Empire of Cotton
Page 43
As time went on, the colonial state and Russian capitalists increasingly involved themselves in the production process itself, something they had previously avoided. Despite persistent conflicts between the state, which was bent on integrating the territory, and capitalists, who were set on maximizing profits, such efforts resulted in a dramatic increase in the area of cotton sown. In Turkestan, for example, the size of cotton land increased by approximately forty-eight times in the five decades after 1870. As early as the 1880s, growers in Turkestan produced a quarter of all cotton used in Russian cotton factories, and more than half by 1909, enough for one historian to call the province “the cotton colony of Russian capitalism.” The state protected its colonial cotton production by levying duties on raw cotton imports, which by 1905 had risen to about 43 percent of the value of cotton. In 1902, a British traveler observed that “the growing of cotton…has now become the main occupation of the inhabitants of all the Central Asian Khanates.” And by the early 1920s, the Central Asian city of Khokand, a center of the cotton trade, came to be called “cottonopolis.” Russia had turned itself into one of the most important cotton-growing countries in the world, ranking fifth behind the United States, India, China, and Egypt.12
The radical changes that the Russian state and Russian and Central Asian capitalists were able to effect led others to look with envy at their success. In 1902, German economist August Etienne remarked with genuine admiration that Russia “approaches with rapid steps inexorably its objective to make the Russian cotton industry independent from America.” Russia deserved praise, since “with its Asiatic cotton culture it has shown the rest of Europe, what energetic will and well planned cooperation between national and private forces can do to solve the cotton question.” A new cotton imperialism had begun to take shape.13
Other imperial powers soon embarked upon their own ventures. They had concluded, with Etienne, that “in the overseas program of the European peoples, the encouragement of cotton culture must take a leading role, with the explicit goal to emancipate oneself from America.”14 Invoking memories of the U.S. Civil War, Etienne employed arguments for the state’s support of national capitalists that were spreading like wildfire through European capitals. States, after all, could speed up the commercialization of potential cotton-growing areas of the world in ways beyond the reach of individual merchants and masters.15
As a result, cotton and colonial expansion went hand in hand, not only for Russia and Japan, which desperately tried to catch up in the grand game of securing raw materials for domestic industries, but also for expansionist stalwarts like Great Britain, France, and the United States, as well as marginal imperial powers such as Portugal, Germany, Belgium, and Italy.16
Everywhere, European manufacturers, at times supported by textile workers and their unions, were the driving force behind this recasting, pressuring their governments to draw more cotton out of various colonial possessions in Asia and Africa. In Britain, such imperial cotton projects had the longest history—recall the enormous range of activities that the Manchester Cotton Supply Association had embarked upon. After the U.S. Civil War, imperial cotton projects continued, although at a lower level, having become less essential as American cotton rushed back onto global markets. But the desire for colonial cotton reached again fever pitch around the turn of the century as manufacturing volume and prices rose and new competitors emerged. In 1901, the Oldham Textile Employers’ Association observed that “the importance…[of] the Growth of Cotton within the limits of the Empire…cannot be over-estimated.” A year later, British cotton manufacturers founded the British Cotton Growing Association in the cotton metropolis of Manchester, funded by both manufacturers and textile workers’ unions. The association believed that “all the cotton Lancashire requires can be grown within the limits of the Empire.” The Oldham Master Cotton Spinners’ Association agreed: “an important commercial nation like our own ought not to be dependent on other countries for the supply of cotton which might possibly be grown within the limits of the empire.” By 1916, the Empire Cotton Growing Association joined in the struggle for colonial cotton—though, unlike the British Cotton Growing Association, under the auspices of the government itself. This government institution devoted itself to raising cotton in the colonies, as “it is essential for the future prosperity of the country and for the welfare of the Colonies, that cotton growing should be developed as rapidly as possible in all suitable parts of the Empire.” As late as 1924, the parliamentary secretary of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, John Harris, reported that a British government commission was investigating “to see what steps can be taken to encourage the negroes of the British Empire to grow cotton in such a volume as to gradually free us from the danger of short supply.”17
In France, cotton manufacturers led the charge for colonial cotton as well. These efforts, as elsewhere, had begun during the American Civil War years, and survived into the postwar decades. In 1867, Mulhouse cotton manufacturer Frédéric Engel-Dollfus agitated for colonial cotton, and in 1889 Louis Faidherbe, a French colonial official with extensive experience in Guadeloupe, Algeria, and Senegal, sounded the same note that “the culture of cotton is the most powerful element in the success of colonization.” By the turn of the century, French colonial cotton projects took on increasing urgency: In 1903 French textile entrepreneurs founded the Association Cotonnière Coloniale so as to encourage colonial cotton production and promote “the independence of our national cotton industry.”18
Cotton manufacturers in other parts of Europe followed suit. Belgian manufacturers in 1901 created the Association Cotonnière de Belgique, which by 1903 had begun to push for cotton growing in the Belgian Congo, including shortly thereafter bringing American cotton planters from Texas to Central Africa. In 1904, Portuguese bureaucrats and manufacturers founded a colonial cotton-growing association along the lines of the British Cotton Growing Association. Italian colonialists, upon the urging of manufacturers organized in the Italian Colonial Cotton Association, focused on expanding cotton production in Italian-controlled Eritrea.
