by Sven Beckert
Soon the world was full of such Manchesters, as the growth of the cotton empire went along with its continued movement. The spatial arrangements of the global cotton industry—and with it, of capitalism—were in constant flux. Not only was cotton being grown in new parts of the world, but increasingly it was being spun, woven, and finished in new parts of the world as well. The days of a cotton empire led by the North Atlantic countries were numbered.
Most precipitous was the declining importance of cotton manufacturing in the United Kingdom. In 1860, 61 percent of the world’s mechanical spindles had turned there, but by 1900 that percentage had declined to 43 percent and by 1930 to 34 percent. Thanks to workers’ struggles for better working conditions, British machines also operated for fewer hours than machines elsewhere. They were also generally older, and thus their share of global output was even smaller, just 11 percent by 1932. The interwar years in particular were an “almost unmitigated disaster” for the British industry, once the workshop of the world, with cotton textiles its leading export. Shipments to Asia, Britain’s most important market, collapsed after World War I, with exports to India declining by 46 percent from prewar years, to the Dutch East Indies by 55 percent, and to China by 59 percent. As a result, the British industry began its painful dissolution not simply in relative terms in a growing world economy, but eventually in real losses: 43 percent of all British looms disappeared between 1919 and 1939, along with 41 percent of its mule spindles between 1926 and 1938, and the number of cotton workers fell by 45 percent between 1920 and 1939.5
As Britain’s industry began to lose its global predominance, continental Europe and the United States retained until 1930 their global share of cotton spindles, at 30 and 20 percent respectively. Yet the reign of these North Atlantic countries in the cotton empire would eventually be cut short by the slower but inexorable rise of the mechanized cotton industry in the vast global South. Indeed, by the 1920s the cotton factories of New England “experienced a collapse…even more thorough-going” then the ones of old England. Among the usurpers, Japan was by far the most impressive. In 1880 the country had a mere eight thousand cotton spindles. By 1930, Japan put 7 million spindles in motion, at which point its share of spindles globally was 4.3 percent, just behind Germany (6.7 percent), France (6.2 percent), and Russia (4.6 percent). Japan by 1920 counted only 6.7 percent as many spindles as Great Britain, but by 1937 that number had skyrocketed to 32 percent. It was also the largest investor in cotton production in China, where the industry expanded rapidly from just under a million spindles in 1908 to nearly 4 million in 1930. India was in a similar position, although it started from a slightly stronger base: from 1.6 million spindles in 1877, rising to nearly 9 million in 1930. By the twentieth century, the Asian cotton industry had turned into the world’s fastest-growing, as the world’s cotton industry returned to where it had largely originated.6
Cotton, while becoming clearly less important to the global economy in an age of vast steel mills, chemical plants, and electrical machinery industries, went through a significant geographic shift, foreshadowing, as it had a century before, the next phase of global capitalism. While many mid-nineteenth-century Europeans had persuaded themselves that the wonders of modern industry were reserved to them because of such unchangeable factors as the local climate and geography, their superior religious beliefs and “culture,” or even their “racial” characteristics, the geographic shifts of the world’s first modern industry showed anyone willing to see that essentializing the particular global geography of a particular moment in the history of capitalism was nothing but a self-serving justification for global inequality. The history of the empire of cotton, in fact, proved them wrong.
This rise of cotton manufacturers in the global South resulted from a shift in the balance of social power in both the heartland of industrial capitalism and its periphery. Industrial capitalism had altered class structures not only in Europe and North America, but also in the global South, which witnessed the rise of new inequalities in state strength and wealth. Two groups played a decisive role in this century-long story: workers in Europe and the northeastern United States, and aspiring cotton capitalists in the global South. They contributed independently to a pair of mutually reinforcing processes: nationalizing social conflicts and strengthening states. As workers organized across the United States and Europe, their collective action increased labor costs. This made low-wage producers elsewhere competitive on global markets, even though those operations were often less efficient. At the same time, capitalists in the global South supported state policies conducive to their own project of domestic industrialization. They could also draw on a pool of low-wage workers, many of whom had been displaced by the rapid transformation of the countryside. This combination of huge wage differentials and the construction of activist states shifted the geography of global cotton manufacturing more rapidly than most observers thought possible. In short, assertive northern workers and politically sophisticated southern capitalists changed the shape of the empire of cotton, foreshadowing the new global division of labor so familiar today.7
Factory consumption of all kinds of cotton, in millions of running bales (illustration credit 13.2)
As collective action of cotton workers in Europe and New England began to affect the global geography of cotton manufacturing, their efforts mirrored an equally profound shift of the nineteenth century: the individual and collective action of slaves and freedpeople, whose struggles had shifted the geography of cotton growing. Of course, cotton manufacturing workers had acted collectively before the 1860s. But in the late nineteenth century and thereafter, strikes, unions, and working-class political parties mushroomed under the increasingly warm light of the nation-state, and succeeded in creating much-improved conditions for workers.
