by Sven Beckert
Moreover, the experience of earlier emancipations in the Caribbean, in Saint-Domingue above all, had deflated the hopes of merchants and manufacturers about cash-crop production by former slaves. As early as 1841, Herman Merivale had observed that it was difficult to compel “the negroes to perform hired labour while they have their own provision grounds, and other resources, at their disposal.” The (British) Select Committee investigating “the existing relations between Employers and Labourers” in the West Indies had similarly noted in 1842 that the production of agricultural commodities had diminished in the wake of emancipation because “the labourers are enabled to live in comfort and to acquire wealth without, for the most part, labouring on the estates of the Planters for more than three or four days in a week.” As The Economist put it, “in the tropics Nature has given man the benefit, or the curse, of a perpetual poor law, a prodigality of food which of itself established a minimum of wages.”57
For British colonial official W. H. Holmes the dilemma was clear: “When the slave became a free man…his first desire was also to become independent; to be completely his own master.” In Guyana, which he studied carefully, “a trifling amount of labour procures the few luxuries, which a most fertile soil fails to place within reach,” making it unlikely that farmers would grow export crops for wages. Vegetables, fish, and fruit were available for the asking, a situation that, “in my opinion, [has] been fraught with evil consequences.” French colonial bureaucrats had come to essentially the same conclusion: Once “free…the Black…returns to the hut of the savage.” Freedpeople’s retreat into subsistence agriculture, envisioned by so many former slaves as a true foundation for their new freedom, was the worst nightmare of cotton merchants and manufacturers the world over.58 European observers’ concerns about freedpeople were further amplified by developments in the Caribbean, such as the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, when a group of black Jamaicans revolted against the harsh punishment the colonial administration had inflicted on a group of squatters, a rebellion that was suppressed by an orgy of violence by British troops.
Landowners, manufacturers, merchants, and statesmen concluded from this reading of past experiences that emancipation was potentially threatening to the well-being of the world’s mechanized cotton industry. Consequently, they worked zealously to find ways to reconstruct durably the worldwide web of cotton production, to transform the global countryside without resorting to slavery. Already during the war itself, in articles and books, speeches and letters, they belabored the question of if and where cotton could be grown by nonslave labor. Edward Atkinson, for example, contributed to this debate as early as 1861 with his Cheap Cotton by Free Labor, and one year later, William Holmes’s Free Cotton: How and Where to Grow It extended the discussion. An anonymous French author added his voice the same year with Les blancs et les noirs en Amérique et le coton dans les deux mondes.59
Soon such treatises were informed by lessons drawn from the Civil War experiences. The sudden turn to nonslave cotton during the Civil War years in Egypt, Brazil, and India as well as in Union-controlled zones of the American South represented, after all, a global experiment: What would a world with cotton but without slaves look like?
These rehearsals—for a new postwar, postslavery cotton empire—nurtured two somewhat contradictory faiths. Few observers reckoned that enough cotton could be procured to permit cotton manufacturing to continue its dramatic expansion even without slavery. This was, for example, the judgment of the English Ladies’ Free Grown Cotton movement, a loose association of women who committed themselves to purchasing only cloth produced with free labor cotton. And, perhaps most optimistically, it was embraced by Republicans in the United States such as Edward Atkinson, who believed that cotton production in the American South could be expanded dramatically through the use of “free labor”—that is, as long as freedpeople did not remain content with subsistence agriculture. Atkinson, impressed by his own successes in staffing his cotton mills with wage workers, fervently believed that the future of the United States’—and the world’s—cotton supply depended on the ability of southern landowners and the southern states to motivate freed slaves to produce cotton.60
Yet the Civil War experience also had shown that nonslave cotton had entered world markets only under conditions of unsustainably high prices; after all, the price of Indian cotton had more than quadrupled and earlier efforts to bring Indian cotton to market at lower prices had largely failed. Moreover, from the perspective of 1864 and 1865, emancipation was accompanied by considerable social turmoil in the American South. Cotton capitalists’ widespread belief that freedom would bring a permanent reduction in the supplies of raw cotton was thus reasonable and was expressed most directly in the fact that postbellum cotton prices remained well above their prewar level. Breathless reports came into Liverpool, such as the one received by the Rathbones which predicted that “negro labour could not be depended on for next year.” The Barings, in turn, asserted that “few appear to think that labour can be sufficiently reorganized in the South to plant and pick a crop next season exceeding 1½ million bales.” (In 1860, the cotton crop had been 5.4 million bales.)61
As fears of permanently reduced cotton harvests spread through cotton circles, pressure for a reconstruction of plantation agriculture in the American South after the defeat of the Confederacy mounted, especially the orderly return of cotton cultivators to the fields. The Bremer Handelsblatt called for a policy of forgiveness toward the defeated planter elite. In the spring of 1865, the British minister to Washington, Sir Frederick William Adolphus Bruce, reported back to London on the status of Reconstruction, severely critiquing the “ultra-Republicans,” and reminding President Andrew Johnson to take into account the urgent need to revive cotton production. The question of if and how freedpeople would work occupied him; he feared that “the emancipation of the Negroes will be a great blow to the material prosperity of the cotton and sugar growing States.” Concerned about upheavals in the South and critical of efforts to extend suffrage rights to freedpeople, he approvingly reported in May 1865 that “everywhere measures are being taken to force the Negroes to work, and to teach them that freedom means working for wages instead of masters.”62
