by Sven Beckert
The continued rapid growth of the industry over the next half century amplified this need: Global cotton consumption doubled from 1860 to 1890, and then by 1920 doubled once more. “Among the larger industrial changes of the last thirty years few exceed, in importance and interest, the marvelous growth of the manufacture of cotton by machinery,” reported economist Elijah Helm in 1903. British spinners remained the world’s most important consumers of raw cotton, but their needs expanded at a slower rate than before 1860. In the 1840s, their cotton consumption had increased by 4.8 percent annually, but by the 1870s and 1880s that rate of increase had dropped to 1.4 percent. Britain’s spinning slowdown, however, was more than made up by the demand from spinners in the rapidly growing cotton industries of western and eastern Europe, North America, and, by the early twentieth century, Brazil, Mexico, India, China, and Japan. In the years between 1860 and 1920 mechanical spindles in the world’s cotton industry tripled, as entrepreneurs and workers set another 100 million spindles in motion—half of them in the forty years before 1900, and the other half in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The spread of power looms was dramatic as well. In 1860 there were 650,000 power looms; the number reached 3.2 million by 1929. Continental Europe slowly increased its share of global cotton spindles between 1860 and 1900 rising from a quarter of the total in 1860 to 30 percent at the turn of the century. America also increased its share at the expense of Britain, rising from a 10 percent share in 1860 to around 20 percent in 1900.4 The primary effect of this shift was to give a much larger number of states and capitalists an interest in cheap cotton, and thus in the transformation of the global countryside, hoping to draw an ever wider swath of the world’s hinterland into the circuits of metropolitan capital accumulation.5
The Cotton Empire After Slavery, 1865–1920
That the demand for raw cotton exploded just when the traditional way of organizing its production—slavery—had collapsed gave increased urgency to capitalists’ and government bureaucrats’ efforts to mobilize cotton-growing workers. As we have seen, most cultivators had a strong preference for producing for their families and communities, not for the world market. While small growers from India to Alabama to West Africa were not averse to participating in markets, even long-distance markets, and did take advantage of opportunities for profit that availed themselves, their strategies were almost always embedded within a world of family subsistence, ties of mutual obligation, political arrangements, rights, and customary practices that made production for the market secondary. They were reluctant to give up household-focused production, and, in certain regions, collectively strong enough to resist the encroachments of European and North American capitalists and imperial administrators. Moreover, agricultural wages were too low and too insecure to entice rural cultivators to give up subsistence production, as much greater risks were not balanced by the possibility of higher rewards.6
Number of factory spindles, United Kingdom and world without United Kingdom, 1800–1920 (illustration credit 10.2)
The reconstruction of the empire of cotton, at its core, required the diligent effort of cotton industrialists, merchants, landowners, and state bureaucrats to undermine such preferences, drawing, in the process, on the powers of newly consolidating nation-states, and sanctioning legal—and often illegal—coercion to make rural farmers into the cultivators and eventually consumers of commodities. They sought to revolutionize the countryside by spreading capitalist social relations, including credit, private ownership in land, and contract law. They sought—and eventually found—what French colonial officials aptly called “a new mode of exploitation.”7 The transformation of the countryside they furthered was most intimately linked to the globalized nature of industrial production. Earlier forms of global trade had been based on the exchange of goods produced in all kinds of distinctly noncapitalist ways—by serfs and within households, for example. Now the wealth and coercive might of globalizing entrepreneurs and imperial statesmen was transforming the production regimes of people around the globe by commodifying both their labor and their land—as they had done in previous centuries in the Americas, albeit in different forms. In Asia and Africa the “great transformation” reached, for the first time, into areas remote from port cities. The logic of industrial capitalism in effect brought about a new form of global economic integration. The rising power of manufacturers, and the particular form of capital they controlled, created a new relationship between capital and territory as well as the people who dwelled on it, and allowed for new ways to mobilize their labor.
