Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  The explosion of the cotton industry was not a flash in the pan. Instead, as we will see, other industries would be made possible by the rise of cotton: a railroad network, the iron industry, and later in the nineteenth century a new set of industries that would amount to a second industrial revolution. But cotton was the vanguard. As historian Fernand Braudel has argued, the Industrial Revolution in cottons affected the “entire national economy.”31 As late as the mid-nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution was still, numerically, the story of cotton.

  The spectacular take off of the British cotton industry allowed British capitalists—along with the British state—to retain even more of the wages of war capitalism. With cheaper production costs thanks to the unprecedented productivity of their new machines and the new organization of production, with wage workers in large factories, British manufacturers, as expected, broke into new markets. Domestic markets expanded as cottons became cheaper and as cotton fabrics became ever more fashionable as their changing designs mattered increasingly to the self-presentation of middle-class consumers.32

  British cotton manufacturers also moved decisively into the all-important export market. By the 1780s, they came to sell in markets that British merchants previously had served with Indian textiles. Fine muslins that had been the pride of Bengal and “which for some thousands of years stood unequalled” were henceforth produced in the United Kingdom. This was clearly decisive, since the British market, with its 8.66 million people, was quite small, and per capita disposable income grew only modestly. Over the course of the eighteenth century cotton exports from Britain increased two hundred times—yet 94 percent of that increase took place in the two decades after 1780, when exports exploded by a factor greater than sixteen from their 1780 value of £355,060 to £5,854,057 in 1800. By the last years of the eighteenth century, 61.3 percent of all cotton cloth produced on the British Isles was exported. After 1815, thanks to these exports, England had indeed pretty much “eliminated all rivals from the non-European world” in the global trade of cotton yarn and cloth.33

  The true boom of the British cotton industry was thus an export boom. By 1800 British manufactured cottons had become a major presence on world markets—and at the same time thousands of spinners and weavers in newly built factories all over the English countryside, not to mention hundreds of factory owners and merchants and seamen, were newly dependent on such foreign markets. As Edward Baines observed in amazement in 1835, cotton exports “at the present day…are three times as large as the woolen exports,—having in so short a period outstripped and distanced a manufacture which has flourished for centuries in England and which for that length of time all writers on trade had justly considered as the grand source of commercial wealth to the country.” Indeed, such record trade in cottons influenced the entire British economy: 56 percent of all additional British exports from 1784–86 to 1804–6 were in cottons.34

  The export explosion: growth of British exports of cotton goods, 1697–1807 (illustration credit 3.5)

  British cottons now rapidly replaced Indian cottons on world markets. While in fiscal year 1800–1801, piece goods valued at £1.4 million were still exported from Bengal to Britain, by 1809–10, only eight years later, cloth exports had been reduced to just a bit more than £330,000—and would continue to fall rapidly thereafter. As a result, Indian weavers, who had dominated global cotton textile markets for centuries, went into free fall. In 1800, commercial resident John Taylor wrote a detailed history of the clothing industry of the Bengali city of Dhaka and reported that the value of cloth exports there had fallen by 50 percent between 1747 and 1797. Spinners especially had been hurt by British competition, and as a result a great number, he reported, “died of famine.” The people of the once thriving manufacturing city had been “reduced and impoverished,” its houses “ruined and abandoned,” and its commercial history become “a melancholy retrospect.” The “ancient celebrity” and “great wealth” of Dhaka were all but gone. By 1806, another report on Bengali commerce concluded that “the exports of Piece Goods on the public account, have also very considerably decreased…the consequences are, that the weavers finding no employment for their looms, many of them have been necessitated to quit their homes and seek employment elsewhere; most of them take to the plough, some remain in their own districts, while others migrate into distant parts of the country.” One critic of the East India Company, observing that it seemed the goal of British policy to make India into an importer of cotton cloth and an exporter of raw cotton, found it “a policy similar to that which Spain pursued towards the unhappy aborigines of America.”35

  British cottons captured the multifaceted export markets formerly controlled by Indian spinners and weavers, while manufacturers focused at first on selling to parts of the world subject to war capitalism. During the last decades of the eighteenth century, the heyday of the Industrial Revolution, more than two-thirds of British cotton exports went to such places. Exports flowed, in effect, within the same channels of the Atlantic economy that Britain had spent two hundred years and untold treasure building. Slaves on plantations in the Americas, unlike agricultural producers elsewhere, did not produce their own clothing and provided a uniquely rich market despite the low level of their masters’ provisioning. In the African trade—mostly in slaves—demand was just as high (and even increasing, as a result of the cotton planting boom in the Americas), as African merchants began to accept British-made cloth as equivalent to Indian cloth in quality and price. After 1806, British cottons were decisively dominating this market that had for so long eluded them.36

  The ability of merchants and manufacturers to access these markets pointed to the importance of a peculiar and novel form of state, a state that would be the crucial ingredient for industrial capitalism and would eventually travel in quite peculiar patterns around the globe. After all, cotton exports expanded on the strength of British trade networks and the institutions in which they were embedded—from a strong navy creating and protecting market access to bills of lading allowing for the transfer of capital over large distances. This state was capable of forging and protecting global markets, policing its borders, regulating industry, creating and then enforcing private property rights in land, enforcing contracts over large geographical distances, forging fiscal tools to tax populations, and building a social, economic, and legal environment that made the mobilization of labor through wage payments possible.

