by Sven Beckert
The Caribbean cotton revolution: West Indian cotton shipments to the United Kingdom, 1750–1795, in million of pounds (illustration credit 4.2)
As the dependence on cotton produced on the French-controlled islands grew among Europe’s cotton manufacturers, Saint-Domingue in particular took on a central role. In 1791, the island, which counted nearly as many cotton as sugar plantations, exported 6.8 million pounds of cotton to France, 58 percent more than eight years earlier, and substantial amounts to Britain. This rapid expansion of cotton production was fueled by the importation of a quarter million African slaves between 1784 and 1791. At the height of the cotton boom, in the 1780s, as cotton prices in France increased by 113 percent over 1770 levels, nearly thirty thousand slaves were shipped to Saint-Domingue annually. That elasticity of the labor supply, a hallmark of war capitalism, was unmatched by any other region of the world. Indeed, as mechanized spinning spread on the European continent, ever more Africans were put in shackles, forced into the holds of ships, sold on the auction block in Port-au-Prince, transported to remote farms, and then forced to clear the land and hoe, sow, prune, and harvest the white gold.18
Slavery, in other words, was as essential to the new empire of cotton as proper climate and good soil. It was slavery that allowed these planters to respond rapidly to rising prices and expanding markets. Slavery allowed not only for the mobilization of very large numbers of workers on very short notice, but also for a regime of violent supervision and virtually ceaseless exploitation that matched the needs of a crop that was, in the cold language of economists, “effort intensive.”19 Tellingly, many of the slaves who were doing the backbreaking labor to grow cotton had been and were still being sold for cotton cloth that the European East India companies shipped from various parts of India to western Africa.
Encouraged by their home governments, rising prices, the availability of labor, and, within bounds, land, Caribbean planters became the cutting edge of the cotton revolution. From that moment on, ever newer cotton frontiers replaced one another, motivated by the unrelenting search for land and labor, as well as soils that had yet to escape the ecological exhaustion that so often came with cotton growing. The world’s cotton industry relied upon “restless spatial expansion.”20
Caribbean planters had lengthy experience growing cotton—but so had Ottoman and Indian farmers. The soil and climate of the Caribbean was well suited to cotton—but so was the soil of western Anatolia or central India. Caribbean merchants moved large quantities of cotton easily to European markets—but so did the merchants of Izmir and Surat. Yet Caribbean planters, unlike Ottoman and Indian farmers, faced few constraints on land and labor. With the native population decimated and slaves arriving on an almost daily basis from West Africa, Caribbean planters’ ability to respond rapidly to newly emerging markets set them decisively apart from all other cotton growers. While powerful Ottoman and Indian landlords also resorted to coercion to force peasants to work on their cotton estates, plantation slavery, as such, never took root.21 Moreover, the infusion of capital that enabled the rapid reallocation of resources in the Caribbean was hampered elsewhere by the lack of private ownership of land and the continued political strength of the Ottoman and Indian rulers. Fresh land and new labor, capitalized by virtually unrestrained European merchants, bankers, and planters, precipitated an explosion of cotton growing.