New forms of labor—including new forms of coercion, violence, and expropriation—spread over ever larger areas of the cotton-growing parts of the globe. Domination now rested not so much on the authority of the master but on the purportedly impersonal but far from impartial social mechanisms of the market, the law, and the state. The new systems of labor that emerged from these sometimes violent but almost always asymmetrical struggles between industrialists, merchants, agricultural producers, workers, rulers, and bureaucrats became the mainspring of the production of cotton until the advent of commercially viable mechanical harvesting in the United States during the 1940s, and of a new global political economy.8
Even though contemporaries were uncertain if and when American growers would return to dominating world market production of cotton, no one doubted that the labor of formerly enslaved cotton growers would be the foundation of any possible resurgence of American cotton exports, and with it the revival and continued expansion of the world’s cotton industry. In 1865, merchants, journalists, and diplomats, many from Europe, pored over maps and tables and sent scouts to the southern countryside to discover information on what labor system might replace slavery.9 The core question, they quickly learned, was whether or not freedpeople would return to the cotton fields. Many wondered if former slaves could be kept working on the land that they had tilled for more than half a century, and if they could be made to continue growing cotton now that outright bodily coercion had become illegal. Certainly some optimistic voices could be heard: Boston cotton manufacturer Edward Atkinson upheld his fervent belief in the superior productivity of free labor, including in the production of cotton. Others believed that the “pinchings of want” would “correct” the “prevailing indolence of the colored people,” forcing them back to the cotton fields.10
Yet most were considerably more pessimistic: “The cultivation of the hitherto great Southern staples, will of necessity be abandoned,” predicted the Southern Cultivator. Cotton merchant J. R. Busk, William Rathbone’s U.S. agent, while hoping that “the pacification of the South will not be indefinitely postponed by radical measures,” advised that “negro labour could not be depended on for next year.” George McHenry from London went even further and argued in his The Cotton Supply of the United States of America, that only reenslavement would bring forth cotton: “Cotton can only be cultivated extensively in the Southern States by negro labour, and negro labour can only be controlled under the semi-patriarchal system called slavery.” Cotton experts in India concurred, with some self-interest, as the Bombay cotton commissioner G. F. Forbes predicted that former slaves would spend their time “sleeping under the nearest tree.”11
Throughout Europe and the United States, economic and political elites agreed that former slaves must continue to grow cotton. And they also agreed that the question of cotton boiled down to labor. As lawyer and Union general Francis C. Barlow put it to his friend Henry Lee Higginson, a wealthy Bostonian who hoped in 1865 to purchase a cotton plantation in the South, “Making money there is a simple question of being able to make the darkies work.” The question of “negro labor” agitated the minds of landowners, bureaucrats, former slaves, and self-appointed experts on such matters from around the globe. As the Southern Cultivator summarized that discussion, “The all absorbing subject, [is] what kind of labor is best for us.” And indeed, the question of how “to manage negro labor successfully” filled the pages of th
e journal. Many “experts” feared that freedpeople, as they had in the West Indies a generation earlier, would engage in subsistence agriculture. To prevent such “evil consequences,” some advocated the payment of monetary wages, others a system of sharecropping, while again others preferred an effort to maintain gang labor. A subscriber from South Carolina remarked that “the negro [is] the proper, legitimate and divinely ordained laborer of the South…[who] has become wild in the exuberance of his freedom…and will be trained to work as a free man. He cannot be permitted to become what he is in St. Domingo.” The Macon Telegraph of Georgia put it more succinctly in the spring of 1865: “the great question now before our people is how to appropriate all the African labor of the country.”12
Some of the answers to the question of “how to appropriate all the African labor of the country” had already been found during the war, when Union generals and northern investors tried to resurrect cotton production in areas of the South captured by Union troops. Most prominent were the efforts on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia—an important cotton-growing area for many decades—where northerners such as Edward Atkinson bought cotton plantations and tried to implement their vision of “free labor.” They foresaw a world in which freedpeople would continue to grow export crops for wages, a project they embraced with infectious enthusiasm. Because freedpeople often had a different idea as to what freedom entailed—namely, land ownership and control over their labor—there, as elsewhere, the Union army obliged freed slaves to work for wages on plantations. Such measures did not bode well for the freed slaves’ hopes and aspirations.13
It took a multiyear struggle on plantations, in local courthouses, in state capitols, and in Washington to determine the outlines of a new system of labor in the cotton-growing regions of the United States. That struggle began the moment the fighting ended, when plantation owners, devastated by the economic and political effects of defeat in war, sought to restore a plantation world as close to slavery as possible. To be sure, contracts now had to be made and wages paid—the Macon Telegraph advised its readers in May 1865 with some regret that “remuneration for labor will hereafter be necessary”—but beyond that, life was to go on as before. Former slaves, living in the hovels they had inhabited before emancipation, were to hoe, plant, weed, and harvest under the supervision of overseers. Money or, more typically, a share of the crop, would compensate them for their efforts.14
An early 1866 contract of cotton planter Alonzo T. Mial of Wake County, North Carolina, with twenty-seven freedpeople stipulated work from sunrise to sunset, with some additional activities after sunset, and a commitment to “attend to the plantation on Sundays.” There was no pay for sick time or leaves. The workers received in return ten dollars a month, and an additional fifteen pounds of bacon and one bushel of meal. Similarly, in the southwestern corner of Georgia, a prime cotton-growing area, upon emancipation planters hired their former slaves as wage workers, unilaterally imposing restrictive conditions and minimal pay—so little that it amounted to no more than “life’s necessities” plus one-tenth of the corn crop (and none of the cotton). The situation was nearly the same in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, perhaps the world’s most important cotton-growing region, where landlords paid wages, but also tried to limit freedpeople’s mobility and to force them to remain on plantations and plant cotton. Since most freedmen and -women possessed hardly anything, landlords imposed these conditions unilaterally, forcing yearlong contracts on their workers, binding them to the plantation until after harvest time.15
Left to their own devices, planters imagined a reconstruction of the empire of cotton based on some form of wage labor, leaving the structure of land ownership, the rhythm of work, and the pattern of plantation life largely unchanged. They had powerful allies among the economic and political elites of Europe whose single-minded focus was on getting more cotton from the United States.