Louis Faidherbe, French colonial official (illustration credit 12.3)
Despite the United States’ domination of cotton export markets, even there cotton manufacturers pressured for a territorial expansion of cotton production. Such agitation had a long history, and the connection between territorial expansion and cotton growing had been an important strand of discussions among northern economic elites in the antebellum decades. Massachusetts cotton manufacturer Edward Atkinson, an enthusiastic believer in what he called “free labor cotton,” had pointed out during the 1860s the great potential for expanded cotton production in Texas, called upon the government to remove native peoples from areas that could be used for cotton agriculture, and pushed for the construction of railroads to transport cotton to the coast. These sentiments became ever more prominent after the Civil War. In 1868, New England manufacturers, including Atkinson, in cooperation with southern cotton planters, created the National Association of Cotton Manufacturers and Planters, which sought to promote the expansion of cotton agriculture, primarily in Mississippi and Texas, a project strikingly similar to those of Europe’s imperial elites. In the early twentieth century, the New England Cotton Manufacturers’ Association continued to press for territorial expansion of cotton agriculture.19 To make such expansion feasible, they sought the twin elements of state-sponsored infrastructure projects, such as the building of levees on the Mississippi, and “the introduction of a working population into the Cotton States.”20
The first wave of this incorporation focused on the territorial expansion of cotton growing in parts of the world that already supplied the white gold to global markets. As we have seen, after the Civil War, Britain steadily strengthened its colonial control in India. Tellingly, when the nizam of Hyderabad requested in 1876 that Berar be returned to his control, the British refused, even though the nizam’s government communicated clearl
y to Manchester interests that it was “keenly aware of the importance of developing the cultivation of cotton in these dominions, and in the future I shall gladly give my attention to fostering the increase of this production.” Egypt, deeply enmeshed in the global cotton economy, by 1882 was transformed into a British colony, alleviating concerns among manufacturers about the “most damaging effect” created by the “unfortunate embroglio in Egypt”—that state’s default on its international debt. Territorial control in Egypt went hand in hand with the expansion of cotton agriculture. In 1861, cotton was grown on 259,513 acres, fifty years later on 1,767,678 acres. The land for this expansion came partly from the rededication of wheat fields, but also from irrigating formerly unproductive lands now made accessible to commercial agriculture by the construction of roads and railways. By 1899 the Egyptian Delta Railways Company transported 245 million pounds of cotton, 40 percent of the entire annual harvest. And by 1902 the dams at Aswan and Asyut enabled a year-round supply of water in the cotton-growing areas.21
But by the early twentieth century, new cotton-growing areas of the world also saw an enormous growth of their output. There was an extension of cotton agriculture in the Ottoman Empire’s Çukurova, for example, where land once used by nomadic tribes for the herding of animals was increasingly turned into cotton farms. By 1908, a quarter of its cultivatable land was used for cotton. In Brazil, cotton cultivation had expanded during the cotton boom of the 1860s into Ceará, where subsistence farmers now became ever more involved in production for world markets. By 1921–22, 1.4 million acres of land were under cotton cultivation, and by the 1930s Brazil had become the world’s fourth most important cotton grower, thanks to state support in the form of infrastructure construction and institution building, such as the creation of the Instituto Agronômico de Campinas.22
