Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  What all these struggles to recast the global countryside had in common was that states now played an important role. New forms of coercion, instituted and carried out by the state, replaced the outright physical violence of masters that had been so important to slave labor. This does not mean that physical violence was absent, but it was secondary compared to the pressures that came from contracts, the law, and taxation. As states developed new sovereignty over territory they also extended their sovereignty over labor, testifying to the new institutional strength of industrial capitalism.

  Khamgaon was a small city, a town really, in Berar, the center of the large western Indian district that had long been renowned for the quality of its cottons. Decades before the arrival of the British, some of this cotton had been exported on bullock carts to Mirzapore on the Ganges and then shipped to Calcutta, but farmers never specialized exclusively in the fiber and grew many other things as well, while also engaging in spinning and weaving. Indeed, the trade in “raw thread” spun locally had dwarfed the trade in raw cotton. Things began to change by 1825 with the rise of an export market in raw cotton, when the Parsi merchants Messrs. Pestanji and Company brought the first cotton on “pack oxen” to Bombay. Dissatisfied with the slow expansion of that trade, Britain assumed political control over Berar in 1853—a position that served Lancashire manufacturers well when during the American Civil War Berar became “one of the very finest cotton fields in India.”36

  As the British colonial administration and Lancashire manufacturers saw the potential of Berar as a major cotton-growing area, and upon the urgings of British manufacturers, the colonial state completed in 1870 a railroad to Khamgaon (paid for by Berar’s “surplus revenue”), which now had an estimated nine thousand inhabitants. “The last obstacle has been removed, and for the future direct communication by steam exists between this the largest emporium of cotton in Western India and the ports of Europe, which will take every bale that can be brought into its market,” celebrated Mr. C. B. Saunders, the British resident at Hyderabad. When the railroad arrived in Khamgaon, none other than the viceroy himself spoke at the opening celebration, a day on which “the Court House, the Factories, the Cotton Market, and every prominent point were gaily decked with flags.” He reminded his listeners, many of whom were cotton merchants, that “we all know that the cotton famine in America had a great deal to do in stimulating the development and production of cotton in this country.” Such new production for world markets, he argued, not only benefited the development of India itself, but was also “conferring vast benefits on a class which at a very recent period, in a time of great suffering and distress, displayed almost heroic qualities”—the operatives in the cotton manufacturing districts of Lancashire. Symbolizing the centrality of cotton to the colonial project in Berar, the viceroy eventually “drove to the cotton market, in which a monster triumphal arch, composed chiefly of cotton bales, had been erected” in his and the new railroad’s honor.37

  With the railroad came the telegraph. Now a Liverpool merchant could wire an order for cotton to Berar and receive it on the docks of the Mersey just six weeks later, the journey on a steamer from Bombay to Liverpool accomplished in twenty-one days thanks to the newly opened Suez Canal.38 The impact of such infrastructure projects was staggering, with Berar cotton commissioner Harry Rivett-Carnac expecting that soon

  the cotton grown around Khamgaon, purchased at the market there, and pressed at the adjoining factories, may not have to leave the rails, from the time that it is rolled from the press-house into the wagon, until its arrival on the wharf at Bombay; and it will not be difficult to calculate the time that will be necessary, with the assistance of the telegraph which joins Khamgaon and Liverpool, the complete railway communication between the market and the port of shipment, and with, perhaps, the Suez Canal to assist still further in the transport of our cotton, to execute an order sent from Liverpool and to land the required number of Khamgaon bales in Lancashire.39

  British India might indeed be considered the archetype for the flexible pragmatism by which states helped capitalists gain access to cotton-growing labor, and how capitalists then found ways to mobilize that labor. Pushed by Lancashire manufacturers and cotton merchants from Liverpool to Bombay, the British colonial government in India continued its project, which had accelerated significantly during the U.S. Civil War, of promoting the transformation of the cotton-growing countryside. The impact was swift: As late as 1853, Berar had remained largely removed from world markets, with a village-oriented economy with a substantial household manufacturing sector. By the 1870s, however, much of Berar’s economic activity focused on the production of raw cotton for world markets. A British colonial official observed by the middle of that decade that in Berar, “Cotton is grown almost entirely for export. The manufacture of home cloth has been undermined by the importation of English Piece Goods, and many of the weaver class have become ordinary labourers.” This reorientation of the local economy also pushed people into agricultural labor, as for example the banjaras (traditional owners of carts who had transported cotton), and weavers as well as spinners, found themselves out of employment and increasingly dependent on agricultural pursuits. Indeed, forty years later a gazetteer could report that Berar’s once thriving cotton manufacturing industry had all but disappeared “since the advent of the railway.”40 As Rivett-Carnac explained in 1869,

  Now it is not too much to hope, that, with a branch railway to this tract, European piece goods might be imported so as to undersell the native cloth. And the effect would be, that, not only would a larger supply of the raw material be obtained,—for what is now worked up into yarn would be exported,—but the larger population now employed in spinning and weaving would be made available for agricultural labour, and thus the jungle land might be broken up and the cultivation extended.