These factors were supplemented by the support, albeit mild, that planters received from their government. Already in 1768 the British Royal Society of the Arts had offered a gold medal “for the best Specimen of West-India cotton,” which was claimed ten years later by Andrew Bennet of Tobago, who had spent years studying dozens if not hundreds of varieties of cotton. In 1780, the British government levied a tariff on cotton imported on foreign boats, the “proceeds to be devoted to the encouragement of the growth of cotton in his Majesty’s Leeward Islands, and for encouraging the import thereof into Great Britain.” Later, the British Board of Trade asked a Polish botanist, Anton Pantaleon Hove, to collect cottonseeds in India and forward them to the Caribbean. And in 1786, Lord Sydney, secretary of state for the colonies, pressured by manufacturers in Manchester, called upon the governors of the West Indian colonies to encourage planters to grow cotton. In response, the governor of Dominica, John Orde, went so far as to promise free land to individuals interested in planting cotton on the island. Such state support would have seemed inconsequential viewed from the vantage point of the late nineteenth century, yet it pointed to a future in which the state’s involvement in the global securing of essential raw materials for industrial production would become a widespread concern.22
But the true importance of the Caribbean planters was not the cotton that was shipped, though that remained essential, but the institutional innovation that the Caribbean experiment produced: the re-creation of the countryside through bodily coercion, something only possible under war capitalism. Cotton grown by slaves motivated and financed the unprecedented incorporation of newly depopulated territories into the world economy. Slavery and land expropriation on a continental scale created the expansive, and elastic, global cotton supply network necessary for the Industrial Revolution, and with it the mechanisms through which the needs and rhythms of industrial life in Europe could be transferred to the global countryside. In the process, a new kind of slavery (what historians have called “second slavery”) emerged that was tightly linked to the intensity and profits of industrial capitalism—a dynamic that soon drew the African continent into its grasp as well, where West African economies increasingly found their focus in supplying sharply rising numbers of workers to the Americas. Approximately half of all slaves (46 percent, to be precise) sold to the Americas between 1492 and 1888 arrived there in the years after 1780. Slavery’s future was now firmly attached to the industrial capitalism that it had enabled.23
Capturing labor: the decks of a slave ship (illustration credit 4.3)
As the Caribbean cotton explosion shows, war capitalism—exactly because violence was its fundamental characteristic—was portable. Its next stop was South America. With cotton exports from the West Indies rapidly rising but demand spiraling even faster, South American farmers discovered the newly profitable cotton market. In Guyana, between 1789 and 1802 cotton production skyrocketed by a staggering 862 percent, fueled by the concurrent import of about twenty thousand slaves into Surinam and Demerara.24
Even more important was Brazil. The first Brazilian cotton arrived in England in 1781, supplementing Caribbean production but soon surpassing it. Cotton was indigenous to many parts of Brazil, and for centuries its planters had exported small quantities. As part of the process of economic modernization of its Brazilian colonies in the latter half of the eighteenth century, Portugal had encouraged the growing of cotton, especially in the northeastern regions of Pernambuco and Maranhão. When early efforts paid off, a surge in the importation of slaves caused one observer to opine that “white cotton turned Maranhão black.” Though cotton would eventually become a “poor man’s crop,” its first explosive expansion in Brazil was fueled by larger slave plantations. As in the West Indies, cotton in Brazil would never challenge sugar and later coffee, but its share of total exports in Brazil grew to a respectable 11 percent in 1800, and 20 percent in the years between 1821 and 1830.25
Without any constraints on the availability of land, as in the West Indies, or on labor, as in Anatolia, the volume of Brazilian cotton expanded sharply. Between 1785 and 1792, Brazil overtook the Ottoman Empire in cotton shipments to England. By the end of that period, nearly 8 million pounds of Brazilian cotton had landed in Great Britain, compared to 4.5 million pounds from the Ottoman Empire and 12 million pounds from the West Indies. In Maranhão—then the most important cotton region of Brazil—exports doubled between 1770 and 1780, nearly doubled again by 1790, and nearly tripled once more by 1800. For a few years in the late 1700s, the period when neither West Indian nor Ottoman cotton production had expanded sufficiently and before Nort
