Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  Famine victims, probably 1899, India (illustration credit 11.12)

  Experiencing a new kind of uncertainty thanks to world market integration, and squeezed by moneylenders, cotton growers in India, Brazil, Mexico, and the southern United States took a desperate and dangerous step: They rebelled. In Egypt, agricultural workers led by Ahmed al-Shaqi had revolted as early as 1865. In India, the Deccan Riots of May and June 1875 targeted moneylenders and merchants—figures who symbolized the recasting of the countryside. During the 1873–74 Quebra Quilos revolt, Brazilian peasants, many of whom had just a few years earlier switched to cotton production, destroyed land records and refused to pay taxes they could no longer afford in the wake of the global fall of cotton prices. In 1899, widespread grain riots occurred again, often drawing in hundreds of people even in small villages. At the same time, cotton farmers in the southern United States also organized. They formed the Farmers Alliance and launched a political movement, Populism, demanding that the state relieve them of some of the economic pressures that had wreaked havoc in their lives, a movement that reared its head again during the first decade of the twentieth century when several hundred thousand farmers joined the Southern Cotton Association and the National Farmers’ Union. Cotton populism spread as far as Egypt, where Wady E. Medawar in 1900 formulated a program of agrarian reform much like the one advanced by cotton farmers in the United States, including cooperative societies, agricultural improvement associations, mechanisms to provide cheap credit to farmers, and an organization of rural cultivators that would interweave private and public initiative. Around the same time, Mexican cotton workers in La Laguna deployed “insubordination, theft, banditry” and other forms of collective action to improve their situation. Food shortages led to grain riots, brutally repressed by private armies backed by federal troops. Strategies of resistance varied according to political regime, ranging from creating cooperatives and running for political office in Texas to murdering moneylenders in India.44

  The rebellion of cotton cultivators at times had a significant impact on national politics, as in the United States, where Populists influenced the critical presidential election of 1896 and forced a greater presence of the state in the cotton trade, but also in Mexico, where they played an important role in the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s. But the integration of many areas of the world into the global cotton empire also made “cotton nationalism” a major theme in twentieth-century anticolonial struggles. Most prominently, Indian nationalists invoked their country’s recast role in the global cotton economy as one of the most damaging effects of colonialism, and envisaged a postcolonial economy in which India would become again a major cotton power.45

  In future decades, these movements would revolutionize the empire of cotton once again. But before this happened, the powerful new combination of manufacturers and imperial statesmen who had emerged after the American Civil War furthered the integration of the global cotton-producing countryside in ever more parts of the world, including Korea, Central Asia, and Africa. The tentacles of the empire of cotton spread ever farther. And that imperial expansion, in often surprising ways, would also come to influence the postcolonial and even postcapitalist cotton industry, and with it twentieth-century global capitalism.

  Chapter Twelve

  The New Cotton Imperialism

  New frontiers: Cotton expedition to Togo. Members of the expedition that introduced American cotton-growing methods into Togo, including technical experts from Tuskegee Institute, celebrate their first harvest by posing with three bales of cotton, 1901. From left to right are the chief of Gyeasekang; unidentified; Akpanya von Boem, a chief; John Robinson (from Tuskegee); Lieutenant Smend; Waldermeer Horn, the vice governor of Togo; unidentified; James N. Calloway (from Tuskegee); and Allen Burks (from Tuskegee). (illustration credit 12.1)

  In 1902, Sako Tsuneaki, the director of agricultural affairs in the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, whiled away the time on a steamer journey from China to Korea with Wakamatsu Tosaburo, a Japanese government official newly transferred from Shashi, China, to Mokpo, Korea. As they traveled across the Yellow Sea, the two discussed the prospects of expanding cotton agriculture in eastern Asia in order to feed the factories mushrooming around Osaka and elsewhere. In 1893, Japan had imported about 125 million pounds of raw cotton. By 1902 imports, mostly from India and the United States, had increased to 446 million pounds; by 1920, they would rise to more than 1 billion pounds. Perhaps, agricultural bureaucrat Sako suggested, Korean rural cultivators could be made to produce more cotton for Japanese factories. Wakamatsu concurred, observing that in Shashi, where he had just spent some years, a vibrant cotton-growing industry had emerged. Upon landing in Korea the two resolved to investigate local cotton-growing practices and to find ways to increase production.1

  Informed by his earlier observations in China, Wakamatsu began to experiment with various cotton strains on small model farms. Two years later, in 1904, members of the Japanese Imperial Diet (the parliament) and the House of Peers, as well as cotton manufacturers, created the Association for the Cultivation of Cotton in Korea, “following the example of the British Cotton Growing Association,” which had been created just two years earlier. The association systematized and expanded Wakamatsu’s efforts, focusing especially on the introduction of American cotton strains, building a cotton gin, and eventually presenting a report to the government of Korea with recommendations to increase cotton production. By 1906, Japanese spinners had established the Korean Cotton Corporation in Osaka with a branch office in Mokpo, providing loans to Korean rural cultivators who mortgaged their cotton crops to the company. Expanding their activities rapidly, the Japanese spinners gained “control over much of the raw cotton produced in the peninsula’s southern cotton belt.” They were aided in this project by the many agents sent into the Korean countryside by Japanese cotton merchants to purchase the white gold.2

