by Sven Beckert
Within Britain, and within two decades, cotton’s evolution was vast. It began as one of the many spoils of imperial expansion, and became the driving commodity behind the Industrial Revolution. From tufted white bolls emerged a new global system: industrial capitalism. There was of course inventiveness and innovation in other industries, but cotton was the only one with a global scope, a strong connection to coercive labor, and a unique level of the state’s imperial attention to capture the necessary markets across the world.
Although industrial capitalism would eventually dominate the world, in the immediate aftermath of its birth it helped to expand and sharpen war capitalism elsewhere. That was because England’s lopsided lead in the exploitation of industrial capitalism rested in the ability of its merchants to secure ever more inexpensive and predictable supplies of cotton for its factories.47 And while British cotton manufacturers quite suddenly demanded huge new quantities of cotton, the institutional structures of industrial capitalism were still too immature and provincial to generate the labor and territory needed to produce all this cotton. For a terrible ninety years, from about 1770 to 1860, as we will see, industrial capitalism reinvigorated rather than replaced war capitalism.
In 1858, the president of the Galveston, Houston, and Henderson Railroad Company, Richard B. Kimball, visited Manchester. His observations are startling in their prescience: “As I entered your city, a sort of hum, a prolonged, continuous vibration struck my ear, as if some irresistible and mysterious force was at work. Need I say it was the noise of your spindles and your looms, and of the machinery which drives them?…. And I said to myself, what connection shall there be between Power in Manchester and Nature in America? What connection shall there be between the cotton fields of Texas, and the Factory, and loom, and spindle of Manchester?”48 The connection that he felt, but could not name, was the vital cord, still attached, between war capitalism and industrial capitalism.
Chapter Four
Capturing Labor, Conquering Land
Capturing land: Christopher Columbus arriving on Hispaniola, 1492 (illustration credit 4.1)
We are far remote from the period when men lived, and died, like plants, in the spot where destiny had produced them…. But of all the travels originating in curiosity, ambition, or the love of lucre, not one can be compared in the importance of its results, its extent, or the influence which it had exerted, to the mere transport of the produce of a weak shrub,—to the travels which industry has imposed upon the wool of a cotton-tree, the metamorphoses of which are as innumerable as our wants and desires.1
—Asiatic Journal, 1826
In 1857, the British economist John T. Danson published his attempt to disentangle the history of the modern cotton textile industry. On the mystery of the “connection between American Slavery and the British Cotton Manufacture,” he noted that “there is not, and never has been, any considerable source of supply for cotton, excepting the East-Indies, which is not obviously and exclusively maintained by slave-labour.” Efforts to cultivate cotton with free labor had largely failed, he observed, lending support to his conclusion that “as far as yet appears, [cotton] must continue to be grown, chiefly by slave-labour.” So ironclad, argued Danson, was the connection between slave labor in the United States and a prospering European cotton industry that “I cannot but deem it superfluous to say one word” about “modifying the existing system.”2
At first glance, Danson seemed correct. The year his essay was published, a full 68 percent of all cotton arriving in the United Kingdom came from the United States, and slaves grew most of it. Yet the reality that seemed so self-evident to Danson and others was only a recent invention. Indeed, in the five thousand years of the history of the world’s cotton industry, slavery had never played an important role. And it was not just slavery that was new. The emerging cotton complex centered in Europe was also unique because it did not draw on the production of nearby peasants for its raw materials. As late as 1791, most of the cotton grown for manufacturing purposes around the world was produced by small farmers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and consumed locally.3 When cotton manufacturing exploded in Great Britain, it was unclear where enough cotton would come from to feed its hungry factories. Yet despite these challenges, never before had an industry grown so large so fast. Indeed, it grew as large as it did, as fast as it did, not despite but because of its peculiar spatial arrangements and its ability to draw on slave labor.
In the crucible of the late-eighteenth-century cotton revolution, cotton built its last, but most decisive, link to the newly global, dynamic, and violent form of capitalism, whose signal feature was the coercive expropriation of land and labor. Necessitated by the yawning gap between the imperatives of mechanized manufacturing and the capacities of premodern agriculture, at its core was slavery.4 Rapidly expanding factories consumed cotton so fast that only the exigencies of war capitalism could secure the necessary reallocation of land and labor. As a result, indigenous people and land-grabbing settlers, slaves and planters, local artisans and factory owners woke to a new century clouded by a constant, if one-sided, state of war. As Danson had understood so well, it was coercion that opened fresh lands and mobilized new labor, becoming the essential ingredient of the emerging empire of cotton—and thus an essential ingredient in forging industrial capitalism. Yet by projecting the world he lived in both backward and forward, Danson missed both the novelty of slavery’s essential role and the possibility that it could come to an end.