Planters, however, were not left to their own devices. They encountered freedpeople determined to create a world radically different from slavery—indeed, a world in which the production of commodities for international markets would no longer be their prime concern. Freed people believed, for good reasons, that only access to land would secure their newfound freedom, and they argued that their support for the Union war effort and their unpaid labor under slavery had given them the right to such lands. Many believed that upon Union victory, forty acres and a mule would await them. A group of freedmen in Virginia, for example, had a very clear and completely accurate idea as to why “we have a divine right to the land.” They recalled that “our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon…. And den didn’t we clear the land, and raise the crops of corn, ob tobacco, ob rice, ob sugar, ob ebery ting. And den didn’t dem large cities in de North grow up on de cotton and de sugars and de rice dat we made?” Slavery amounted to the theft of the just rewards of their labor—a theft now to be compensated by the redistribution of land.16
Yet freedpeople’s hope of turning themselves into landowning subsistence peasants was short-lived. Much of the land confiscated during the war was returned to its original owners as early as the fall of 1865. Without access to land, it was difficult for freedpeople to exert much control over their labor. With President Andrew Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction policy, moreover, former slave owners regained much of their political influence, and they used their restored local and regional political power to deploy the machinery of the state to limit the claims of freedpeople to economic resources and power. One of the first things these “reconstructed” state governments did was to try to enforce labor discipline and keep workers on plantations. So-called black codes, passed as early as November 1865 in Mississippi, required freedpeople to sign labor contracts that defined mobility as “vagrancy.” And although the federal government, via the Freedmen’s Bureau, corrected some of the most flagrant violations of “free labor,” many in the U.S. government also believed that the coercive power of the state was needed to transform freedpeople into wage workers. An assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau for Louisiana argued in July 1865, for example, that it was necessary “that freedmen everywhere be enjoined to work, and in doing so, they will, in all cases, enter into free and voluntary contracts.” The irony of being freely enjoined escaped this commissioner, and many others. Indeed, freedpeople not employed were threatened with compulsory labor.17 Northerners legitimized these “compulsory contracts,” as historian Amy Dru Stanley has called them, as a measure to help guide freedpeople into freedom. At the same time, alternative ways of gaining access to subsistence, such as allowing animals to graze on public lands, hunting, fishing, and gathering fruits and nuts were increasingly restricted.18
Cotton capitalists generally welcomed such measures, with the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, speaking for New York’s business community, expressing its hope that freedpeople’s mobility “cannot be deemed anything more than a temporary state of affairs, to be corrected by the joint influence of the vagrancy laws and the necessity of the vagrants.” In the face of such powerful opposition, many freedpeople felt that they “shall be forever made hewers of wood and drawers of water”—and, we might add, cultivators of cotton. Divorced from access to alternative means of subsistence—a situation radically different from rural cultivators in India or Africa—freedpeople seemed comparatively easy to convert into agricultural proletarians.19
Yet the defeat of freedpeople’s aspirations was not the end of the story. So blatant was the attempt by white southern elites to reimpose a system of labor akin to slavery, and so flagrant was their effort to ignore their defeat in war, that northerners began to mobilize against the Reconstruction policies of President Johnson. Thanks to the efforts of former slaves and their northern allies, freedpeople in 1866 gained citizenship rights, and in 1867 the right to vote, which allowed them to use their growing political power to improve their situation on plantations. By 1867,
Congress had reestablished military authority over southern states. Northern support and the political mobilization of freedpeople in turn made black workers more able to articulate their demands on plantations themselves, and by 1867 “freedpeople walked out of the fields and off their jobs.” They were helped by a shortage of labor, the result of men working fewer hours than they had under slavery and many women and children retreating from field labor altogether. Consequently, slaves managed to negotiate somewhat better contracts. Contracts in the Delta, for example, paid higher wages and offered better conditions than those of the previous year. Moreover, freedwomen, who had an increasingly difficult time finding a place for themselves and their children in a plantation world that favored physically strong men, struggled and mobilized for their own inclusion into the world of labor contracts. Such were the “weapons of the weak.”20
Even more important, freedpeople demanded to work independently, in family units, and with access to subsistence crops. Planters were now unable to unilaterally dominate work arrangements. Freedpeople, in turn, were still unable to own land. By 1867, neither was able to impose their will entirely on the other. Consequently, a social compromise emerged, in which African-American families worked particular plots of land without day-to-day supervision, received supplies from landlords, and would then be paid with a share of the crop they had grown. Such sharecropping arrangements spread like wildfire through the cotton-growing regions of the United States, with gang labor, the prevalent system during slavery, nearly disappearing. As the Southern Cultivator observed in November 1867, the “first change that must occur…is the subdivision of landed estates.” By 1868, even the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta saw widespread sharecropping, and by 1900 more than three-quarters of all black farmers in Arkansas, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia were sharecroppers, retaining a share of the crop, or renters, who paid a fixed sum to the landowner but retained the crop.21