  When Japan began its occupation of Korea in 1910, the new colonial government took steps to further expand cotton production. In March 1912, “the Governor-General issued…an instruction to the Provincial Governments of the southern part…concerning encouragement of the planting of upland cotton.” Both Japanese cotton capitalists and imperial administrators worried that Japan’s dependence on cotton imports might endanger the growth of its manufacturing industry. They especially hoped to disentangle themselves from the British Empire, given that by 1909, 62 percent of Japanese cotton imports arrived from India.3

  Cotton from colonial Korea, and from Japan’s other colonial possessions, Manchuria and Taiwan, was one potential solution. Korean farmers had traditionally produced cotton alongside other crops such as beans and vegetables on their smallholdings, often in the same fields. Most of the fiber was consumed in the domestic manufacture of cloth. Japanese colonialists hoped to recast this indigenous cotton industry just like their British peers had done in India: by cultivating new lands, persuading farmers to convert more of their existing fields to cotton growing, conducting agricultural experiments to improve yields and quality, and providing state supervision of the selling of the crop. They drew upon the experiences of rival cotton powers: The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce had indeed investigated the cotton-growing efforts of the Germans in Togo, the French in French Soudan (modern-day Mali), and the British in the Sudan. Both the Association for the Cultivation of Cotton in Korea, founded in 1904, and the Cotton Cultivation Expansion Plan of 1912 borrowed significant elements from these foreign models.4

  These efforts bore fruit. Korean cotton exports to Japan increased from an annual average of 37 million pounds between 1904 and 1908 to 165 million pounds between 1916 and 1920. Cotton exports from Japanese-controlled Kwantung province in China provided another 4.1 million pounds. The production of cotton from American seeds increased at a particularly rapid rate. By 1915, 263,069 Korean cultivators grew 37 million pounds. Thanks to the efforts of the colonial state, the Japanese cotton industry had domesticated a small but gr
owing colonial cotton complex.5

  Japanese colonial officials with Korean cotton growers in a field, c. 1912 (illustration credit 12.2)

  Stories like this could be told about many parts of the world. As states took on an ever more important role in constituting the new systems of labor that came to characterize the cotton-growing countryside after 1865, they also secured vast new territories on which cotton could be grown, dominating them militarily, politically, and bureaucratically. Sovereignty over labor, they all understood, became linked to territorial control. By the late nineteenth century contemporary observers treated as commonplace that the transition to cotton production for world markets rested most fundamentally on that domination of territory by newly empowered imperial states. Having lived through the grand defeat of slavery in the American South and experiencing often insurmountable hurdles to transform the global countryside, cotton manufacturers in particular, concerned with continuous access to inexpensive cotton and markets, pressured their governments to exert more control over ever more extensive cotton-growing lands.

  The consolidation of states in the United States, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, and elsewhere, as well as the expansion of imperial control over colonial territories in Korea, western Africa, and Central Asia, significantly extended the reach of the cotton empire in the decades after the American Civil War. Conquest and control, however, did not by itself produce cotton. Expansion demanded incorporation strategies, and state bureaucrats and capitalists systematically applied lessons learned from the mobilization of cotton-growing workers in the United States after emancipation. In some cases, they removed native populations to make land available for cotton-growing settlers, as in eastern Africa. But more typically in the period after the American Civil War, they folded their new subjects into the global cotton-growing complex by constructing infrastructure, creating new labor regimes, and recasting local social structures. This happened in western Anatolia, Central Asia, and western as well as central Africa. This metamorphosis frequently rested on coercion and violence, but not on enslavement. And its particular pace and extent varied with the particular ways these societies had been organized before incorporation and with the relative capacity of colonizing states. Indeed, integration into the global economy sometimes failed or bogged down when imperial subjects successfully retained control of their land and their labor.6

  These exceptions, however, prove the rule: In most cases, emancipation and the emergence of a new imperialism went hand in hand. Slavery became free labor, local sovereignties gave way to nation-states and empires, mule and camel trails to railroads, and war capitalism to scientific agricultural reform, carried out by eager colonial agents drawing on the lessons learned from industrial capitalism. States brought military domination and pacification, infrastructure and property rights in land. And as these states constituted new far-reaching global networks, global networks in turn fostered the strengthening of states.

  In the wake of the nineteenth century’s great struggles for emancipation, European cotton-consuming countries, the United States, and Japan moved decisively to control and exploit territories where cotton could be grown. This “cotton rush” of sorts reached its zenith at the turn of the century, when new imperial powers embraced it with as much zeal as the older colonial states had done during the Civil War. The reasons were straightforward: While the ability of cotton capitalists to return African-American workers to the growing of cotton for world markets by the 1870s had taken some pressure off the world’s countryside, long-established concerns among cotton manufacturers and statesmen about secure and inexpensive cotton supplies were amplified by the late nineteenth century.