For millennia, as we have seen, cultivators had grown cotton in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. But while the cotton plant found a favorable environment in large stretches of the world’s arable lands, Lancashire, or anywhere else in the British Isles for that matter, was not among them. Outside of the greenhouses at the Royal Gardens at Kew (which to this day showcase the core commodities on which the British Empire rested), Britain and much of Europe was too cold and wet for cotton. Among European leaders, only French revolutionaries, with their fervent belief in inventing the world anew, seriously tried to outwit the local climate and grow cotton—and even they failed.5
Indeed, British cotton manufacturing—and later, manufacturing across Europe—seemed a poor bet, for it was the first major industry in human history that lacked locally procured raw materials. In the United Kingdom, woolen and linen manufacturers had relied on Scottish sheep and English flax, the iron industry had used Sheffield iron ore, and the pottery manufacturers had worked up clay found in Staffordshire. Cotton spinning and weaving was different, with British manufacturers entirely dependent upon imports. To flourish, they required not just Asian technologies and African markets, but also raw material from yet another continent. Managing to acquire these materials meant building the first globally integrated manufacturing industry.
Yet in 1780, even as mechanical innovations occurred at a remarkable pace, a key piece of this global integration—the actual supply of cotton—remained undiscovered. The solution that emerged—slaves in the southern United States growing cotton on land expropriated from Native Americans—was far from obvious from the perspective of British cotton manufacturers and merchants. After all, in 1780 no cotton whatsoever arrived from North America. Instead, manufacturers drew on a far-flung network of small-scale suppliers to feed their mills. In the ports of London and Liverpool, bags of the “white gold” arrived from Izmir and Thessaloniki in the Ottoman Empire, from Port-au-Prince and Port Royal in the Caribbean, from Bombay in India and the Gold Coast in Africa. Raw cotton had traveled comparable routes for many centuries, within Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as well as between Asia and Europe. Syrian cotton had been spun and woven in Egypt, Maharashtra cotton in Bengal, Hainan cotton in Jiangnan, Anatolian cotton in Lucerne, Yucatecan cotton in Teotihuacán, and Macedonian cotton in Venice.6
By 1780, the surging production speeds of spinning machines in British factories increasingly strained this traditional nexus. British manufacturers spun about 5.1 million pounds of cotton in 1781, o
nly about two and a half times as much as they had spun eighty-four years earlier. But a mere nine years later in 1790, that figure had multiplied six times. By 1800, the quantity had nearly doubled again to 56 million pounds. In France, growth was slower but nonetheless remarkable: In 1789, 4.3 times more cotton was consumed than in 1750, 11 million pounds. Rapidly falling yarn prices created ever larger groups of consumers, especially in Europe, where cotton, once a luxury product only accessible to the rich, could now be consumed by the many, and in Africa, where it would replace the products of Indian spinners. The increased consumption of raw cotton, as Leeds writer Edward Baines noted in 1835, “has been rapid and steady far beyond all precedents in any other manufacture.”7
As demand for raw cotton rose, so too did prices. In 1781, prices for cotton in Britain were between two and three times higher than they had been a decade earlier. Manchester manufacturers were “quite convinced that unless some new source of supply could be found the progress of the rising industry would be checked, if not altogether arrested.” As a result, “From the 1780s they formed a powerful and influential group in their efforts to acquaint the planters and the British government with their requirements.”8
This sudden and unprecedented demand for cotton, and the lucrative prices paid for it, according to a contemporary expert, “occasioned a most extraordinary Increase of Culture in every Part, wherever the Climate and Soil could produce it; and, on this Account, every Sinew in the commercial World was strained to supply our Wants.” Ottoman growers, who for the past two hundred years had been a major source of raw cotton for Europe, could not satisfy this exploding demand. Indeed, throughout the 1780s, exports from Thessaloniki and Izmir remained nearly level. A severe labor shortage and the tenacity of feudal relations in the Ottoman countryside limited the supply from Anatolia and Macedonia. The labor shortage was such that beginning in the 1770s landowners in western Anatolia brought in thousands of Greek laborers to grow cotton—an expansion that still did not provide the scale necessary for the supply of European industry. The largely precapitalist dependencies that structured the world of rural cultivators, the efforts of peasants to secure their subsistence, the lack of transportation infrastructure, and the continued political independence of the Ottoman state contributed to Europeans’ inability to press for the monocultural production of cotton. A rapid reallocation of land and labor for cotton planting proved impossible. Local elites, moreover, remained a powerful counterweight against the increasingly influential presence of Western merchants in port cities such as Izmir and Thessaloniki, hampering the ability of Western capitalists to reform the social structure in the countryside to produce more cotton for world markets. Western merchants were also competing for what cotton there was with domestic spinners, a sizable and relatively prosperous artisan class. As a result, Ottoman cotton soon became marginal to European markets: while between 1786 and 1790 the Ottoman Empire supplied 20 percent of cotton imports to Great Britain, twenty years later it supplied only 1.28 percent and another ten years later a minuscule 0.29 percent. Unable or unwilling to revolutionize their countryside and trade networks, Ottoman cotton farmers and merchants exited the emerging European industrial system.9