The Massachusetts city of Fall River, one of the United States’ most important cotton manufacturing centers, is but one of many examples. Early in the nineteenth century, easy access to waterpower had attracted the attention of entrepreneurs to the region. In 1813, Dexter Wheeler and his cousin David Anthony opened the “Fall River Manufactory,” followed by numerous similar ventures. By 1837, the city boasted ten cotton mills feeding on a workforce of sons and daughters from the local countryside. Helped by easy shipping access to New York markets, Fall River soon rose to become the nation’s leading producer of printed cotton cloth. From 1865 to 1880, the number of factories in Fall River increased fivefold; at the industry’s peak, around 1920, the city counted 111 mills, one-eighth of the United States’ total spinning capacity, and a textile workforce of some thirty thousand people, nearly as many as in Ahmedabad.8
Workers in Fall River consistently organized to improve their wages and working conditions. Thirteen major strikes occurred between 1848 and 1904. Some, like the 1865 mule spinners’ strike, involved only one craft’s struggle for higher wages; others, like the 1904 strike, shut down almost every mill in the city for months. In fact, Fall River workers’ mounting militancy eventually impelled the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor to launch a formal investigation into the question posed by an 1881 letter from a Massachusetts state representative: “Why is it that the working people of Fall River are in constant turmoil?”9
Workers’ militancy was in part driven by the conditions in which they worked and lived. Cotton mills, just as in Ellen Hootton’s time a century earlier, remained noisy, polluted, and dangerous places. Factories, now often powered by steam instead of water, had increased in size and often combined spinning and weaving operations. The movements of bobbins and shuttles, power transmission belts, and metal parts assaulted the ears of children, women, and men, cotton dust filled the air and their lungs, and all too often pieces of clothing, hair, or limbs got stuck in machines, grotesquely injuring workers. The workday was harshly regimented and seemingly unending, providing spinners and weavers with little time off. The effects of such work regimes continued to be profound: Among the textile workers of the German city of A
achen, for example, an estimated half of all children died before celebrating their first birthday, an unusually high rate of child mortality. Even during relatively prosperous times, workers suffered subsistence wages and wretched, congested housing. An 1875 Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor investigation, for example, found one unskilled laborer in Fall River with a family of seven living on a yearly salary of $395.20—below subsistence levels—supplemented by the wages of his twelve-year-old daughter who worked beside him in the mill. His family lived in an “out of repair” five-room tenement “in the worst part of the city.” They were in debt, and the only ray of hope was that the next summer would see another child coming of age to send into the mills alongside father and daughter.10
In response, Fall River’s cotton workers organized. Bolstered by the transplanted cultures of working-class solidarity and militancy brought across the Atlantic by British workers, their often militant strikes allowed them to score a number of pathbreaking victories. In 1866, the mule spinners’ union led a successful citywide drive for a ten-hour workday. In 1886, that same union secured a wide-ranging agreement to set the wages of New Bedford, Fall River, and Lawrence spinners on a “sliding scale” based on the price of cotton measured against the selling price of print cloth. In the fallout of the citywide 1904 strike, Fall River mills also accepted the demands of weavers’ unions for a sliding scale wage agreement. As early as the 1890s, the city’s skilled textile workers began taking an interest in national union organization, and over the next half a century Fall River workers joined or created various regional labor organizations.11
Moreover, Fall River’s cotton workers along with their New England counterparts succeeded in improving their wages and working conditions, at least in part because as citizens of the United States they enjoyed political influence. Most important, they translated their right to vote into improvements in the workplace. In Fall River and elsewhere, unions and strikes became factors in politics, as it was all but impossible for the government to ignore the demands of enfranchised and mobilized workers.
And Fall River’s story was far from exceptional. In France during the early twentieth century, the number of strikes among its approximately 165,000 cotton workers increased rapidly. In 1909, for example, a particularly strike-prone year, there were 198 such strikes with more than thirty thousand participants. Unions also became a growing force in French politics.12
Textile strike, 1934: Firestone Mill, Fall River (illustration credit 13.3)
In the German industry cotton workers as early as the 1840s had organized collectively. By the early twentieth century, about 25 percent of them were unionized, and in some areas, such as Saxony, the percentage was even higher. These workers were unusually political—in Saxony’s cotton industry, for example, “the socialists rule almost unchallenged.” One of German social democracy’s greatest figures, August Bebel, was elected to the Reichstag with the votes of the weavers of Glauchau-Meerane, and the 1869 founding of the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (SPD) had strong support in the textile areas of Saxony and Thuringia.13
In Russia, nearly half a million cotton textile workers came to play a key political role as well, especially during the revolutionary upheavals of 1905 and 1918–19, building on many decades of union activities and strikes. The first major strike occurred in the Russian cotton industry in May 1870 at the Nevsky spinning mill in Saint Petersburg, when eight hundred workers left their machines. Two years later, five thousand workers walked out of the Kreenholm cotton mill. Between 1870 and 1894, a total of eighty-five strikes occurred in the cotton textile industry, with 53,341 workers participating; between 1895 and 1900, 139,154 workers participated in 188 such strikes. During the huge 1905 strike wave, workers took part in 1,008 walkouts, succeeding in improving working conditions, shortening the workday, and gaining higher wages. Further waves of cotton workers’ strikes hit the Russian industry in 1912 with 135,000 cotton workers, in 1913 with 180,000 workers, and 1914 with 233,000 workers participating, with some of these strikes taking on overtly political tones. When cotton workers’ strikes broke out again in 1917, they became a central part of the revolutionary turmoil of that year.14
