Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  New infrastructures, new laws, and new property rights invaded the global countryside on the trails of strengthening and expanding states, making the kind of transformations possible that still had been unimaginable a few decades earlier. State involvement in cotton was furthered in many other ways. Perhaps the most comprehensive endeavor was the systematic effort to collect and disseminate information about all aspects of cotton agriculture. Huge compilations about climate and soil conditions, production trends, patterns of land ownership, seed qualities, and labor systems increasingly filled governmental office files, much of the same information that in previous decades merchants had laboriously gathered and transmitted via letters or circulars. In part this was a straightforward effort to systematize and appropriate indigenous knowledge. Observing Indian peasants’ efforts to grow cotton could yield useful information about best practices under specific environmental conditions, which could then be transferred to Africa or elsewhere. Similarly, specific strains of cotton could be collected and then sent to other parts of the world—indeed, governments enabled a vastly accelerated circulation of biological matter throughout the world. But more important than either of these two tasks was a very simple effort to take stock—to observe what was there in the social and natural world, to translate that information into numbers, force it into tables, compile it, and then send it out throughout the empire of cotton. These numbers clarified the “potential” of certain places and suggested certain policies to actualize that potential.54

  Throughout the cotton-growing world, governments embarked on such efforts. In 1866, the colonial government of India created the “Cotton Commissioner for the Central Provinces and the Berars,” a colonial bureaucrat who collected scrupulously detailed information on cotton-growing regions. Harry Rivett-Carnac, an intrepid agent of the cotton empire’s expansion, came to fill this position, traveling up and down Berar, living in a railroad carriage “with an attached horse box, so that I could, whenever necessary, ride off to some important point in the district where my presence was required,” all to “extend and improve the cultivation in order to increase the supply; then to undertake all necessary measures to assist the trade in getting these supplies to the coast in good order and without delay.” The revolutionary transformation of the world’s countryside rested on the shoulders of such government bureaucrats. By 1873, the Indian government expanded these activities and centralized them by creating a Fibres and Silk Branch that studied the production of cotton, among other fibers, throughout India in exacting detail.55

  Other countries followed suit. The United States in 1862 established a Department of Agriculture, which soon began to work on cotton. The department first collected statistical information, but soon broadened its activities by studying diseases affecting the cotton plant, trying to identify cotton strains particularly suited for particular environmental conditions, and breeding improved cotton strains. The department also applied itself to the pressing question of how cotton could be grown in western states such as Arizona. In 1897, Russia created an Administration of Agriculture and State Domains in its newly acquired Central Asian possessions, whose focus was cotton. In Egypt, the government provided detailed information about agricultural best practices to cotton farmers and by 1919 created a ministry of agriculture to expand on these efforts—a model later studied and appropriated by the Belgian colonial authorities in the Congo.56

  The collection of information went hand in hand with governmental efforts to recast cotton agriculture directly: British colonial officials distributed American cottonseeds to Indian peasants, worked on changing Indian cotton strains, and encouraged peasants to use new agricultural methods. The Egyptian Société Royale d’Agriculture experimented with model farms. Local peasants often resisted such projects, for not only was the planting of new cotton strains more labor-intensive, but it was also riskier because they had not been proven in the local climate. Few projects provided increased remuneration to offset these burdens, and it took powerful pressures to make them succeed.57

  Despite working in concert, powerful governments and capital-rich merchants and landowners did not always accomplish their grand projects. Government records are replete with efforts of rural cultivators to delay, or even halt, the reordering of their economies. In Dhawar in western India, for example, peasants retained a strong preference for growing indigenous varieties of cotton, and also for privileging food crops, despite sustained efforts by British colonial officials to introduce American varieties. Local varieties were much better adapted to the local climate, commanded a ready local market, and fit better into the household economies because they could be ginned locally.58 Sudanese peasants, as the Austrian consul general reported from Khartoum in 1877, refused to grow increasing amounts of cotton because “the native searches and finds his means of subsistence in much easier ways and in less taxing occupations than the difficult and relatively unprofitable cultivation of the soil.” In Iraq, a German observer remarked in 1919 that “the awakening of a greater willingness to labor is prevented by the presence of cultures in the country which provide the laborer effortlessly everything he needs for nourishment and for all other necessities”—an argument made by colonial officials the world over. In Burma, a British bureaucrat regretfully observed “the indifference shown to cotton-growing as a paying industry by the Burmese peasantry themselves, who look upon it as of very secondary importance and are not likely to take much interest in cotton while they can make, with much less trouble, handsome profits in their paddy crops.”59

