Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  Rationalizing labor control with the whip: Thomas Affleck markets his cotton plantation account book (illustration credit 5.6)

  The peculiar combination of expropriated lands, slave labor, and the domination of a state that gave enormous latitude to slave owners over their labor was fabulously profitable for those positioned to embrace it: As early as 1807 a Mississippi cotton plantation was said to return 22.5 percent annually on its investment. Many thousands of planters moved along with the cotton frontier to capture some of these profits. Cotton’s profitability is also revealed by the dramatic increase in the price of slaves: A young adult male slave in New Orleans cost about $500 in 1800, but as much as $1,800 before the Civil War. Consider the story of a young Georgia planter, Joseph Clay. He had bought Royal Vale, a rice plantation in Chatham County, Georgia, in 1782. He grew rice until 1793. That year, hearing of Whitney’s gin, he obtained a loan of $32,000, used that money to buy additional slaves, had them convert some of the land to cotton fields, and installed a number of gins. So profitable was the undertaking that a mere seven years later he was able to repay his debt, lavishly redecorate his mansion, and buy additional slaves and gins. When Clay died in 1804, his estate was valued at $276,000.36

  The wages of slavery: indexed cotton prices, American middling, at Liverpool (1860 = 100) (illustration credit 5.7)

  In similar ways, South Carolina indigo planter Peter Gaillard saw his fortunes revive thanks to the cotton boom. By 1790 Gaillard’s indigo business had all but collapsed owing to the disappearance of British markets, and he had resorted to growing food for his family on his plantation. As a friend of his reported, “The disastrous ten years which preceded the introduction of cotton as a market crop involved him, as it did others, in debt and distress.” In 1796, however, he began growing cotton—“a brilliant prospect now opened to the eyes of the desponding planters”—a crop so profitable that four years later he had paid back all his debts and in 1803 constructed a new mansion on his property. Coerced labor meant rapid profits; by 1824 he owned five hundred slaves. South Carolinian Wade Hampton I followed suit. His first cotton crop in 1799 allegedly netted a profit of $75,000, and by 1810 he drew $150,000 annually from his cotton plantations. His son would eventually use some of the profits to relocate to the Mississippi Delta in the mid-1840s. Prospective cotton planter Daniel W. Jordan, surveying the opportunities for cotton growing in Mississippi, saw “a field to operate in and here I can make money…. I can in this State make as much money in 5 years as a man should want.”37

  Fortified by their wealth, confident of their slave-aided ability to squeeze ever more cotton from the land, American cotton planters came to dominate British markets by 1802. By the 1830s they had also captured newly emerging continental European and North American markets. As a result, earlier producers, especially those in the West Indies, suffered: “The Competition, if left perfectly free and unrestricted, cannot be long maintained by the Colonialists [in the West Indies]; as the same price that yields a liberal profit to the American Cultivator, is not adequate to defray the charges of cultivation to the colonist,” observed an anonymous letter writer in 1812. Other potential competitors, such as farmers in India, planted cotton on just as much land as North Americans as late as 1850, but their presence on world markets remained marginal.38

  As this cotton boom violently transformed huge swaths of the North American countryside, it catapulted the United States to a pivotal role in the empire of cotton. In 1791, capital invested in cotton production in Brazil, as estimated by the U.S. Treasury, was still more than ten times greater than in the United States. By 1801, only ten years later, 60 percent more capital was invested in the cotton industry of the United States than that of Brazil. Cotton, even more so than in the Caribbean and Brazil, infused land and slaves alike with unprecedented value, and promised slaveholders spectacular opportunities for profits and power. Already by 1820, cotton constituted 32 percent of all U.S. exports, compared to a minuscule 2.2 percent in 1796. Indeed, more than half of all American exports between 1815 and 1860 consisted of cotton. Cotton so dominated the U.S. economy that cotton production statistics “became an increasingly vital unit in assessing the American economy.” It was on the back of cotton, and thus on the backs of slaves, that the U.S. economy ascended in the world.39