Yet cotton capitalists and government bureaucrats also had learned much broader lessons during the war. Most important, they understood that labor, not land, constrained the production of cotton. Members of the Manchester Cotton Supply Association, the world’s leading experts on such matters, understood that land and climate of a “quality equal and in many cases superior to that” of America was available in many different parts of the globe. But these experts on global cotton found that “the very first requisite, which was labor” was more difficult to find. As the British finance minister for India, Samuel Laing, remarked, “The question of the abolition of slavery over the world, depends probably upon the question whether cotton produced by free labor in India can undersell cotton the produce of slavery in America.”63
But where should this labor come from? During the Civil War, as we have seen, the efforts of cotton interests focused squarely on accessing labor in regions that formerly had not grown significant amounts of cotton for European markets. The president of the Cotton Supply Association summarized this strategy succinctly: “We are now opening up the interior.” This strategy had a long history; the Civil War, however, had focused the energies of capitalists and statesmen in unprecedented ways.64
This rapid geographic expansion of the global web of cotton production was deeply entangled with efforts to find new ways to motivate rural cultivators to grow the white gold and move it to market. How could rulers make peasants grow crops that, as political scientist Timothy Mitchell put it so well, “they could not eat, or process to serve local needs”? Or how could, as the French observer M. J. Mathieu asked far less delicately in 1861, “black workers be disciplined and stimulated”?65
Throughout the empire of cotton, bureaucrats and capitalists agonized over
the question of whether “the negroe will from now on be a industrious worker.”66 In an unusually long article, The Economist took the occasion of the end of the Civil War to engage in an extended deliberation on the issue, arguing:
There is probably no one point of politics which involves economic results so wide or so permanent as the relation between the white and the dark races of the world…. It is probably the destiny, it is even now the function, it is certainly the interest of the European, and more particularly of the English family of mankind, to guide and urge and control the industrial enterprises of all Asia, of all Africa, and of those portions of America settled by African, Asiatic, or hybrid races. Those enterprises are very large indeed…. The one necessity essential to the development of these new sources of prosperity is the arrangement of some industrial system under which very large bodies of dark labourers will work willingly under a very few European supervisors. It is not only individual labour which is required, but organized labour, labour so scientifically arranged that the maximum of result shall be obtained at a minimum of cost, that immense sudden efforts, such as are required in tunnel cutting, cotton picking and many other operations, shall be possible without strikes or quarrels, and that, above all, there shall be no unnatural addition to the price of labour in the shape of bribes to the workmen to obey orders naturally repulsive to their prejudices.
To be sure, The Economist argued, “All these ends were secured, it must freely be acknowledged, by slavery. For the mere execution of great works cheaply no organization could be equal to that which placed the skilled European at the top, and made him despotic master of the half-skilled black or copper-coloured labourer below…” But slavery had also “moral and social consequences which are not beneficial.” And for that reason, “A new organization therefore must be commenced, and the only one as yet found to work effectively is…one based upon perfect freedom and mutual self-interest…. If, however, complete freedom is to be the principle adopted, it is clear that the dark races must in some way or other be induced to obey white men willingly.”67
But how would “the dark races…be induced to obey white men willingly”? The Civil War had unintentionally transformed the possibilities for where and how cotton might be grown, overturning in one stroke the balance between coerced and free labor in the global web of cotton production. The determined efforts of slaves themselves and the advance of the Union army bolstered by newly freed men and women had destroyed the system of chattel slavery that for 250 years had fueled both war capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. But the newly emerging order in the world’s cotton fields was still up for grabs.68
The outlines of what this reconstruction would look like were only glimpsed here and there during the Civil War itself. Yet by century’s end, the world of cotton would look dramatically different. The speed and flexibility with which merchants, manufacturers, and agricultural producers responded to the crisis revealed their adaptability and, not least, their capacity for marshaling new, indirect, but far-reaching forms of state power to secure labor in place of direct ownership of human beings. “The emancipation of the enslaved races and the regeneration of the people of the East,” observed the Revue de Deux Mondes perceptively, “were intimately connected.”69
When the guns fell silent on the North American continent in April 1865, the greatest turmoil in the eighty-five-year history of a European-dominated cotton industry came to an end. New systems for the mobilization of labor had been tested around the world—from coolie workers to sharecropping to wage labor—and while it was still uncertain if cotton production would return to antebellum levels, belief in the possibility of “free labor” cotton had become nearly universal. As former slaves throughout the United States celebrated their freedom, manufacturers and workers looked forward to factories running again at capacity, fueled by newly plentiful cotton supplies.