With this traditional source of cotton production insufficient to meet demand, manufacturers desperately looked elsewhere. Cotton merchant William Rathbone and cotton spinner Richard Arkwright, for example, embarked upon a failed effort to increase the cotton supply from Africa by creating the Sierra Leone Company. Manufacturers also cast an acquisitive eye toward India’s bountiful cotton harvests. Given that the East India Company enjoyed significant power on the subcontinent and that India was the ancient home of the world’s cotton industry, many expected it to become a major source of fiber. The company, however, reacted warily to Manchester’s appeals. The export of raw cotton, they argued, would undermine manufacturing in India and therefore its own profitable export business of cotton cloth. “If the Manufactures of Bengal were to suffer any material Check,” warned the East India Company in 1793, “and become considerable decreased, the Revenue of that Country would fall off, and its Population decline beyond the Power of Prevention; for it is not to be expected that even any considerable Encrease in the Cultivation of raw Materials could become an equivalent for a material Reduction in the Extent and Encouragement of Manufactures.”10 Moreover, such production for export would make peasants unduly dependent on purchasing food grains on the market, “which in an Indifferent Seasin might bring in a scarcity of Grain, nay even a famine, which would bring desolation on the Country, and an annihilation of Revenue.”11 Whatever cotton there was available for export the East India Company shipped to China to finance its purchases of tea, replacing the need to export bullion there. The resistance of the East India Company compounded other difficulties: infrastructure that made moving cotton to the coast often prohibitively expensive, the quality of Indian cotton, especially its short fiber, and a lack of labor in the vast interior of the South Asian subcontinent. In short, Indian cotton exports to Britain proved insufficient to satisfy the growing demand.12
More promising than in India, Africa, or Anatolia, it seemed, was the situation in the West Indies and South America. The exploding demand for cotton was no secret to the region’s white planters, who had grown small quantities of the fiber since the 1630s. As demand for cotton increased, West Indian and South American merchants increasingly added cotton shipments to their regular trade in sugar and other tropical commodities. They also integrated it with their trade in slaves, as in the case of Liverpool’s Tarleton Brothers, whose trade in cotton was at first just a sideline to their trade in human beings.
With fortunes to be made, European merchants in the Caribbean tried to secure more of the white gold. They drew on Caribbean planters who, unlike growers in Africa, Anatolia, and India, had nearly two centuries of experience growing crops for European consumers, most importantly sugar. The planters also controlled two key elements: land suitable for cotton growing and long-standing experience in mobilizing labor to produce for world markets. In the boom years of the 1770s through the 1790s, cotton was especially attractive to two up-and-coming groups of planters. The first consisted of small growers who lacked the capital necessary to start a sugar plantation and wanted a crop that would let them work more marginal lands, with fewer slaves and less investment, and still make fabulous profits. On Saint-Croix, for example, the average cotton plantation drew on the labor of less than a fifth as many slaves as the average sugar plantation. The second group consisted of planters in newly settled territories who planted cotton as a first crop for a few seasons to break the soil and would then use the cotton profits to move into sugar.13
Collectively, hundreds of these planters opened up a new “commodity frontier”—a new cotton-producing territory—and with it they began a new chapter in the global history of cotton. As a result of their decisions and the efforts of their slaves, cotton exports from the Caribbean exploded. Between 1781 and 1791, cotton imports quadrupled from the British-controlled islands alone. French planters followed suit, doubling exports of what French manufacturers called “coton des Isles” from Saint-Domingue, the Caribbean’s most important cotton island, to France between 1781 and 1791.14 So rapid was the growth of Caribbean cotton that by 1800 Bahamian planter Nathan Hall reported in awe that the cotton “trade has increased amazingly.”15
Caribbean cotton came from various sites. Those islands that had been at the forefront of cotton production earlier in the century—Jamaica, Grenada, and Dominica, for example—continued to produce cotton, but their exports remained nearly constant at around two million pounds during the 1770s, and then approximately doubled during the course of the 1780s. The increase in production was (relatively) modest because cotton had found a stable place in the local economy and because sugar cultivation, which required a significant financial investment, was hardly ever given up for cotton.
But on islands with more uncultivated land and fewer sugar plantat
ions, production boomed. On Barbados between 1768 and 1789, cotton exports increased by a factor of eleven, from 240,000 pounds to 2.6 million pounds. First, an ant invasion had decimated Barbados’s traditional crop, sugar. Then in 1780 a massive hurricane destroyed much of the island’s sugar infrastructure, which could not easily be rebuilt because of limited access to raw materials from revolution-torn North America. Transformed essentially into a huge cotton plantation, Barbados became the most productive cotton island within the British Empire. Similarly, Tobago planters had exported no cotton in 1770 but shipped a full 1.5 million pounds in 1780. And planters in the Bahamas, who had grown virtually no cotton before the 1770s, by 1787 sold nearly half a million pounds to British merchants.16
Significant amounts of cotton also found their way to Britain from the French Caribbean islands. There, British merchants profited both from the slower growth of the French cotton industry and the abundant imports of slaves to Saint-Domingue above all. In 1770, for example, the French islands produced an estimated 56 percent of the total Caribbean cotton crop, compared to 35 percent for the British. Saint-Domingue alone shipped 36 percent, or more than all the British islands taken together. Twenty years later the imbalance continued. Of the 14 million pounds of cotton that the French islands produced in 1789, only about 6 million pounds were consumed in France itself, while an estimated 5.7 million pounds were exported from French mainland ports to Great Britain.17