  For Secretary of State for India Charles Wood, such changes to the Indian social structure produced a sense of déjà vu: “The conclusions drawn from the Cotton papers are on the whole satisfactory. The Native weavers are exactly the class of people whom I remember in my early days on the Moor Edges in the West Riding. Every small farmer had 20 to 50 acres of land, and two or three looms in his house. The factories and mills destroyed all weaving of this kind, and now they are exclusively agriculturalists. Your Indian hybrids [that is, people who combined farming with household manufacturing] will end in the same way.” Contemporaries like Wood understood that they were part of a grand move to transform the world’s countryside into the producer of raw materials and consumer of manufactured goods (as well as, eventually, a supplier of labor to factories), and they took pride in their role.41

  Altogether, Berar became one of the world’s most significant laboratories for the reconstruction of the empire of cotton. Its diversified agricultural economy was turned into ever greater specialization on cotton crops. As The Asiatic reflected in 1872, “A pressure unknown before was put upon the people to grow cotton.” While in 1861 cotton was harvested on 629,000 acres of land in Berar, that acreage had nearly doubled by 1865, and then doubled once more by the 1880s. By the early twentieth century, Berar alone produced one-quarter of the Indian cotton harvest—a harvest larger than that of all of Egypt. As one observer put it, Berar had “become a perfect garden of cotton.”42

  In Egypt, as in India and the United States, the expansion of cotton agriculture was a direct result of the powerful interventions of the state. A redefinition of property rights in the last third of the nineteenth century made possible a massive redistribution of land away from villages and nomadic peoples to the well-connected owners of huge estates. Before that transformation, property in Egypt provided the right to shares of the revenue of the land, which meant that ownership claims to particular pieces of land were usually shared among various individuals, communities, religious authorities, and the state.43 Such multifaceted claims effectively hindered the purchase and sale of land; by the later decades of the nineteenth century such property rights
stood in the way of a further commercialization of agriculture.

  As a result, the Egyptian government, motivated by its desire to extract more taxes to pay for the expansion of the nation’s infrastructure and the mushrooming service on its enormous debt, as well as its desire to better control its people, moved toward conferring property rights in very large estates to well-placed individuals. At first these estates were merely “tax responsibilities” of their owners, but by the 1870s they became their outright private property, much of which consisted of land taken, usually forcibly, from villages. Now that the cotton-growing estates increasingly were held as the outright property of large landowners, the villagers who once had controlled some of the revenue of the land, and some rights of settlement, fell entirely on the mercy of these landowners. These new estate owners could force peasants to live in special “private villages” that controlled most aspects of their lives. Those cultivators who did not do what was asked of them were expelled, joining the ever-growing ranks of the landless agricultural proletariat.44

  The rights of the new owners were far-reaching, including their ability to “imprison, expel, starve, exploit, and exercise many other forms of arbitrary, exceptional, and, if necessary, violent powers.” As a result, these estates represented a “system of supervision and coercion that succeeded for the first time in fixing cultivators permanently on the land.” To make land into the exclusive possession of single individuals had required what political scientist Timothy Mitchell has described as the “violence of property making.” These new property rights spread rapidly: In 1863, estate owners controlled one-seventh of the cultivated land area of Egypt, by 1875 almost twice as much, and by 1901 a full 50 percent.45 In 1895, just 11,788 individuals held nearly half of all lands in Egypt, while the other half was held by 727,047 proprietors. Some of these estates were huge; Ibrahim Mourad, for example, controlled thirteen thousand acres in Toukh, worked by twenty thousand cultivators, dwarfed only by the mammoth estates that Egypt’s ruler, Isma’il Pasha, had personally seized.46

  As elsewhere, the transformation of the Egyptian cotton-growing countryside rested on a vast pyramid of credit. At the bottom, workers on cotton estates were almost always in debt to moneylenders and landowners, constantly threatened by debt bondage. Landowners, in turn, received credit from local merchants, many of them foreigners. The largest landowner of all, Isma’il, accumulated such debts that in 1878, in the wake of falling cotton prices, he signed over his estates to his creditors, the Rothschilds. At the same time, the Egyptian state took out massive loans to finance the digging of irrigation canals (largely by resorting to forced labor), the building of railroads, and the import of steam pumps. So staggering were the amounts borrowed that the state eventually went bankrupt, despite ever greater pressure on the Egyptian people to produce for export markets. That debt brought Egypt as a whole into the arms of the British: With diminishing proceeds from cotton, Egypt could not service its debt, lost sovereign control, and was eventually taken over by the British government in 1882.47

  As the examples of Egypt and India show, by the last third of the nineteenth century, rulers and bureaucrats played a critical role in the effort to further cotton growing for world markets. They did so partly because their own power rested on access to resources and was made more stable by the relative social peace that came from humming mills. But they also acted at the behest of powerful capitalists—either because rulers and capitalists were largely the same group of elites, as in the case of Egypt, or because statesmen were subject to concerted lobbying and political pressure, such as in the case of Britain and France and, as we will see, Germany.

