Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  As the sun was made to rise over a small part of Europe, as enterprising Europeans sucked the discontinuous, multifocal, and horizontal worlds of cotton slowly into their orbit, they invented tools and methods that enabled them to mobilize land, labor, and markets in the service of a newly and boldly imagined empire. By creating this vast sphere of war capitalism that followed rules so different from the ones in Europe itself, they created not just the conditions for the “great divergence” and the Industrial Revolution but also for a further strengthening of states at home that would in turn become crucial to the creation of the empire of cotton. By 1780, Europe in general, and Britain in particular, had become a hub of the world’s cotton networks.

  Chapter Three

  The Wages of War Capitalism

  Spinning mule, Lancashire, 1835 (illustration credit 3.1)

  The revolution began in the most unlikely places: a quiet valley in the low hills that surround Manchester, for example. Today just a short bus ride away from the city’s bustling international airport, Quarry Bank Mill attracts tourists as much for its well-kept gardens as for its industrial history. Visitors stroll along the banks of the Bollin River, whose waters over the millennia have cut a valley perhaps a hundred feet deep into the surrounding fields.

  Two centuries ago that river inspired a British merchant to launch one of the most important experiments in human history. In 1784, on the bank of the stream, Samuel Greg gathered together in a small factory a few newfangled spinning machines, so-called water frames, a collection of orphaned children, putting-out workers from surrounding villages, and a supply of Caribbean cotton. Eschewing the power supply that spinners had been using for hundreds of years—human—Greg put his yarn-spinning machines into motion using the weight of falling water. Though modest in size, Greg’s mill was unlike anything the world had seen. By 1784 here and on a handful of riverbanks nearby, for the first time in human history, machines powered by non-animate energy manufactured yarn. Greg and his manufacturing contemporaries, after decades of tinkering, had suddenly increased the productivity of one of mankind’s oldest industries, and with it began to choreograph an unprecedentedly grand movement of machines and people.

  Samuel Greg’s venture was a quintessentially local event. Greg was born in 1758 in Belfast, but grew up in Manchester, and moved to nearby Styal soon after realizing the capacities embedded in its sleepy stream. His workers came from the valleys, hills, and orphanages of Cheshire and nearby Lancashire. Even his machines had recently been invented in nearby towns and cities. Like Silicon Valley’s role as the incubator of the late-twentieth-century computer revolution, the idyllic rolling hills around Manchester emerged in the late eighteenth century as the hotbed of that era’s cutting-edge industry—cotton textiles. In an area forming an arc of about thirty-five miles around Manchester, the countryside filled with mills, country towns turned into cities, and tens of thousands of people moved from farms into factories.

  What at first glance seems like a local, even provincial event, however, could not have occurred without the ideas, materials, and markets provided by the recasting of the worlds of cotton during the previous three centuries. Greg’s factory was embedded within globe-spanning networks—and would eventually spark around the world far greater changes than Greg could comprehend. Greg secured the essential raw material for production from his merchant relatives in Liverpool, who had purchased it off boats from places like Jamaica and Brazil. The very idea of cotton fabrics, and the technologies for finishing them, as we know, came from Asia, India in particular, and Greg’s desire to produce them was largely motivated by his hope to replace the products of Indian spinners and weavers in domestic as well as international markets. Last but not least, much of Greg’s production would leave the United Kingdom for destinations elsewhere—feeding the slave trade on the western coast of Africa, dressing Greg’s very own slaves on the island of Dominica, and catering to consumers in continental Europe. Samuel Greg was able to draw upon all of these networks in large part because British merchants had long dominated them.