Merchants, however, had little to celebrate. “The peace rumor caused almost a panic,” reported Baring Brothers Liverpool to their counterparts in London in February 1865. When the Indian Daily News, in an “extraordinary” issue, reported in early March of the capture of Charleston by Union forces, it observed, “Panic in Liverpool. Cotton down to one shilling,” a panic that rapidly spread to Bombay itself. Boston ice merchant Calvin W. Smith reported from Bombay that “I am sorry to say such long faces I never saw on any set of mortals as the English & Parsees put on here. Our success at home is their ruination. Let that war end in one year, and there will be more failures in this town, than in any one place anywhere. Such wild speculation as has been going on here for the last four years, never was heard of before.” In Liverpool panic prevailed as well. Liverpool cotton merchant Samuel Smith remembered, “It was pitiable to see men who had bought fine mansions and costly picture galleries, hanging about ‘the flags,’ watching the chance of borrowing a guinea from an old friend.”70
This global panic illuminated to peasants, workers, manufacturers, and merchants how closely intertwined developments all over the world had become. Battles fought in rural Virginia reverberated in small villages in Berar and Lower Egypt, a farmer’s crop choice in Brazil rested on his reading of the Liverpool market, and real estate prices collapsed in Bombay as soon as news of the Union’s destruction of Richmond reached India’s shores. A British observer was amazed at these new global links that the Civil War had brought to the fore. “We have seen how potent and how quick,” he wrote, “the effects of ‘price’ was in the most distant parts of the globe.”71
The world indeed had become smaller, and the way cotton held parts of it together had changed significantly. If the Civil War was a moment of crisis for the empire of cotton, it was also a rehearsal for its reconstruction. Cotton capitalists were confident from their triumphs in recasting industrial production at home. As they surveyed the ashes of the South, they saw promising new levers that might move the mountain of free labor into cotton cultivation with new lands, new labor relations, and new connections between them. But perhaps most important, cotton capitalists had learned that the lucrative global trade networks they had spun could only be protected and maintained by unprecedented state activism. Meanwhile, statesmen understood that these networks had become essential to the social order of their nations and hence a crucial bulwark of political legitimacy, resources, and power. Thus the French observer was correct when he predicted in 1863, “The empire of cotton is ensured; King Cotton is not dethroned.”72
Chapter Ten
Global Reconstruction
Indian cultivators delivering cotton to an upcountry Volkart Brothers agency. Probably Khamgaon, 1870s. (illustration credit 10.1)
In the fall of 1865, Captain William Hickens of the British Royal Engineers traveled through the states of the defeated Confederacy. Dispatched by the Foreign Office to evaluate the prospects of cotton growing, Hickens met with planters, brokers, “and other individuals connected with cotton.” In his report to the British secretary of state, the Earl of Clarendon, he expressed great pessimism about the possibility of the American South again producing large quantities of cotton at prices comparable to those of the antebellum years. For 1866, he expected at most 1 million bales of cotton to come from southern plantations and farms, one-quarter of the last prewar harvest. The reason for his dismal assessment was straightforward: There was not enough labor in the South to plow, seed, prune, and harvest all that cotton. “So completely has the system of labour been disorganized by the emancipation of the slaves,” he lamented, that cotton harvests for the foreseeable future would be vastly reduced. Planters in Louisiana had told Hickens that “there is the greatest difficulty in getting a fair day’s work out of the negroes,” as the freedpeople have “no idea of the sanctity of a contract, and will…evade the performance of [their] part of it.” The solution, Hickens concluded, was the growing of cotton by white settlers, who would eventually be able to grow a crop “as large each year as before the war,” but never again as cheaply as “in the old days.”1
; In April 1865, the question that was first and foremost on the minds of cotton capitalists and statesmen was if and when the cotton planters of the American South would resume their position within the empire of cotton. This question, virtually all observers agreed with Hickens, boiled down to just one issue: labor. Manchester cotton manufacturer Edmund Ashworth was all but certain that “the blacks who had once worked by the whip would be slow to work for wages.” Liverpool cotton broker Maurice Williams put the issue succinctly: “Now as the power to force this labor is for ever taken away and that it was mainly owing to this power that the Southern States were enabled to raise such enormous Crops of Cotton as previously to supply four fifths the Consumption of the world it may naturally be expected that free laborers toiling mainly for themselves cannot for years until their number be materially increased be expected to produce any large quantity compared with former crops.”2
Just as slaves had revolutionized the cotton empire, emancipation forced cotton capitalists toward their own revolution—a frantic search for new ways to organize the cotton-growing labor of the world. Reconciling the emancipation of America’s cotton growers with the need for ever more raw cotton was not easily accomplished. Yet cotton manufacturers’ insatiable demand for inexpensive cotton made sure that the “cotton question” remained high on the agenda. Raw cotton imports were so voluminous that they were generally the most costly item in the trade of the industrialized nations of Europe, and cotton exports were at the very top of the list of goods brought from there to foreign markets. With hundreds of thousands of workers finding employment in textile mills, these supplies and outlets were crucial to securing the social stability of European and North American societies. To maintain an industry so important required a global reconstruction of the empire of cotton; a search for innovative combinations of land, labor, capital, and state power.3
