Empire of Cotton
Page 18
Relief for cotton-hungry manufacturers, ironically, came from unexpected quarters, for unexpected reasons: from the slow but steady collapse of competing circuits of cotton manufacturing in Asia. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, local cotton craft networks remained a powerful presence in the world. In Africa, Latin America, and throughout Asia, the growing of cotton for household use or local markets remained important; indeed, it is entirely possible that as late as midcentury more cotton entered such limited circulation than entered industrial production. In large parts of Africa, observed Thomas Ellison as late as 1886, “indigenous Cotton has from time immemorial been both grown and manufactured, and the natives are for the most part clothed in fabrics of their own production.”75
In China as well, using traditional methods of production, spinners and weavers, working mostly in their houses and drawing on the labor of their dependents, continued to serve their very large domestic market. Most of the cotton they consumed came from their own or their neighbors’ fields, while others bought cotton from the large cotton merchants of Shanghai and elsewhere. “Early in the fine autumnal mornings,” observed a British traveler in 1845, “the roads leading into Shanghae are crowded with bands of coolies from the cotton farms,” testifying to a world of cotton distant from the circuits of growing, production, and consumption dominated by Europeans. Japan too had a flourishing domestic trade in locally grown cotton, and produced large amounts of cotton goods in homes and workshops. And Bengal, despite the beginning decline of its export manufacturing industry, still imported huge quantities of raw cotton in the first years of the nineteenth century: In 1802, it was said that Bengal grew a little more than 7 million pounds of cotton, but imported more than 43 million pounds, principally from western India, competing with China and Lancashire for the raw material of its core industry. Despite British designs to the contrary, India continued to be the most prominent example for such alternative circuits of cotton.76
Yet while local and regional networks persisted, they would never again flourish. These smaller networks, defined by custom, convenience, and profit, were undermined by the ever-widening veins of European capital and state power. Indeed, the cheapness of cottons enabled by slavery in the United States would help undermine local manufacturing everywhere. Many times over, indeed, the empire of cotton would advance what historian Kären Wigen has called the “making of a periphery.” Tench Coxe understood that process already in 1818: The export of British piece goods to India, he perceptively observed, would force Indians “to turn to raising cotton instead of making piece goods they cannot sell.” Across the nineteenth century, Europeans gambled on the efficacy of war capitalism again and again; each time they succeeded in planting new fields, in coercing more slaves, in finding additional capital, they enabled the production of more cotton fabrics at cheaper prices, and they pushed their cotton rivals to the periphery. The destruction of each of these alternative circuits of cotton, in turn, would further tip the balance of power in many parts of the world’s countryside, making more territory and more labor vulnerable to the encroachment of the global economy. The great irony of this rapacious cycle of war capitalism, as we will see, is that its success laid the foundation for its own demise.77
But any hint of demise was distant. In the first half of the nineteenth century, war capitalism seemed a vast and impenetrable machine, a painfully efficient mechanism for profit and power. As Britain’s power grew, capitalists in other regions of the world saw the possibilities inherent in the marriage of new technologies and bodily coercion. Certainly, many observers were anxious about the warlike expropriation of native peoples, the violence on the plantation, and the social turmoil in England’s industrial cities. Yet wealth and power beckoned to those able to embrace that new world. Throughout France, the German lands, Switzerland, the United States, Lombardy, and elsewhere, capitalists tried to follow the path laid down by Manchester.