  The actual material contribution made by Greg and his colleagues during the heyday of the Industrial Revolution between 1780 and 1815 would still not come close to matching the volume and the quality of Asian, Latin American, and African spinners and weavers. Yet their mills were the future. These water-powered (and, soon, steam-powered)machines, driven by relentless innovation, animated by wage workers, enabled by significant capital accumulation and the willing encouragement of a new kind of state, seemed almost magical, and they created the central pillar of the empire of cotton. From this local spark, England came to dominate a many-pronged world economy, making one of humanity’s most important industries its own. From this local spark, industrial capitalism would emerge and eventually spread its wings across the globe. From this local spark, the world as most of us know it emerged.

  The changing spatial arrangements between growers, manufacturers, and consumers of cotton in the world, 2000 BCE–1860 CE. Phase I: Multipolar, disconnected. Phase II: After 1600, networks focused increasingly on Europe, but production remained dispersed. Phase III: After the Industrial Revolution, production networks focused on Europe, and a multicentric industry became unipolar. (illustration credit 3.2)

  “This Land of Long Chimneys”: The Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom, 1780–1815

  Samuel Greg was important to this story; he and his contemporaries shaped the future. But like most successful revolutionaries, they relied on the past, on the networks constructed by British merchants, planters, and the state during the previous two hundred years. In other words, the power they harnessed in water was only possible because of the power harnessed by war capitalism. Slavery, colonial domination, militarized trade, and land expropriations provided the fertile soil from which a new kind of capitalism would sprout. Greg’s genius lay in realizing that risk-taking English entrepreneurs like him could build upon this material and institutional heritage and generate unprecedented wealth and power by embracing the heretofore ungentlemanly world of manufacturing.

  Greg had deep roots in war capitalism, its violent appropriation of territory and slave labor, as well its reliance on the imperial state to secure new technologies and markets. He had secured his part of the family fortune through Hillsborough Estate, a profitable sugar plantation on the Caribbean island of Dominica, where he held hundreds of enslaved Africans until the final abolition of slavery in British territories in 1834. Greg’s uncles Robert and Nathaniel Hyde, who had raised him from age nine and also provided much of the capital for the building of Quarry Bank Mill, were also textile manufacturers, West Indian plantation owners, and merchants. Greg’s wife, Hannah Lightbody, was born into a family involved in the slave trade, while his sister-in-law’s family had moved from the slave trade into the export of cloth to Africa.1

  Most of Greg’s fellow cotton manufacturers came from considerably less prosperous circumstances, without Caribbean slave plantations. They had accumulated only modest amounts of capital, but had a wealth of tinkering spirit and technical aptitude—as well as a hunger for the huge profits that might be generated by manufacturing. Yet they, too, drew their essential raw material—cotton—from slave labor. Even they catered to markets that had first been opened by the trade in Indian cotton textiles, textiles that had been kept out of many European markets in order to protect noncompetitive European producers. And they, too, drew on Indian technologies captured through British imperial expansion on that continent. Many, moreover, used capital accumulated via the Atlantic trade and catered to Atlantic markets—especially in Africa and in the Americas, economies fueled almost exclusively by slave labor. And for them, war capitalism had also provided many learning opportunities—how to organize long-distance trade, for example, how to run domestic industries; an understanding of the mechanisms to move capital across oceans—lessons that informed the development of domestic financial instruments. Even modern labor cost accounting had emerged from t
he world of the slave plantation and only later migrated into modern industry. And British entrepreneurs’ incentive and ability to reinvent radically the production of cotton textiles was protected by a powerful imperial state, a state that itself had been the product of war capitalism.2

  Bringing war capitalism home: Hannah Lightbody, Samuel Greg’s wife, and daughter of a Liverpool merchant family (illustration credit 3.3)

  Most crucially, by the second half of the eighteenth century, that heritage allowed British merchants to assume commanding roles at many vital nodes of the global cotton industry—even though British workers produced only a tiny percentage of global output and Britain’s farmers grew no cotton whatsoever. England’s domination of these global networks, as we will see, was essential to recast production and become the unlikely source of the cotton-fueled Industrial Revolution. While certainly still revolutionary, industrial capitalism was the offspring of war capitalism, the previous centuries’ great innovation.3