  As one perceptive French observer argued in the early nineteenth century, “England has only arrived at the summit of prosperity by persisting for centuries in the system of protection and prohibition.”37 Indeed, in the end, it was not so much the new machines that revolutionized the world, impressive and important as they were. The truly heroic invention was the economic, social, and political institutions in which these machines were embedded. These institutions came to further define industrial capitalism and increasingly set it apart from its parent, war capitalism.38

  The creation of such a state at the core of industrial capitalism was a complicated dance between various interests. A rising group of manufacturers pressed for a recognition of their interests, while statesmen and bureaucrats came to understand that their own exalted position in the world rested on Great Britain’s rapidly expanding manufacturing capacity. Manufacturers fought competing interests—the East India Company, for example—and competing elites, such as aristocratic landowners. And as merchants and manufacturers accumulated significant resources on which the state came to depend, these capitalists could translate their growing importance to the national economy into political influence.39 Cotton mill owners became increasingly active politically, culminating in the 1832 Reform Act that extended them the suffrage, allowing many textile entrepreneurs to move into the House of Commons, where they strenuously lobbied for the (global) interests of their industry, from the Corn Laws to British colonial expansion.40 The argument of the manufacturers for policies conducive to their interests was straightforward
and strikingly modern, as this 1789 petition of 103 cotton goods manufacturers from around Glasgow to the Treasury shows:

  That your Petitioners began early to Manufacture British Muslins, and of late years have made great Progress in extending and improving this valuable branch of Trade, as well as the other Articles denominated Callicoes, and Mixed Goods. That the Power of Machinery applied on this Manufactory, joined to the new Facilities, which a more extended Practice has enabled your Petitioners to introduce, occasions 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.41

  Built by newly empowered manufacturers and a state with vastly increased capacity, industrial capitalism found a very different answer to the question of how to mobilize labor, capital, and markets compared to its parent, war capitalism. Labor, unlike in the Americas, could be mobilized because changes in the countryside, including legal changes, had already produced a large group of landless proletarians who were forced to sell their labor power to survive, and did so without being physically coerced. Moreover, unlike for the plantation economy of the Americas, the territorial needs of cotton manufacturing were limited and focused mostly on accessing waterpower. As markets in land had emerged centuries before, and property rights in land were relatively secure and protected by the state, the land grab so typical of war capitalism did not and could not emerge in Britain itself. At the same time, an interventionist state was able to promote land uses deemed helpful to general economic development, for instance by allowing expropriations for the building of turnpikes and canals. Moreover, a highly centralized and bureaucratic state regulated and taxed domestic industry.42

  Finally, and perhaps most decisive for this early moment in the emergence of industrial capitalism, the mechanisms of war capitalism could be externalized thanks to the state’s imperial expansion, in effect reducing capitalists’ need to recast the domestic social structure and their dependence on domestic resources, ranging from labor to food to raw materials. Some of the problems in the mobilization of labor, raw materials, territories, and markets had indeed been solved by war capitalism in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. And it was again a strong state (a state fortified by the institutional and financial accumulations of war capitalism) that was the root cause of the ability to externalize some of the labor, land, and resource mobilization. This state could in fact enforce different kinds of institutions in different parts of the world, with slavery and wage labor coexisting, for example.

  Manufacturers, merchants, and statesmen constructed a new form of capitalism—a capitalism that would dominate much of the world by the late nineteenth century.

  The modern state at its core was sometimes less “visible” than autocratic monarchical rule, and thus seemed “weaker” as its power was increasingly embedded in impersonal rules, laws, and bureaucratic mechanisms. Paradoxically, industrial capitalism made state power less visible as it amplified it. No longer did the personal authority of the king, the lord, or the master, or age-old custom, regulate the market; instead the market was made by explicit rules relentlessly enforced by contracts, laws, and regulations. Weaker states continued to rely on client networks, the subcontracting of authority, and arbitrary rule—characteristics that would not provide fertile ground for industrial capitalism. And as European colonialism spread its tentacles into ever more areas of the world, it further strengthened the state capacity of the colonizers, while at the same time undermining political authority and state capacity among the colonized. Just as state capacity became ever more important, its distribution around the globe became more unequal.