  The significance of these struggles can perhaps best be seen in an area where production failed, despite decisive efforts: Australia. Starting in the early twentieth century, the British colonial administration made efforts to grow cotton in a continent with virtually unlimited supplies of land perfectly suited for cotton agriculture. Despite these efforts, cotton production expanded only slowly. The Adelaide Advertiser understood the reasons well: While abundant land was suitable for the growing of cotton, what was missing was cheap labor to plant, hoe, and harvest the crop. The chief difficulty facing any sort of expansion, reported the Advisory Committee of Science and Industry, “is the high cost of picking by hand.” Because of the shortage of cheap labor, and because white settlers had options far better than cotton, the committee observed in 1918 that “cotton growing in Australia is now practically extinct.” Theo Price, president of the New York Price-Campbell Cotton Picker Corporation, advising the government of Australia on such matters in 1917, understood the reasons perfectly: “Cotton culture is largely a matter of labor. Unless you can be assured of an abundant supply of labor, it is going to be difficult to cultivate cotton on anything like a large scale. I do not know what your immigration laws in Australia are but if you can bring the Chinese in…. I think [it may] be practicable to develop cotton growing rapidly.” “Labor conditions,” concluded the Sydney Evening News in 1920, “are not conducive to the establishment of the cotton industry on an economic basis.” Without access to abundant cheap labor, the cotton market could not be satiated.60

  Yet despite such setbacks, cotton capitalists sought labor, and ever more of it. In the cotton-growing regions of India, Brazil, and Egypt, as in the United States, the empire of cotton expanded as landowners, colonial bureaucrats, merchants, and local political elites such as the landlords of the American South were able to turn rural cultivators into producers and consumers of commodities.61 The precise arrangements found to mobilize their labor differed from place to place because they depended on the relative local, regional, or colonial distribution of social power.62 Industrial capitalism’s great strength derived exactly from its continued ability to connect to different systems of labor, and especially to draw on the extraordinary cheapness of production made possible by the incomplete transformation of the world of rural cultivators, a world in which family labor often remained uncompensated and subsistence was to some extent still produced within households. Local and regional circumstances encruste
d in traditions and the distribution of social power shaped the emerging labor arrangements. It mattered, for example, that cotton growers in the United States enjoyed access to the franchise for a little more than two decades (limiting the political power of landowners), just as it mattered that economies in Africa remained vibrant and largely independent of European capital. As a result, some rural cultivators turned into sharecroppers, others into renters, and again others into wage workers. Even as their power and traditional way of life was steadily stripped away, they still maintained some influence—indeed, they still had more sway over their daily lives than the millions of unskilled workers laboring in spinning and weaving mills.63

  Rural cultivators, landowners, merchants, and bureaucrats struggled over the shape of the new empire of cotton and the forms of labor within it, constrained by the startling imbalances of power in particular locales and the unequal relationship between various parts of the world. By the end of the nineteenth century, sharecropping and tenant farming had become the dominant mode of mobilizing labor for similar reasons that they dominated in the United States: Rural cultivators preferred the autonomy of working without day-to-day supervision, and they generally resisted being turned into wage workers. In Berar, sharecropping tenants worked the land of khatedar landowners, receiving their working capital from moneylenders. In Egypt, most of the crop was grown not by “hired labor,” but instead by “small occupiers themselves,” some sharecroppers, some owners, all of whom were able to draw upon the labor of their families; indeed, most cotton in Egypt was picked by children. In Brazil, sharecropping, along with small family farms, spread. On large estates tenant families “paid” for their land rent by giving a share of the crop to the owners. In Peru, landowners rented their land to cultivators in response to the closing of the trade in Chinese indentured workers in 1874 and their inability to attract peasants to work for wages. In the Çukurova, which had been largely unsettled before the advent of cotton agriculture toward the end of the nineteenth century, large-scale landholdings were in need of labor, and most of that labor was recruited through sharecropping arrangements along with some migrant wage laborers.64

  Wherever sharecropping prevailed, tenant farmers as well as small owner-operators became dependent on outside capital. In Sind, India, for example, peasants sold the crop to moneylenders as soon as they had sown it, to pay for loans they had received to enable them to focus on cotton in the first place, “in part being hard cash, part grain, and cotton seed, cloth, bajri, flour & c. for the family and workmen.” Moneylending merchants, there and elsewhere, often determined the farming decisions of peasants, since they were the ones who advanced seeds and implements. Interest rates between 12 and 24 percent were typical, but could skyrocket to as much as 150 percent annually. In the Çukurova sharecroppers drew on credit from landowners and merchants, who charged interest rates of 15 to 20 percent, and as a result, “Merchant capital, despite the limitations of labor scarcity, gained control over the land and the production process.”65

  Thus by the end of the nineteenth century most of the world’s cotton would be grown by cultivators who worked their own or rented land with family labor, but instead of subsistence or local production, these cultivators would be drawn into the global cotton market by a novel infusion of metropolitan capital. Sharecropping, crop liens, and powerful local merchants in control of capital would quickly become the new normal, shaping a countryside of laborers who were not enslaved, but not quite free either. These cotton farmers, the world over, would be deeply enmeshed in debt, vulnerable to world market fluctuations, generally poor, and subject to newly created vagrancy statutes and labor contracts designed to keep them on the land. They would be politically marginalized. And they would often be subject to extraeconomic coercion. Such a system was not without precedent. But now, supercharged with private capital and the state’s legal, administrative, and infrastructure advances, it began to structure the global cotton-growing countryside to an unprecedented extent.66