In other older cotton-growing areas, commercial production ex-panded as well. In Peru, ever more land was rededicated to cotton agriculture, and as a result cotton exports increased dramatically, from an annual average of 0.71 million pounds in the years between 1861 and 1865 to an annual average of 59 million pounds between 1916 and 1920. A few thousand miles to the South, in Argentina, the government made great efforts to enable the industrializing nation to become self-sufficient in raw cotton, part of a larger program of import-substitution growth.23
Of the greatest magnitude, however, in terms of additional output of cotton was the further extension of the U.S. cotton complex. Its expansion had been in some ways comparable to that of Russia—state agents and military units had captured contiguous territory and sponsored the construction of new infrastructures to make it accessible. As in Russia, the state would later drain wastelands, contain waterways, and build irrigation infrastructures. Yet while Russia mobilized Central Asian cultivators and forcefully settled nomads to grow cotton (as had also been the case in the Ottoman Empire’s Çukurova), the United States removed most indigenous inhabitants from cotton-growing soils as it encouraged citizens from farther east to move in, combining, as historian John C. Weaver has put it, “defiant private initiative” with “the ordered, state-backed certainties of property rights.”24
Capturing and incorporating new territories as a strategy to increase cotton production for world markets was thus not just significant in the context of European colonial expansion. The U.S. cotton empire expanded at a rapid clip and entered entirely new territories. Before the Civil War, in 1860, 5,386,897 bales of cotton had been produced in the United States, but in 1920 production had increased two and a half times, to 13,429,000 bales, and the territory used for cotton grew rapidly. Twenty-two million acres of additional land was plowed under, or a little more than the total area of the state of South Carolina, or that of the nation of Portugal.25
In the United States, the expansion of land under cotton occurred in two distinct ways. Cotton production expanded into the remoter hinterlands of older American cotton states such as Georgia and the Carolinas, now made accessible by railroads, where white upcountry farmers began growing much larger quantities. In the South Atlantic states, annual production, for example, increased by a factor of 3.1 between 1860 and 1920. In Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, by contrast, annual cotton production stayed level until the end of the century, and declined by about 25 percent in 1920, due to the exhaustion of cotton soils and the emergence of more productive cotton-growing areas farther west. Yet even despite the tired soil, cotton production dramatically expanded in some areas, such as in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, where large numbers of African Americans cultivated cotton, enabled by new railroads, canals, and levees. As a result, by 1900, “one of the most highly specialized cotton producing areas in the world” emerged. The most dramatic expansion of cotton agriculture, however, occurred farther to the west. In Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas, the production of cotton exploded from 1,576,594 bales in 1860 to 7,283,000 bales in 1920—a factor of 4.6 in the half century after the U.S. Civil War. By far the most important expansion took place in Texas, a state whose farmers had only produced 431,463 bales of cotton in 1860, but produced ten times as many, 4,345,000 bales, in 1920. Indeed, the cotton growth of 1920 in Texas alone equaled about 80 percent of that of the entire South in 1860. And by the late 1910s and early 1920s, vast investments in irrigation infrastructure by the federal government enabled a further extension of cotton agriculture into the arid lands of Arizona and California.26
Territorial expansion—“the great land rush”—was thus crucial to the position of the United States within the empire of cotton, paralleling developments in other parts of the world. Most of these new cotton-growing territories had been captured from Mexico in 1848, and without their acquisition, Mexico, not the United States, might have been the world’s premier cotton producer by the early twentieth century.