  So important had American cotton become to the Western world that a German economist remarked that “a disappearance of the American North or West would be of less significance to the world, than the elimination of the South.” Southern planters, convinced of their central role in the global economy, gleefully announced that they held “THE LEVER THAT WIELDS THE DESTINY OF MODERN CIVILIZATION.” As the American Cotton Planter put it in 1853, “The slave-labor of the United States, has hitherto conferred and is still conferring inappreciable blessings on mankind. If these blessings continue, slave-labor must also continue, for it is idle to talk of producing Cotton for the world’s supply with free labor. It has never yet been successfully grown by voluntary labor.”40

  American cotton farmers had succeeded in turning themselves into the world’s most important growers of the industrial age’s most important commodity. Their “gigantic plantations,” observed a British merchant in Tellicherry, India, “now supply the materials for clothing half the civilized world.” And with slave-grown cotton pouring in from the United States, the cost of finished cotton declined, making clothes and sheets affordable for a rapidly expanding market. As the Manchester Chamber of Commerce put it in 1825, “We are firmly persuaded that it is in great measure owing to the very low price of the raw material that this manufacture has been of late years so rapidly increased.” In 1845, South Carolina’s cotton planters agreed: “Nearly one half of the population of Europe…have not now the comfort of a cotton shirt,” constituting an “untried market…opening more and more to our enterprize.” The world of cotton, which before 1780 had consisted mostly of scattered regional and local networks, now increasingly became one global matrix with a single nexus. And slavery in the United States was its foundation.41

  War capitalism recasts the global cotton industry: world’s cotton crop, 1791–1831 (rough estimate) (illustration credit 5.8)

  Despite its undeniable success, the dependence of Europe’s cotton manufacturers on one country and on one peculiar system of labor disquieted some consumers of raw cotton. As early as the 1810s, British manufacturers in particular began to worry that they had become too dependent on a single supplier for their valuable raw materials. In 1838, the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce and Manufactures shrilly warned of the “alarming fact that Britain is almost entirely dependant on foreign supply for this article, which is now scarcely less necessary than bread.” Six years later, “A Cotton Spinner” looked with “great apprehension” at the dependence of the United Kingdom on cotton supplies from the United States. This relationship had become important just as the North American colonies embarked upon their slow and painful move away from the empire, showing that connections across the Atlantic could be severed by political and military action. Cotton manufacturers understood that their prosperity was entirely dependent on the labor of slaves and they “dreaded the severity of the revulsion which must sooner, or later arrive.” By 1850, one British observer estimated that 3.5 million people in the United Kingdom were employed by the country’s cotton industry—all subject to the whims of American planters and their tenuous hold on their nation’s politics.42

  Cotton imports into Great Britain, annual averages, in percent, by country of origin (illustration credit 5.9)

  Cotton manufacturers’ concerns about dependence on U.S. cotton focused on three issues. First, they feared that the United States would siphon off ever-increasing amounts of its own cotton in its own factories, which had begun to emerge in significant numbers in the 1810s, making less cotton available to European consumers. Second, British manufacturers in particular were concerned that continental producers would acquire a rising percentage of the world’s cotton
, competing for American supplies. Third, and most important was “the increasing uncertainty of the continuance of the system of slavery.” Drawing on “the blood-stained produce” constituted a “suicidal dependence” on the “crime of American slavery.”43

  In 1835, Thomas Baring carefully observed the United States, expecting that “the further agitation of the Slave question might materially alter the result, acting of course, favourably on prices.” How secure, after all, would slave property be in an industrializing America with increasing abolitionist sympathies? Would the political economy of southern planters collide with that of northern economic elites? And could the increasingly expansionist designs of wealthy and powerful slaveholders in the American South and their proto-nationalist project be contained within an industrializing United States? Southern planters, the “lords of the lash,” emboldened by their wealth, began to lament their subordinate role within the global economy; their fledgling designs to revolutionize their own position within it were yet another threat to the system as a whole. To the “lords of the loom,” raw material producers had to be politically subordinate to the will and direction of industrial capital.44