h American cotton swamped markets, Brazil became a very important supplier to the booming British cotton textile industry. Not only did Brazilian farmers produce significant amounts of cotton, but they were also able to grow a particularly long-staple variety that was better suited to emerging factory technology.26
By the 1780s, slaves in the West Indies and South America produced the vast majority of cotton sold on world markets, and this explosive combination of slavery and conquest fueled the Industrial Revolution all the way to 1861. John Tarleton, a successful slave trader and Liverpool cotton merchant, understood that the slave trade, the export of commodities from plantation economies, and the well-being of the British shipping industry were all “mutually blended & connected together.” And the combination was stupendously profitable: Cotton and slaves made many merchants rich, with Tarleton calculating, for example, that his “fortune” had tripled between 1770 and 1800.27
The risks and costs entailed in the development of its globe-spanning system of supply might have seemed an insurmountable brake on the cotton industry’s development. Yet the cotton manufacturers’ total dependence on a distant tropical commodity turned out to be their signal breakthrough. Indeed, their factories would likely never have expanded as rapidly without the counterintuitive gamble of relying entirely on faraway land and labor. Already by 1800, Britain alone consumed such fabulous amounts of cotton that 416,081 acres of land were needed to cultivate it. If that cotton had been grown in Britain, it would have taken up 3.7 percent of its arable land, and approximately 90,360 agricultural laborers would have been needed to work these hypothetical cotton fields. In 1860, with the appetite for cotton even greater, more than 1 million workers (or half of all British agricultural workers) would have had to work these fields, which would have taken up 6.3 million acres or 37 percent of all arable land in Great Britain. Alternatively, if we assume that the woolen industry, instead of the cotton industry, had been at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution even more land would have been needed to raise the required number of sheep: 9 million acres in 1815, and 23 million acres in 1830—or more than Britain’s entire arable land area. Under both the hypothetical domestic cotton and the wool scenario, land and labor constraints would have made all but impossible the sudden expansion of cloth production. Perhaps even more decisively, such a scenario would have created unimaginable upheaval in the British and European countryside, whose social structure, like that of the Ottoman Empire and India, was not suited for such a massive and quick reallocation of land and labor. The elasticity of supply so essential to the Industrial Revolution thereby rested on reliable access to distant land and foreign labor. The ability of Europe’s states and their capitalists to rearrange global economic connections and to violently expropriate land and labor were as important, if not more important, to the ascendency of the West as the traditional explanations of technical inventiveness, cultural proclivities, and the geographical and climatic location of a small group of cotton manufacturers in a remote part of the British Isles.28
West Indian and South American cotton thus poured into the markets of Liverpool, London, Le Havre, and Barcelona, in effect allowing for the rapid expansion of mechanized spinning. But there were limits to this expansion. As already mentioned, the West Indian islands themselves had a rather low supply of suitable cotton lands, limiting cotton production and putting it at a long-term disadvantage with sugar. Sugar plantations there as well as in land-rich Brazil also competed with cotton plantations for labor. As a result, beginning in 1790, exports of West Indian cotton declined absolutely: In 1803 only about half as much cotton left the West Indies as in 1790, and its market share in Britain was now reduced to 10 percent. Even preferential treatment at customs, which British-grown cotton was afforded after 1819, could not reverse the tide. By the early nineteenth century, the market share of West Indian cotton was in free fall, “accelerated by the emancipation of the negroes.” In Brazil, the lack of a massive redeployment of slaves from sugar into cotton production acted as a brake on the expansion of cotton production. As cotton expert James A. Mann observed, “If Brazil could command the needful labour, there is no question but that she would become a large supplier of our wants.”29