  A small but growing number of rural cultivators, however, turned into poorly paid wage workers in the world’s cotton fields. They were the least powerful. Often their descent into wage work had been the result of their worsening situation as highly indebted sharecroppers, tenants, or owners of small farms. Becoming a wage worker was a measure of their defeat. In Egypt, by 1907, nearly 40 percent of all agriculturalists had become landless laborers. In India as well, the number of wage workers on cotton lands tended to increase across the nineteenth century: In Khandesh, the greater orientation toward cotton agriculture and the attendant legal and social changes resulted in an ever-increasing percentage of land devoted to the white gold and a wave of proletarianization, so that by 1872 one in four adult men worked for wages.67

  In northern Mexico too, proletarianization swept the cotton fields. After 1884, landowners in La Laguna made use of new railroads and a new irrigation infrastructure to build a huge cotton-growing complex, “making it Mexico’s most important commercial agricultural area.” Tens of thousands of workers populated the fields, some residing on plantations and others hired by the week or month, as the rural population, many of them migrants from elsewhere in Mexico, increased from twenty thousand to two hundred thousand between 1880 and 1910, with an additional forty thousand migrant workers arriving during harvest time. As a result, the cotton farms expanded at breakneck speed, increasing production by a factor of five in the ten years before 1890, and then doubling in the next decade. Some of these haciendas were extremely large. The Luján family, for example, owned forty-five thousand hectares. These industrial outposts were often highly mechanized, sporting presses, gins, and cotton oil mills.68

  La Laguna cotton workers were as completely proletarianized as any in the world. Some plantations maintained a force of semiskilled workers, organized into gangs of eight to twelve, led by a foreman who took responsibility for cultivating specific lots. Some large haciendas had recruited several thousand such workers, who worked twelve hours a day six days a week. These workers joined the agricultural proletariat because they had lost their erstwhile communal access to the resources of the land due to the concentration of landownership. Many of these workers eventually arrived in La Laguna on private rail lines, packed like cattle in boxcars. Since there was no land available for these migrants, there was no possibility of engaging in subsistence agriculture.69

  Instead, “The landlord’s rule was law,” observes one historian, as haciendas enforced labor discipline with the help of uniformed private police forces, jails, and the “physical punishment” of workers. Some plantations even built a cepo de campaña—a specially made “cage…to punish troublesome workers.” Migrant workers were often supervised by armed guards stationed in the fields. The state helped to enforce labor discipline, with towns enacting “strict vagrancy laws to keep [those workers] outside the central area when they were not working.” This resort to physical coercion was widespread in the world’s cotton-growing areas and was important in the United States, Peru, Egypt, and elsewhere. Capitalism’s awe-inspiring advances continued to rest not just on a great variety of labor regimes, but on a staggering degree of violence.70

  Controlling labor: Armed guards secure cotton-picking labor in La Laguna, Mexico. (illustration credit 10.6)

  Within that reconstructed empire of cotton, the newly empowered states of Europe and North America were everywhere. After all, the capitalists’ project of accumulation by securing labor and the bureaucrats’ project of state formation by controlling populations evolved hand in hand.71 In their struggles at home, in the heartlands of industrial capitalism, cotton capitalists had learned that to transform the countryside, to transform society, they must reinforce their wealth with state power. Enabled by the new bureaucratic, legal, military, and infrastructural capacity of states, a capacity that had directly grown from the wages of war capitalism, manufacturers and merchants incorporated ever more people and ever more areas of the world into the global economy in genera
l, and in the production of cotton for world markets in particular.

  By the late nineteenth century, the dynamics of industrial capitalism had accelerated to such an extent that capitalists and statesmen made a concerted effort to speed up the collapse of noncapitalist social formations, or at the very least to connect them to the capitalist world market. To break the reluctance of people to embrace these new and revolutionary arrangements of work and social relations, they at times embraced coercion. They were unwilling to wait, as cotton manufacturer Henry Ashworth had put it so well in front of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce in 1863, “until price has done it.” For labor to be turned into a commodity, workers had to be “liberated” from the matrix of mutual obligations that had historically sustained them. They believed, at the same time, that land had to be “liberated” from noneconomic ties and made into a freely marketable commodity. This “liberation” rested ideologically on the naturalizing of certain historically specific ways of organizing production, and was thus enabled by economic, social, cultural, and even racial hierarchies it had helped to produce. Capitalists were the age’s true revolutionaries.72

  Rulers and bureaucrats supported this project because securing access to raw materials, including extracting cotton, became increasingly a touchstone of national politics. As they consolidated their states, the rearrangement of global economic connections in fact became a project they deliberately embarked upon—indeed, the late-nineteenth-century acceleration of global economic integration went hand in hand with a strengthening and consolidation of nation-states themselves. Powerful states, rulers, and bureaucrats depended on strong national industries, which in turn depended on raw materials and markets—for such industries produced wealth that could be taxed, and provided employment for millions, all of which in turn increased social stability and further strengthened the state.73