  On the plantation itself, another terror was lurking. A visit to the industrial cotton fields of the “black belt” impressed on many observers that slavery was unstable because the war between slaves and their masters could turn at any point. “A Cotton Spinner” warned in 1844 that “the safety of this country depends upon our obtaining an improved supply of Cotton from British India,” since in America “on the first opportunity…these slave-gangs will naturally disperse, the improvident negroes will cease to grow cotton, and there being no white men to supply their places; Cotton cultivation in America will terminate.” He feared an “exterminating war of races—a prospect too horrible to dwell upon.” Emancipation, he worried, might shake “our country…to [its] very foundations.” Talk of runaways, refusals to work, and even outright rebellion kept planters and European cotton manufacturers on their toes. Merchant Francis Carnac Brown warned in 1848 of “a race of discontented slaves, ruled by tyranny, and threatening daily some ruinous outbreak, which it is known must one day come.” Americans tried to explain to their European customers that slavery in the United States, unlike in Saint-Domingue, was safe—not least, as Tench Coxe put it, because of the presence of a powerful white militia and because slaves have “no artillery nor arms. Tho they are numerous they are much separated by rivers, Bayos and tracts thickly peopled with whites.” But concerns remained.45

  During these moments of anxiety, European cotton manufacturers looked to other regions of the world for an increased supply of cotton, to places such as Africa and India. French officials eyed Senegal in the 1810s and 1820s as a potential alternative source of cotton, but despite their concerted efforts, little cotton came. In Britain, hopes for non-American cotton focused squarely on India, whose long history of cotton exports seemed to make it superbly suited to supply British factories, not least because manufacturers believed the country had “overflowing supplies of various descriptions of cotton.” And India might point toward ways to build a cotton industry not dependent on the inherent instabilities and exigencies of slavery and expropriations. The possibilities of Indian cotton were enumerated and analyzed in literally dozens of books, many with fantastically ambitious titles like Scinde & The Punjab: The Gems of India in Respect to Their Past and Unparalleled Capabilities of Supplanting the Slave States of America in the Cotton Markets of the World. Some of these books were not mere pamphlets; John Chapman, a former manufacturer of supplies for the textile industry and railroad promoter in Western India, for example, published in 1851 The Cotton and Commerce of India, Considered in Relation to the Interests of Great Britain, with over four hundred pages of detailed accounts of the soil, agricultural practices, land ownership patterns, transportation infrastructure, and trade relations of various parts of India, supported by a vast array of statistical information. Like him, most writers concluded that “the soil and climate” of India was “favourable to the growth of” cotton.46

  By the 1830s, these individual voices found collective expression. In 1836, the Manchester Chamber of Commerce mentioned Indian cotton for the first time in its Annual Report. Four years later, they held a special meeting to pressure the East India Company to do something about cotton production in India, and in 1847 they sent a petition to the House of Commons to similar effect. In 1845 the Manchester Commercial Association, a rival body of local entrepreneurs, even sent a deputation to the directors of the East India Company to urge them to promote cotton growing in India, a subject “of paramount importance to the interests of this district.”47

  Some forward-looking manufacturers began to understand that there might be a deeper, and enduringly profitable, relationship between India as a market for their goods and India as a provider of raw materials. They imagined a world in which Indian peasants would export their cotton and in turn purchase Manchester piece goods: “Nothing can be more natural than that the inhabitants, deprived of a market for their cloths, should be encouraged to cultivate the raw material.”48