  As cotton prices rose for the first time in a quarter century—between 1898 and 1913 by 121 percent—European and Japanese manufacturers expressed concerns that the United States would consume increasing percentages of the cotton harvested on its fields in its own factories, leading to shortages and even higher prices. These concerns were further amplified by the temporarily successful efforts by some speculators to “corner” the market and force higher prices by manipulating future and spot transactions on the newly established cotton exchanges. Once these corners failed, a wave of “cotton populism” swept the southern countryside of the United States, with cotton growers determined to collectively enable higher prices for their crops. The boll weevil, an agricultural pest that had begun to spread on American cotton farms in 1892, also seemed to threaten cotton production, and there were pressures on demand as well with cotton factories spreading to new areas of the world. British manufacturers, for example, observed that continental Europeans now consumed one-third of the entire U.S. cotton harvest, which was more than British factories. “One shudders,” warned British author Edmund D. Morel, “to contemplate the consequences which would ensue if anything should again prevent Lancashire from obtaining her share of the cotton crop of America.” Rising prices, reported an association of German industrialists, meant a huge sacrifice for the hundreds of thousands of workers employed in German cotton factories. So great was the concern for world cotton supplies at the turn of the century that some modern-day scholars have called this moment a “second cotton famine.”7

  At the same time, the general notion of “raw material independence” became an increasingly important political goal for policy makers and capitalists in Europe and Japan. The idea of securing cotton on lands controlled by imperial states gained traction. As a result, the global cotton “commodity frontier” was pushed into even more numerous areas of the world, intensifying what one historian has so aptly termed “the great land rush.”8

  The expansion of the empire of cotton, as we know, was hardly a new development. Yet the effort at its more “national” organization was a true departure, considering how deeply the cotton industry had been embedded within global trade networks that crossed national and imperial boundaries, and that rested on the connections crafted by merchants. As industrial capital, not merchant capital, became ever more important to states, and as these states became ever more important to national capitalists, the old merchant-dominated order became less relevant, and statesmen and manufacturers increasingly perceived it as potentially threatening to their power, their wealth, and their ability to maintain social stability.

  Perhaps most remarkable for its audacity was Russia’s attempt to secure “domestic” supplies of the white gold. Since the early 1800s, farsighted government bureaucrats, along with a group of merchants and manufacturers, had imagined Transcaucasia and Central Asia as a source of raw cotton to “prevent all those negative consequences that might arise due to long factory stoppages,” as manufacturer Aleksandr Shipov argued. The Russian commander in chief in the Caucasus, Baron G. V. Rosen, had envisaged as early as 1833 that the cotton growers there “would be our Negroes.” Yet as late as 1857, such efforts reaped few rewards—Central Asian cotton supplied only 6.5 percent of the needs of the Russian industry.9

  During the 1860s, however, efforts to promote Central Asian cotton exploded, as a small group of cotton mill owners, united in the Central Asian Trading Association, met in Moscow to find ways to grow more cotton for Russian factories. Encouraged by a tripling of prices during the U.S. Civil War, cotton exports from Central Asia to Russia increased nearly fivefold to 24 million pounds between 1861 and 1864. In a key moment in 1865, Russia captured Tashkent and the Central Asian khanate of Khokand, which were to become important cotton-growing areas in the future. Manufacturers began to pressure the Russian government to further its acquisition of Central Asian territories. In 1869 the Russian Industrial Society, which brought together a wide variety of entrepreneurs, published numerous petitions agitating for deepening Russia’s intervention in Central Asia in order to create a market for Russian goods and a source for cotton fibers. The government responded favorably, in part because of its geostrategic desire to counter British moves in Central Asia, but also because the import of cotton weighed heavily on its balance of trade. By 1890, raw cotton c
onstituted 20 percent of the value of all Russian imports. The capture of Central Asian territories only whetted the appetite of Russian entrepreneurs. In 1904, Russian industrialists, among them textile manufacturer Baron Andrei L’vovich Knoop, the son of Ludwig Knoop, whom we encountered earlier as a Bremen merchant moving to Russia, created the Commission to Develop Russian Cotton Growing to investigate further possibilities for the expansion of cotton agriculture in Central Asia.10

  Central Asian cotton, as a result, was launched on a path of rapid state-backed expansion, similar to what happened simultaneously in India. After the consolidation of Russian rule over Central Asia in the 1860s and 1870s, the imperial government, at the urging of Russian cotton capitalists, systematically worked to increase cotton production. In 1871, Russian colonial bureaucrat Shtaba L. Kostenko commanded that “the aim of all of our efforts has to be the striving to remove from our inner markets the American cotton and to replace it with our own, Central Asian one.” To make this possible, the colonial administration undertook large-scale infrastructure projects, such as the building of railroads. In remote areas it had taken up to six months to transport cotton by camel to the nearest railroad station; now the same journey took two days. The government sponsored seed plantations and sent agronomists to help farmers improve agricultural techniques. In addition, the government began planning large-scale irrigation projects and sent bureaucrats to the United States to study American cotton growing. They eventually procured American cottonseeds and distributed them to local peasants; by the late 1880s more than half of the Central Asian cotton crop derived from these seeds. At the same time, large Russian cotton manufacturers erected cotton gins in Turkestan and sent out agents who advanced credit to local growers on the security of their future crop.11