  Samuel Greg and his fellow innovators knew that the global reach and power of the British Empire gave them a tremendous advantage over their fellow merchants and artisans in Frankfurt, Calcutta, or Rio de Janeiro. Having started out as a merchant in the employ of his uncles, he had already organized a large putting-out network of cotton spinners and weavers in the Lancashire and Cheshire countryside before investing in his new machines. In addition to the profits and labor from this putting-out network, Greg had easy access to abundant capital from his wife’s family. And the Rathbone family, which would become one of the dominant players in the nineteenth-century cotton trade, stood ready in 1780 to supply raw cotton to Greg. He knew firsthand that the market for cotton fabrics—in continental Europe, along the coast of Africa, and in the Americas—was rapidly expanding.4

  And while the upside was tremendous, the risks of these first ventures were modest. In the 1780s, Greg invested at first a fairly small amount of capital into his Quarry Bank Mill: £3,000, the equivalent of about half a million U.S. dollars today. Then he recruited ninety children between the ages of ten and twelve from nearby poorhouses, attaching them for seven years to his factory as “parish apprentices.” By 1800 he supplemented these children with 110 adult workers who received wages. Greg sold his cloth first mostly to Europe and the West Indies, and, after the 1790s, increasingly to Russia and the United States. Thanks to those expanding markets, the new factory, like others, was spectacularly profitable from the beginning, returning annually 18 percent on his original investment, four times as much as UK government bonds.5

  Contemporary observers as well as modern historians have found many reasons that explain Greg’s venture, and with it why the much broader Industrial Revolution, “broke out” in this place, in northern England, and at this time, in the 1780s. The genius of British inventors, the size of the British market and its unusually deep integration, the geography of Britain with its easy access to waterborne transport, the importance of religious dissenters for thinking outside the box, and the creation of a state favorable to entrepreneurial initiative have all been cited.6 While none of these arguments are unimportant, they omit a core part of the story of the Industrial Revolution: its dependence on the globe-spanning system of war capitalism.

  As a result of all these factors, for the first time ever, a new character, the manufacturer, strode onto the scene, an individual who used capital not to enslave labor or conquer territory, though that remained essential, but to organize workers into great orchestras of machine-based production. Manufacturers’ efforts to reorganize production rested on new ways of mobilizing land, labor, and resources—and called, among other things, for a new connection between capitalists and the state. It was this nexus of social and political power that together animated industrial capitalism, the transformational invention of the Industrial Revolution. It was that innovation that would, as we will see, eventually take wing and travel to other parts of the world.

  Fueled by the wages of war capitalism, Greg and his contemporaries, as one observer remarked in the 1920s, “wrested the empire of cotton from the East within a vigorous generation of invention,” rewriting the entire geography of global cotton manufacturing. Their work was revolutionary because it heralded a new institutional form for organizing economic activity and a world economy in which rapid growth and ceaseless reinvention of production became the norm, not the exception. To be sure, important inventions had been made in the past, and there had been moments of accelerated economic growth in various regions of the world before the Industrial Revolution. Yet none of them had created a world in which revolution itself would become a permanent feature of life, a world in which economic growth would, despite periodic collapses, seem to fuel its own expansion. There had been no radical acceleration of economic growth in the thousand years before 1800 in Europe or elsewhere, and any that had occurred had soon foundered on the shoals of resource constraints, a food crisis, or disease. Now industrial capitalism was creating an ever-changing world, and cotton, the world’s most important industry, was the mainspring of this unprecedented acceleration of human productivity.7

