineness the muslins of the East, or the solidity and elegance of the Hamaca’s, the Brazilians and Carribees were wont to weave. When our people were in primeval darkness, East and West were in comparative light.
India…is the source whence we received indirectly our ideas of trade; it was the manufactures of that country, as of China, that inspired the minds of our forefathers with the wish for luxuries according to the received notions of the times. The period in which the manufacture was carried on in India, formed comparatively speaking, the dawning of our day; the sun was then traveling from another and past era in the world’s commerce. The Indian manufacture was the forecast of that light, which, intensifying on its road hither, gained the needful warmth to dispel the early mists of morn, and develop the embryo state; and strengthened by the energy of the European, it has given rise to a new era of commercial splendour never before witnessed.57