  Tellingly, even though Edward Baines argued in 1835 that “this [cotton] trade was not the nursling of government protection,” he proceeded to list in chronological order all “interferences of the legislature” that related to the cotton industry, from prohibitions to tariffs—a list that would fill seven pages, a striking reminder of the state’s importance to ensuring the “free” market of cotton.43 In Great Britain and eventually in a few other states, this dependence of capitalists on the state attached them firmly to one another and resulted in a kind of territorialization and “nationalization” of manufacturing capital. Ironically, that link between capitalists and the state would eventually also empower workers, who could deploy the state’s dependence on the consent of the governed to mobilize collectively for higher wages and better working conditions.

  It was also because of the awe-inspiring capacity of modern states (what Hegel would call the “spirit of history”) that war capitalism’s way of mobilizing land, labor, and markets would be largely irrelevant within Europe itself. This is in many ways surprising. After all, large-scale and capital-intensive enterprises, the mobilization of vast numbers of workers, and the tight managerial supervision of those workers had all been pioneered to great profit on the plantations of the Americas and seemed to show the way toward the reorganization of production. Yet in Britain itself, war capitalism provided only the foundation, not the nature, of capitalism. To dominate production, workers were neither enslaved nor populations murdered, for capitalists were not fulfilling frontier fantasies beyond the reach of the state. This was revolutionary, but in our world, in which the institutional foundations of industrial capitalism have become commonplace, it is hard to appreciate just how revolutionary it was.

  And the relationship between the expansion of manufacturing and the strengthening of the state was mutually reinforcing. Just as the British state undergirded the economic dynamism of the cotton industry, that industry’s many progeny became ever more important to the British state. To fuel the wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that established British hegemony in the Atlantic, according to Edward Baines, Britain relied heavily on its commerce, and the most important line of commerce was cotton: “Without the means supplied by her flourishing manufacturers and trade, the country could not have borne up under a conflict as prolonged and exhausting.” Cotton goods valued at £150 million were exported between 1773 and 1815, estimated Baines, filling the coffers of manufacturers, merchants—and the state. It was the volume and balance of trade that provided the state the revenues it needed to invest, for example, in expanded naval power in the first place. State revenues indeed increased by a factor of sixteen between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries, as Britain engaged in these years in a total of fifty-six years of warfare. And fully one-third of tax revenues in 1800 came from customs. As the Edinburgh Review remarked in 1835, “How great a degree of our prosperity and power depend on their [manufacturers’] continued improvement and extension.” State bureaucrats and rulers understood that manufacturing was a way to produce revenue for the state, as the state itself now rested on the industrial world it had helped create.44

  The first, lurching stages of this great acceleration, as seen at Quarry Bank Mill, might still have appeared modest. To modern eyes, the new technologies seem quaint, the factories small, and the impact of the cotton industry limited to a few regions in just one small part of the world, while much of the globe, even much of Great Britain, continued as before. The productive capacity of the first factories dotting the English countryside, looked at from a global perspective, was indeed minuscule. After all, Chinese spinners and weavers processed about 420 times as much cotton in 1750 as their counterparts in Britain in 1800, and the numbers for India were similar.45 In 1800, two decades after Greg’s midwifery to the Industrial Revolution, less than one-tenth of 1 percent of global cotton cloth production came from machines invented on the British Isles. Yet once the social and institutional scaffolding of industrial capitalism had been invented in a decades-long conflict between capitalists, aristocrats, the state, workers, and peasants, it could spread to other industries and other parts of the world. The territory for further transformations was huge.

  The Industrial Revolution, powered by cotton, was, as historian Eric Hobsbawm has pu
t it, “the most important event in world history.” It created a world unlike any that had come before. “This land of long chimneys,” as cotton manufacturer Thomas Ashton called it in 1837, was not just different from the centuries-old world of the British countryside, it was also a vast leap from the world of war capitalism that merchants, planters, and state officials had forged over the previous two hundred years. Its spectacle attracted visitors from all over the world, simultaneously awed and horrified by the sheer scale of it all: the endless chimneys, the chaotic cities, the spectacular social transformations. An 1808 English visitor saw in Manchester a town that was “abominably filthy, the Steam Engine is pestiferous, the Dyehouses noisesome and offensive, and the water of the river as black as ink.” Alexis de Tocqueville made that same pilgrimage in 1835 and saw a “sort of black smoke [that] covers the city. The sun seen through it is a disk without rays. Under this half daylight 300,000 human beings are ceaselessly at work. A thousand noises disturb this damp, dark labyrinth, but they are not at all the ordinary sounds one hears in great cities.” However, Tocqueville added, it was “from this foul drain [that] the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilisation works its miracles, and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage.” Observers from the still pastoral United States were terrified by this new Old World; Thomas Jefferson wished that his compatriots would “never…twirl a distaff…let our workshops remain in Europe.”46