Chapter Six
Industrial Capitalism Takes Wing
The Industrial Revolution in Alsace (illustration credit 6.1)
In 1835, John Masterson Burke, a twenty-three-year-old business manager at the iron foundry of James P. Alair in New York City, set sail for southern Mexico. His destination was the small colonial town of Valladolid. There, Don Pedro Baranda, the onetime governor of Yucatán, and John L. MacGregor, a Scot, had opened Mexico’s first steam-powered cotton manufacturing enterprise, a factory that Burke was to direct. They cited the “spontaneous growth of cotton around Valladolid” as the incentive for this venture, but stories of cotton profits from Lancashire to Lowell must have encouraged Baranda and MacGregor as well.1
Building a cotton factory in Valladolid, far from shipping facilities and technical expertise, was no small undertaking. Although a New Yorker who passed through in 1842 described the factory as “remarkable for its neat, compact, and business-like appearance,” setting up production in Yucatán had been a struggle. To get the Aurora Yucateca started, Burke had brought with him from New York not only the machinery (including the carts required to move these machines from the port to Valladolid) but also four engineers, two of whom promptly died of malaria. With no architect, the entrepreneurs designed the factory themselves and “twice the arches gave way, and the whole building came down.” Nonetheless, Baranda, MacGregor, and Burke eventually got the mill up and running. Drawing on 117 local workers, along with Mayan families who supplied the wood to fire the steam engines and who planted cotton on their maize fields, they churned out 395,000 yards of cloth in the nine years before 1844. Though modest by the standards of Lancashire, this was a spectacular achievement.2
That a cotton mill arose in the middle of the tropical wilderness of the Yucatán Peninsula, several days’ ride away from the port town of Mérida, and remote from sources of capital, testifies to the powerful attraction that cotton had for entrepreneurs across the globe. After the spread of water-powered spinning machines in Great Britain during the 1780s, mechanized cotton manufacturing spread around the world, at first slowly and then at breakneck speed, from Britain to continental Europe and to the United States, then on to Latin America, to northern Africa, and eventually to India and beyond.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such stories could be told. Take the Wiesental in what is today Germany. Reaching from the highest peaks of the Black Forest in the Duchy of Baden to the Rhine near the Swiss city of Basel, this valley had been a vibrant center for the hand spinning and weaving of cotton since the eighteenth century. Flush with Swiss capital, cheap labor, and a broad network of middlemen, enterprising Basel merchants mobilized thousands of peasants to spin cotton in their homes, workers who came from local farm families unable to find land for their offspring and who were outside the guild restrictions that limited the expansion of production in cities such as Basel. Some of these merchants began to employ very large numbers of these workers, helped by government stipulations that forced children and young adults to spin: In 1795 putting-out merchant Meinrad Montfort from Zell in the Black Forest paid wages to about twenty-five hundred households in which one or more family members spun or wove. Montfort and other such putting-out merchants received the raw cotton from Basel and returned the finished cloth to its merchants, who in turn delivered the goods to the burgeoning cotton printing factories located in Mulhouse, an independent city-state just across the Rhine. So massive was Swiss investment that one historian has called the attendant economic restructuring of the area the “colonialization of the Wiesental.”3
Already in the eighteenth century, these Swiss entrepreneurs and their Baden subcontractors had put some spinners and weavers to work in nonmechanized workshops in order to better supervise production. Montfort himself had created as early as 1774 a bleaching workshop in nearby Staufen. Once workers left their homes to labor in workshops, it was only a question of time when mechanical devices for the spinning of cotton, recently invented in England, would come to the Wiesental. Indeed, in 1794—only ten years after Greg
’s venture in Styal—entrepreneurs erected the first mechanized spinning mill, although government agents forced its closure soon thereafter for fear that mechanization would lead to unemployment, misery, and social upheaval. But this government intervention against industry was a rare exception, and by 1810 modern water frames and mules returned to the valley, invited by a government more favorably inclined to mechanization. Drawing their power from the plentiful streams cascading down the mountainsides of the Black Forest, these mills destroyed hand spinning in short order. The greater availability of yarn, however, resulted in a boom in hand weaving, which for a short period allowed peasants to remain within their farm households. As elsewhere, rising demand and ready capital eventually moved weaving into factories as well. Mulhousian entrepreneur Peter Koechlin, to name but one, created hand-weaving factories in the Wiesental towns of Steinen (in 1816), Schönau (1820), and Zell (1826). With manufacturing moving from their households into factories, peasants in ever greater numbers gave up raising cattle as well as making cheese. By 1860, the Wiesental counted 160,000 mechanized spindles and 8,000 looms, nearly all of them located in factories. Once a remote outpost of subsistence farming, the valley had become yet another dot on the map of the Industrial Revolution. Like the Yucatecan town of Valladolid, it had fallen into the vortex of a globe-spanning capitalist economy linking peasants in the Black Forest and on the Yucatán Peninsula, slaves on the banks of the Mississippi and, as we will see, consumers on the shores of the Río de la Plata.4