In Switzerland, cotton workers mobilized, albeit less dramatically than in Russia, in the late nineteenth century. In 1908 they created the national Schweizerische Textilarbeiterverband (STAV), the Swiss union of textile workers, which fought for improved working conditions and higher wages and embraced socialist ideas. In Catalonia, socialists and anarchists dominated many mills, with the cotton industry rocked by frequent confrontations between owners and well-organized workers, with massive strikes in 1890 for shorter hours, with bombings of mill owners’ houses, and, in 1909, during the Setmana Tràgica, with violent insurrection in Barcelona. In the Dutch industry, many strikes occurred around the turn of the century, and in its center, Twente, 60 percent of cotton workers had organized in unions by 1929.15
Lancashire, the heartland of the global cotton industry, witnessed the influence and national scope of unions earlier than anywhere else, and served as an inspiration and a source of organizers for cotton workers in other parts of the world, including Fall River. Unions had created national organizations in spinning by 1870 (the Amalgamated Spinners Association), and in 1884, in weaving (the Amalgamated Weavers Association). The Trade Union Congress, bringing British unions together in all sectors of the economy, had been created two years earlier. The spinners’ union, which organized the most highly skilled workers in spinning mills, had by the 1880s organized almost 90 percent of all workers, making it perhaps “the most powerful union in the world.” They succeeded in raising wages, improving working conditions, and managing technological development. The Spinners were among the “best organized and best-financed workers’ organizations in Britain,” and they extracted premium wages and captured a large portion of the increasing productivity of the industry from the 1880s to the 1920s. The Cardroom Workers and Weavers, larger, more diffuse, and less committed to exclusive craft practices, also won significant gains for workers. According to a study of data from 1890, the union wage premium for skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled workers in cotton textiles was around 12 percent, a significant margin, providing material rewards for the unionized workers of the cotton districts. The working conditions were still hot and humid and the hours long and hard, but militant, massive, and disciplined collective action from the cotton workers managed to force employers into sharing the profits from increasing industrial productivity.16
The mobilization of cotton workers did not in all cases succeed in improving local working and living conditions, but collectively, workers of these North Atlantic nations reduced their hours of work, improved working conditions, increased their wages, and won political influence—often with the tacit support of strengthening states that were above all concerned with social stability and under pressure from politically mobilized and at times enfranchised workers. This trend was magnified by the tendency of wages to roughly converge within national economies, which allowed even less well organized cotton workers to benefit from the collective mobilizations of other groups of workers.17
As a result, workers in western and northern Europe and the northeastern parts of the United States spent less and less time at work. Cotton workers in the Saxon town of Crimmitschau demanded in 1903, “An hour for us! An hour for our family! An hour to live!” And even if all too often their demands were unsuccessful, over the years they managed to decrease their working hours from an annual average of 3,190 hours in 1865 to 2,475 hours in 1913. In France, labor legislation in 1892 restricted women to the eleven-hour workday, to be reduced further in subsequent years. In January 1919 the Spanish government gave cotton workers the eight-hour day.18
As hours declined, wages increased. In Germany, spinners in 1865 had been paid an average of 390 marks per year. In 1913 they made 860 marks annually, or, in real terms, 53 percent more. In Alsace, there was also a “remarkable” increase of wages betw
een 1870 and 1913. Mulhousian mule spinners had made between 40 and 48 francs every two weeks in 1870, but took home 65 to 75 francs in 1910, which in real terms equaled a doubling of their wages. In Rhode Island, hourly wages of male weavers climbed from 13.5 cents an hour in 1890 to 59.8 cents by 1920; for loom-fixers, wages rose from 18.4 cents an hour in 1890 to 79.1 in 1920. Even doffers, unskilled laborers generally excluded from formal labor organization, saw their wages rise. In 1890, the average male doffer might expect a daily wage of 135 cents; by 1920, their wages had shot up to 484 cents, an inflation-adjusted 50 percent rise, while the more skilled loom-fixers saw a near doubling of their real wages.19
Workers not only improved their wages and working conditions through collective action at the workplace, but they also succeeded in getting newly strengthened nation-states to pass legislation that improved their welfare. Germany enacted a whole slew of worker-friendly legislation: When compulsory schooling came about after 1871, children under twelve years could no longer work in factories, and the effective work time of children under fourteen was thereby limited. Laws in 1910 stipulated that women could not work more than ten hours on weekdays and eight hours on Saturdays, while children under thirteen were now not allowed to work at all. Massachusetts passed its first labor laws in 1836, factory safety rules in 1877, and by 1898 outlawed night work for women and minors, in effect closing factories at night. In Switzerland, as elsewhere, labor laws increased labor costs, as already in 1877 the maximum number of hours for textile workers was limited to eleven, night work for women was outlawed, and child labor for workers under fourteen was declared illegal.20