  States’ desire to mobilize cotton-growing labor now led to unprecedented claims upon their subjects, as states increasingly defined and enforced the rules of the market. From Berar to the Nile Delta to Minas Gerais, governments and courts undermined older collective claims to resources such as grazing and hunting rights, forcing peasants to dedicate themselves single-mindedly to the production of cotton. Berar’s natural landscape, for example, was turned upside down by a vast British effort to survey the land, followed by the encouragement of the British to turn so called “waste lands” into cotton farms. “Waste lands” once had been open to the collective use of farmers, but now increasingly were turned into private property. In the process, extensive forests that traditionally had been the source of firewood and wild foods were logged, and grasslands put under the plow that had in earlier times served as communal grazing lands. Logging further reduced the forests to feed the steam presses of Western merchants in the major Berar cotton towns. In some parts of the world, such deforestation led to significantly altered patterns of rainfall, undermining the very colonial cotton craze that had incited deforestation in the first place.48

  Court-enforced lien laws, moreover, gave creditors another means to undermine peasants’ claims to the land and enmesh them further in a quagmire of debt, which forced them to grow ever more cotton. The systems of mutual dependence and personal domination that had characterized the countryside of Berar, the American South, and elsewhere before the U.S. Civil War gave way to a world in which creditors backed by the state turned rural cultivators into producers and consumers of commodities. As an anonymous British writer on Indian cotton explained, “Where there is no intelligent population to lead the way, a Government must do what in more civilized countries can safely be left to private enterprise.”49

  The creation of private property in land became yet another state-led project, in India and elsewhere. British cotton manufactures, demanding that the colonial government “set its colonial house in order,” called for new forms of land tenure, as they perceived the old system of communal ownership as “obstructive to the rights of individual ownership, and to its effective cultivation.” They saw private property in land as a precondition for increasing production of cotton. Individuals were to gain clear title in land that then could be bought, sold, rented, or mortgaged. These new property rights were quite a departure: In precolonial Berar, for example, relations between various social groups had been characterized by a “master-servant relationship of social status in the caste hierarchy” in which “the produce of the soil…was divided according to social ranking.” Individuals did not control particular pieces of land, but instead enjoyed rights to a share of the harvest. A British colonial official perceptively compared that “system, if system it may be called,” to “medieval Europe.” Once the British arrived on the scene, however, the land was surveyed, boundaries between various landowners clearly demarcated, and taxes on each parcel set. A class of khatedars was created who controlled the land, and in turn were made responsible for tax payments. By 1870, a British colonial official was able to report that the revolution was succeeding. In Berar “the occupant of land is its absolute proprietor.” Because the khatedars owned land, but no capital, they were dependent on moneylenders, to whom they now were able to mortgage the land they controlled. To work the land, these khatedars brought in sharecroppers, who in turn received their working capital from moneylenders. There and elsewhere in India, it was the large landowners, and moneylenders, who drew significant profit from the extension of cotton culture for export, unlike the vast majority of small landholders or landless peasants, who entered a morass of debt and poverty.50

  With private property in land spreading throughout the global countryside, landowners could now also be made responsible for the payment of taxes, to be paid in cash, which in turn encouraged the production of cash crops. In the Indian province of Maharashtra, as in Berar, British efforts to increase revenue and encourage peasants to produce for distant markets led to the weakening of the collective nature of villages. Individual peasants, instead of villages as a whole, were now responsible for taxes. Moneylenders thereby gained new power over peasants’ land and labor, as rural cultivators became dependent on advances to pay their taxes. In similar ways, in the Çukurova, the Ottoman state increasingly taxed local populations, and as a resu
lt, people had to engage in wage labor, or were forced to work on infrastructure projects. Cotton production benefited from their need for cash—just like in the United States—because “cotton is the one article,” observed the Cotton Department in Bombay in 1877, “that always commands the readiest and best sales.”51

  While Indian cotton growers usually held on to their land, unlike freedpeople in the United States, they had to draw on advances not just for tax payments, but also to purchase implements, cottonseeds, and even grains to hold them over until harvest time. New contract laws allowed these same moneylenders to enjoy a modest security when making advances to peasants. New property rights in fact favored the commercialization of agriculture not just because they made for easier land transactions, but also because they allowed for the infusion of capital, for which the land itself could now serve as collateral. Cultivators paid exorbitant rates of interest on these loans (30 percent annually was not unusual), and in turn they signed over their cotton crop to moneylenders, usually many months before the harvest—creating what one historian has called “debt bondage.”52

  Moneylenders—sowkars—had been deeply rooted in villages and had advanced credit to peasants for a long time before the arrival of the British. However, they had been embedded within a moral economy that had forced them to support peasants in years of poor harvests, a lifeline that increasingly disappeared in the more commercialized economy that British colonialism was building. While moneylenders could acquire modest wealth, and large landowners could benefit from the availability of capital (allowing them to focus on a cash crop with hired labor), small landholders, sharecroppers, and especially landless agricultural wage workers were most at risk. As prices for cotton continued to fall for nearly thirty years after the Civil War, this mass of “modernizing” farmers were thrust into more and more desperate circumstances; many of them would eventually perish in famines that swept the cotton-growing districts of India during the 1890s.53