Hitched behind a well-matched team of entrepreneurs hungry for profits and rulers lusting for power, the mechanized cotton industry successfully colonized the Wiesental, Valladolid, and an ever-larger swath of the world. In 1771, the spinning jenny came to the French city of Rouen, only six years after it had been introduced in the United Kingdom. In 1783, Johann Gottfried Brügelmann, a putting-out merchant in Ratingen near Düsseldorf, did not have enough yarn for his weavers, a problem that would have been impossible to solve just a few years earlier; now he invested 25,000 reichstaler, gathered about eighty workers, and with the help of a British expert created the first spinning factory in the German-speaking lands. Two years later, the first mechanical spinning machine arrived in Barcelona, a city with such ancient cotton traditions that one of its narrow streets to this day carries the name Carrer del Cotoners. In 1789, Providence merchant Moses Brown hired a skilled British cotton worker, Samuel Slater, and built the first successful spinning factory in America. In 1792, Belgian entrepreneur Lieven Bauwens followed suit and started the first mechanized spinning mill in Twente. A year later, such machines for the first time began twisting yarn in Russia, when the Russian Treasury sponsored Michael Ossovski to start a cotton spinning mill. In 1798, a citizen of the Saxon city of Chemnitz, Christian Friedrich Kreissig, bought twenty-five spinning jennies and started a cotton factory. By 1801, local merchants in St. Gallen in Switzerland had sponsored Marc-Antoine Pellis’s creation of the country’s first spinning mill, the Spinnerei Aktiengesellschaft. Seven years later, spindles turned in the Lombardian town of Intra on the shores of Lake Maggiore. By 1818, the first mechanized cotton spinning mill began operations in Egypt on orders of Muhammad Ali, and in the mid-1830s, Don Pedro Baranda built the first steam-powered cotton spinning factory in Mexico.5
British tinkerers’ revolutionary methods for the production of cotton yarn spread rapidly, probably more rapidly than any previous manufacturing technology. It certainly helped that travelers, journals, newspapers, and learned societies trumpeted these wondrous advances. But even more influential must have been the influx of British traders carrying yarn and finished cotton cloth at unbeatable prices. European and North American consumers, introduced to the wonderful properties of cotton through relatively expensive goods made in India, responded swiftly and enthusiastically, as did consumers in regions of the world that had produced their own cotton fabrics for centuries or millennia. As more people bought cheap cottons, entrepreneurs in more countries became convinced that they could produce the same goods. With equal enthusiasm skilled artisans, adventurers, state bureaucrats, and budding entrepreneurs embraced the new machines and techniques. By 1800, as we have seen, the first mechanized spinning mills had sprung up in Britain, France, the German lands, the United States, Russia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Twenty years later, new mills churned out yarn and cloth in the Habsburg Empire, Denmark, Italy, Egypt, and Spain. And by 1860, mills could be found throughout Europe, North America, India, Mexico, and Brazil. While that year the United Kingdom still controlled 67.4 percent of the world’s mechanical spindles, cotton spinning by machines had effectively replaced older ways of doing things in large areas of the world.6
The world’s mechanized cotton industry was remarkable not only for its rapid global dispersion but also for its feverish rate of growth. Each new spinning mill served as an example to entrepreneurial neighbors that profits awaited those who could master the new world of cotton manufacturing. Belgian industrialization, without precedent in continental Europe in the first decade of the nineteenth century, was an example of this growth: In Ghent alone, its center, there had been only 227 cotton spinners in 1802, but six years later there were already 2,000 such workers, with an additional 1,000 laboring in the surrounding countryside.7 The number of spindles in the German lands increased from 22,000 in 1800 to 2 million in 1860. Catalonia saw an exponential growth of its cotton industry as well, so much so that it became known as the “little England in the heart of Spain,” with nearly 800,000 spindles turning in 1861. By 1828, nine spinning mills had opened in Russia, and by the middle of the nineteenth century Russia had become self-sufficient in cotton textiles. In Mexico, 25,000 spindles and 2,600 looms worked in its fifty-eight mills by 1843. Switzerland counted 1.35 million spindles in 1857. Nearby Alsace housed more than 500,000 mechanical spindles in 1828, and 859,300 in 1846. In the United States, cotton mills opened in Rhode Island (1790), New Jersey (1791), Delaware (1795), New Hampshire (1803), New York (1803), Connecticut (1804), and Maryland (1810). In 1810, according to the U.S. census, there were 269 cotton establishments in the United States with a total of 87,000 spindles. By 1860, there would be 5 million spindles, making cotton textiles the United States’ most important manufacturing industry in terms of capital invested, workers employed, and net value of its product.8
The rapid spread and exponential growth of mechanized cotton yarn production in so many parts of the world evinces the compelling nature of this new social system. Most obviously, mechanized spinning led to enormous productivity gains; those with sufficient capital to afford the new technology immediately enjoyed a competitive advantage over hand spinners. Once entrepreneurs installed spinning mules in Switzerland, productivity per worker increased by as much as a factor of a hundred.9 It is not surprising that the history of cotton after 1780 had a definite direction: Ever-more productive machines substituted for human labor, turning the world’s most important manufacturing industry upside down.