  In retrospect, late-eighteenth-century England seemed ripe for a reinvention of cotton manufacturing. British capitalists looked back on two centuries of cotton textile production, had access to investable capital, and employed ever more peasants to spin and weave at home. Also, British textile producers based in households had withstood the pressures of imports from India for decades, an experience that schooled them in the importance of being able to compete with Indian manufacturers to capture their markets. And last but not least, workers were available to staff the new factories, workers who did not have the ability to resist the process of being turned from rural cultivators or artisans into wage laborers. These factors provided the necessary conditions for a radical reimagining of production and the institutions in which it was embedded. Such conditions, however, were hardly unique, in fact they were shared, if not in all aspects, then at least in many particulars, from China to India to continental Europe to Africa. They cannot alone explain why the Industrial Revolution broke out in a small part of the British Isles in the late eighteenth century.8

  British capitalists, however, in contrast to their counterparts elsewhere, controlled many global cotton networks. They had access to uniquely dynamic markets, they dominated the transoceanic trade in cottons, and they had firsthand knowledge of the fabulous potential wealth that could come from selling cloth. The core problem faced by British cotton manufacturers was the difficulty of competing with high-quality yet cheap Indian products. In the course of the eighteenth century, as we have seen, British producers had largely (though not entirely) solved the quality problem by appropriating Indian technology. Expanding output, and lowering costs, proved more difficult: The putting-out networks that British merchants had built in the countryside proved largely resistant to higher production. Work was performed irregularly, additional workers were difficult to mobilize on short notice, and transportation costs rose with the volume of work. And it was difficult to enforce homogeneous quality in products spun and woven on remote farms. With the existing technology and social organization of production, British outworkers could hardly compete with cotton workers in other parts of the world. Indeed, they succeeded mostly only in the protected domestic and colonial markets.9

  The main reason for this inability to compete, however, was wage costs. Wages in the United Kingdom were significantly higher than in other parts of the world; indeed, in 1770 Lancashire wages were perhaps as much as six times those in India. Even though by this point improved machinery meant that productivity per cotton worker in Britain was already two to three times higher than in India, that multiplier was still not sufficient to level the playing field. War capitalism had created a fundamentally new set of opportunities for British cotton capitalists, but it had no answer to the question of how to enter cotton cloth markets in a globally significant way. Protectionism had been a workable answer to a point, and was deployed to
great success, but the tantalizing possibility of global exports could not be preserved by such prohibitions. What British cotton capitalists needed was a dynamic combination of new technologies to lower costs, the further growth of elastic markets that already had begun to expand on the tails of British expansion, and a supportive state with the ability not just to protect global empire but to transform society in Britain itself.10

  Since labor costs were the primary obstacle to grasping the new tantalizing opportunities, British merchants, inventors, and budding manufacturers—practical men all—focused on methods to increase the productivity of their high-cost labor. In the process, they effected the most momentous technological change in the history of cotton. Their first noteworthy innovation came in 1733 with John Kay’s invention of the flying shuttle. This small wooden tool in the shape of the hull of a ship allowed weavers to attach the weft thread and then propel it to “fly” from one side of the loom to the other through the warp threads. The shuttle doubled the productivity of weavers. At first it spread only slowly, but its spread was unstoppable: After 1745, despite resistance from weavers who feared for their livelihoods, it was widely adopted.11

  This tiny piece of wood propelled in novel ways prompted a cascade of further innovations that would gradually but permanently change cotton manufacturing. The spread of more productive weaving techniques put huge pressure on spinning, as ever more spinners were needed to supply one weaver with sufficient yarn to keep the looms working. Despite more women in ever more households working longer hours on the spinning wheel, the supply was insufficient. After Kay’s invention it took four spinners to supply one weaver. Many artisans tried to find ways to circumvent this bottleneck, and by the 1760s productivity increases became possible with James Hargreaves’s invention of the spinning jenny. The jenny consisted of a hand-operated wheel that would rotate a number of spindles within a frame, while the spinner would use her other hand to move a bar back and forth to extend the thread and then to wind it on the spindles themselves. This machine was at first able to spin eight separate threads, later sixteen or more, and as early as 1767 it had tripled a spinner’s speed. It spread rapidly, and by 1786 there were about twenty thousand in use in Britain.12