  The agitation for Indian cotton reached its height during the 1850s, when prices for U.S. cotton rose once more. To be sure, Manchester cotton interests were still divided on the merits of state intervention to secure Indian cotton, with some believing that things should be left to the market.49 But by 1857 the “adequate supply of cotton being obtained to sustain the industry of this district” had become a major topic of discussion at the Chamber’s annual meetings. Cotton manufacturer, Chamber of Commerce president, and member of Parliament Thomas Bazley believed that “the supply of…cotton is altogether inadequate” and demanded that more needed to be done to secure cotton from India, Africa, Australia, and other places, “precisely because the British government does possess that soil.” Calling upon spinners to organize to expand cotton production in colonial territories, he was the prime mover behind the creation of the Manchester Cotton Supply Association in 1857 “with a view to having a more abundant and universal supply.” Concerned about the increasing volatility of American politics in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision, the association literally went to the ends of the earth delivering cotton gins, giving advice, and distributing seeds and implements to farmers, while collecting information on various kinds of cotton and various ways of growing it. The association’s work was a microcosm of the grand project of cotton capitalists: to transform the global countryside into a cotton-growing complex.50

  For cotton manufacturers, India beckoned for the obvious reason that it remained one of the world’s greatest growers of the white gold. They believed that India produced more cotton than the United States; notoriously imprecise estimates spoke of up to 750 million pounds of cotton consumed annually within India, in addition to its annual exports of 150 million pounds and more. This compared favorably with total U.S. production, in 1839, of 756 million pounds. Traditionally, much of this cotton was used for domestic production, and even cotton that went into long-distance trade usually remained within India. Central Indian cotton had been traded to Madras in the south and Bengal in the east, but with the decline of the Indian cotton cloth export industry, it was increasingly brought to Bombay and from there exported to China and, in limited quantities, to Britain.51

  The British East India Company had halfheartedly supported efforts to increase such exports since 1788, but the quantities involved were small, not least because of high transport costs. Indeed, until the 1830s, much more cotton was exported to China than to Europe (it paid for the company’s purchases of tea), and increases in exports to Europe usually went hand in hand with decreasing exports to China. Thus Indian cotton agriculture did not significantly become more export-oriented.52

  Yet Manchester manufacturers wanted more. They pressured the British East India Company, the British government, and, later, the British colonial administration to develop a multitude of activities to encourage t
he growth and export of Indian cotton. Private initiative was insufficient to change India’s cotton-growing countryside, as “private companies do not answer” and thus government needed to step in. Infrastructure improvements were first and foremost on their mind, “a bridge [needed to be] built, or a railway made, or canals dug, or cotton cultivated, or machines introduced.” In 1810, the company sent out American cottonseed to be used in India. In 1816, the Board of Directors shipped Whitney gins to Bombay. In 1818, four experimental cotton farms were started. In 1829, further experimental farms were established and land was given to Europeans “to grow the approved kind of cotton.” In 1831, the Bombay government created an agency to purchase raw cotton in Southern Mahratta County. In 1839, discussions emerged within the East India Company on more investments in infrastructure, experimental farms, and the shifting of capital out of opium production into cotton. Their cause was aided by legal changes: Starting in 1829, the Bombay government punished with up to seven years in prison people who fraudulently packaged and sold cotton. In 1851, another “Act for the Better Suppression of Frauds” came into effect, with similar goals. Numerous initiatives sought to increase and improve Indian cotton exports. And in 1853, as the British acquired Berar, a territory about 300 miles northeast of Bombay, Lord Dalhousie, governor-general of India, bragged that this “secured the finest cotton tracts which are known to exist in all the continent of India; and thus…opened up a great additional channel of supply, through which to make good a felt deficiency in the staple of one great branch of its manufacturing industry.”53

  As important were schemes to collect, appropriate, and disperse knowledge. Efforts to survey the state of Indian cotton agriculture proliferated. In 1830, the administration commissioned detailed reports on cotton cultivation in India. In 1848 the government of India surveyed virtually the entire subcontinent, investigating the potential of each and every region for the increased production of cotton for export. Indeed, as elsewhere, the statistical and informational penetration of territory usually came before the incorporation into the global economy, and at midcentury, Europeans’ knowledge about the climate, soil, agricultural diseases, labor supplies, and social structures in many parts of India was still tentative. Simultaneously, exotic seeds, especially of U.S. origin, were introduced into India, new gins delivered, and experimental farms established in Gujarat, in Coimbatore, and elsewhere.54