The incorporation of these territories relied as much on infrastructure advances as it did on land grabs. As with India and Africa, cotton bloomed alongside the railroad. There were no railroads in Oklahoma before the mid-1880s, but by 1919, 6,534 miles of railroad crisscrossed the state. In Texas, there were 711 miles of railroad in 1870, but 16,113 miles in 1919, including into the fertile lands of the blackland prairie, which the Houston and Texas Central had connected to Dallas in 1872. Once it had done so, cotton production exploded: Dallas County cultivators grew 3,834 bales of cotton in 1870 but 21,649 bales in 1880—an increase of 465 percent in only one decade.27
The arrival of cotton growers in most cases displaced the indigenous inhabitants. In the antebellum decades, native peoples who had inhabited the cotton-growing territories of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi had been pushed farther west. Now pressure resumed. In October 1865, the Kiowa and Comanche were forced to give up land in central Texas, west Kansas, and eastern New Mexico—land that was turned, among other things, into cotton plantations. Shortly thereafter, many of the Texas plains Indians were pushed into reservations in Oklahoma, and so were the last southwestern Indians during the Red River War of 1874 and 1875, thereby freeing up further land for cotton growing.28
Yet Oklahoma ultimately provided little protection for these Native Americans. By the 1880s, the old Oklahoma and Indian territories came under pressure from white settlers who hoped to displace the native population from the most fertile lands. In 1889 the U.S. government gave in and paid the Creeks and Seminoles to surrender claims to land in the center of Oklahoma. Over the next few years, further “land runs” in various parts of Oklahoma put ever more pressure on native people. Many white settlers began to grow cotton, as Oklahoma’s fertile soil and its infrastructural opening to the world market, thanks to railroad construction, made such expansion a profitable proposition. By 1907, when Oklahoma became a state, cotton was grown on more than 2 million acres and production had reached 862,000 bales, compared to 425 bales grown on 1,109 acres in 1890. Cleveland County, to cite just one example, produced thirty-nine bales of cotton in 1890, but 11,554 bales in 1909, on land that was once the home of the Quapaw. Creek and S
eminole Indians later lived there, tribes that had been forced to leave the southeastern parts of the United States during the late 1820s and 1830s where their lands once before had been turned into cotton plantations. Cotton planters chased America’s native peoples from their land, though eventually they hired some of them to work on cotton plantations. In Oklahoma, as elsewhere, the dispossession of America’s native people and the expansion of cotton-growing territories went hand in hand—state coercion, indeed, was central to the further expansion of the empire of cotton.29
The territorial expansion of the empire of cotton in the United States, Central Asia, Egypt, and Korea, among other places, was vast. Yet statesmen and capitalists pushed the cotton frontier ever further, and Africa, in particular, became the focus of European efforts. These European efforts in fact were directly related to the United States’ and Russia’s successful expansion of their respective cotton empires, and focused on the goal of emancipating themselves from the United States’ cotton supply. Africa, in other words, was to be the “South” and “West” of Europe—a supplier of raw materials, labor, and agricultural commodities that were deemed necessary to confront the global challenge of a rising United States with its seemingly limitless supplies of industrial raw materials, and also of a Russia whose very territorial extent embodied a rising “threat.”30 Imperial efforts at cotton growing in Africa were the cutting edge of the cotton empire’s new “national” constitution.
Take Germany, for example. In the last decade of the nineteenth century this latecomer to colonialism engaged in frantic efforts to secure cotton from its African possessions. This was not surprising considering that by 1900 the German cotton industry was the most significant on the European continent and, indeed, the third largest in the world. Despite significant productivity increases, the number of workers directly engaged in cotton spinning and weaving had increased to nearly four hundred thousand, with an estimated one in eight German industrial workers so employed by 1913, making the “healthy development of our cotton industry a vital question for our national economy.” The value of their output was the most considerable of all domestic industries and constituted the nation’s most important export product. In 1897, the German cotton industry produced goods valued at 1 billion marks, or about 36 percent more than those of the next largest industry, coal, and 45 percent more than the industry that symbolized Germany’s economic miracle and all too often overshadows our historical imagination, the male-dominated iron and steel industry. And no other German industry was so reliant on other countries for its crucial raw material. Because all raw cotton came from abroad, it amounted to Germany’s costliest import. A full 1 billion pounds of cotton were imported into Germany in 1902. “King Cotton has become the most powerful ruler,” observed cotton manufacturer Karl E. Supf, “he has deeply affected the social conditions, yes, even entirely rearranged them.”31