Cotton’s dramatic decline in price: average price of 100 kilograms of cotton yarn in Mulhouse, 1811–1860 (illustration credit 6.2)
Yet if this new way of spinning cotton yarn was so compelling, should it not have spread more evenly throughout the globe? Why did it take ten or more years to travel a few hundred miles to continental Europe, twenty or more years to cross the Atlantic to the United States, fifty or more years to reach Mexico and Egypt, and a hundred or more years to reach India, Japan, China, Argentina, and most of Africa? The spread of cotton industrialization is puzzling. Clearly it was a vastly more productive way to satisfy a basic human need for cloth. Cotton growing needed appropriate climates and soil, but cotton manufacturing, as the British example had shown, needed neither. In fact, the spread of mechanized cotton manufacturing seemed to follow a universal law of efficiency—yet with surprisingly particular results.
If we compare mechanized cotton production to the spread of a virus or an invasive species, then figuring out the underlying
causes requires us to differentiate the vulnerable populations from the resistant ones. And indeed, even a cursory glance around the edges of these newfangled machines in the countries and regions that adopted them first reveals a host of characteristic economic, social, and political relations—the embryonic features of industrial capitalism. As we have seen in Britain, this industrial capitalism was a radical departure from the life of centuries prior. It was one thing for British tinkerers and putting-out merchants to stumble upon a new way of spinning cotton in the last decades of the eighteenth century. But it was an entirely different thing to scale that model by several orders of magnitude and forge it into a new social order. It was the capacity of a newly emerging type of state, as we will see, that was decisive.
To understand the seemingly peculiar patterns of the spread of mechanized cotton manufacturing around the world, and with it industrialization as such, let us chart what the places that followed the British had in common. First and foremost, these early adopters all had a prior history of textile manufacturing. While no guarantee of success, such prior experience was all but required for cotton industrialization. Spinning mills almost always arose in areas that had already sustained vibrant textile industries—no matter if in woolens, flax, or cottons, urban or rural, home-based or in workshops. In the area around Ghent, for example, a long tradition of flax spinning and weaving had trained labor to cotton manufacturing. In the Mexican city of Puebla, mechanical cotton spinning built upon a centuries-long history of cotton spinning and weaving so established that its workers had a cotton producers’ guild, and indeed large workshops had emerged even before the advent of mechanization. The situation in the German lands was no different: One economist found that “the modern cotton industry nearly everywhere is building on older home industries.” In Russia, the cotton manufacturing industry emerged from eighteenth-century linen and woolen manufacturing; in the United States, New England’s textile mills arose in areas in which women especially had a long tradition of spinning yarn and weaving textiles; in Alsace, the history of textile production stretched back to the fifteenth century; and in Switzerland’s cotton manufacturing areas, the long and distinguished history of people making cotton fabrics in their homes had resulted in the accumulation of skills and capital. This small-scale work was often the first victim of industry’s rise, but it provided the usurpers with skills and labor essential to modern manufacturing.10