In 1791, revolution rocked the most important cotton island of all—Saint-Domingue—all but halting production of commodities for world markets, including cotton. In the largest slave revolt in history, Saint-Domingue’s enslaved population armed themselves and defeated the French colonial regime, leading to the creation of the state of Haiti and the abolition of slavery on the island. War capitalism had its first major reversal at the hands of its seemingly least powerful actors: Saint-Domingue’s hundreds of thousands of slaves. Saint-Domingue cotton production had equaled 24 percent of British cotton imports the year before the revolution, while four years later, in 1795, it was only 4.5 percent. As one British observer put it, “That Island, which has been the grand Source of Supply to us, of the Article of Cotton Wool, is, from these Causes, in a State of Anarchy, Distress, and almost Dissolution.” Indeed, he predicted that it was unlikely that “the Soil of the Planters, fertilized by the Thirst and Blood of the Negroes, will always increase the Store of our Coffers, in order to add to the Excess of your Wealth, Extravagance and Voluptuousness.” By 1795, cotton exports to France had fallen by 79 percent, and even ten years after the beginning of the revolution, exports had recovered to only one-third of their prerevolutionary level. The French National Assembly compounded British supply anxieties by disallowing the export of raw cotton from French ports. The Pennsylvania Gazette in 1792 reported matter-of-factly, “The cotton and indigo…must have been deeply injured in 1791, as they were in season during the part of that year when the disturbances were greatest.”30
The combination of rapidly rising demand for cotton and political upheaval in the Caribbean led to worrisome price spikes for manufacturers dependent on capturing new markets for cotton textiles by competing with Indian production. Throughout 1791 and 1792 John Tarleton reported to his brother that “Cotton is rising daily.” By 1795 he found “Cotton up amazingly.” In 1790, prices for West Indian cotton peaked at 21 pence per pound, in 1791 at 30 pence, and prices stayed consistently high throughout the 1790s. So traumatic was the experience of revolution for some cotton merchants that as late as 1913 the Rathbone family, one of Liverpool’s major cotton traders, remembered that the effect of the upheaval was a doubling of prices for cotton. Once war broke out between France and Britain in 1793, moreover, the import of French West Indian cottons into the British Caribbean ports came to an end.31
By the 1790s, therefore, it had become obvious to interested observers that the gap between the demand for and supply of raw cotton in Europe would grow rapidly and continuously for the foreseeable future. As the American writer Tench Coxe put it, “The peculiar fitness of the staple for the conversion into yarn, cloths, &c. by machinery…have hitherto made these demands, at home and abroad, very extensive, steady, and increasing.”32 Traditional techniques of procuring cotton had clearly been insufficient. In the West Indies and Brazil, however, building on the experiences of their sugar economies, a new way of producing cotton had been invented that focused clearly on plantations and slavery. And while the production growth in these parts of the world soon reached their limits, or, as in Haiti’s case, was curtailed by revolution, there was a nearby region that seemed to meet all conditions for producing an abundant supply of cotton: the newly born United States of America. It was there that cotton production based on slavery would reach unprecedented heights.
Chapter Five
Slavery Takes Command
War capitalism at work: marrying slavery and industry in the American Cotton Planter (1853) (illustration credit 5.1)
As British cotton manufacturing exploded in the 1780s, the pressures on the global countryside to supply the crucial cotton increased at a rapid clip. It was in the middle of that decade, in the winter of 1785, that an American ship sailed into Liverpool harbor. The
re was nothing remarkable about such a voyage; thousands of ships had brought the bounties of North America to the shores of Britain before, filled to the brim with tobacco, indigo, rice, furs, timber, and other commodities. This ship, however, was different: In its hold, among other goods, were a number of bags of cotton. Such freight seemed suspicious, and Liverpool customs officials immediately impounded the cotton, arguing that it had to be contraband West Indian produce. When the Liverpool merchants Peel, Yates & Co., who had imported the cotton, petitioned the Board of Trade in London a few days later to permit entry, they were told that it “cannot be imported from thence it not being the Produce of the American States.”1
Indeed, to Europeans in the 1780s, cotton was the product of the West Indies, of Brazil, of the Ottoman Empire, and of India—but not of North America. It was all but unimaginable to Liverpool customs officials that cotton could be imported from the United States. That the United States would ever produce significant amounts of cotton seemed even more preposterous. Though cotton was indigenous to the southern parts of the new nation, and though many settlers in South Carolina and Georgia grew small amounts of the fiber for domestic use, it had never been planted primarily for commercial purposes nor exported in significant quantities. As the customs officials undoubtedly knew, American planters used their plentiful land and abundant slave labor to grow tobacco, rice, indigo, and some sugar, but not cotton.2
The Revolution of Slavery: European Cotton Industrialization Transforms the Countryside in the Americas, 1780–1865
