Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  Zhang was part of a school of thinkers throughout the global South, among them also Ch’en Chih and Hsueh Fu-ch’eng in China, who tried to reenvision their nations’ roles in the global economy. They focused on regaining domestic markets, undoing the process of deindustrialization, introducing Western technology, and, like List, Ali, Coxe, and Antuñano, coaxing the state into supporting industrialization. Arguing that industrial progress equaled national progress, they wanted local industries protected against imports. “The local production of coarse cottons,” observed the Brazilian Associação Industrial in 1881, “is being warred upon by foreign competitors and if legislative measures do not come to the industry’s aid, all the effort and capital employed to date will be wasted.” Referring explicitly to the protectionism of Germany and the United States, they called upon the state to support manufacturing in “young lands.” Cotton mills were no less than a “patriotic undertaking.”36 Similarly, Inoue Shozo of Japan’s Industrial Development Bureau concluded from a study trip to Germany in 1870 that

  I want to make our country equal of Europe and America…. After having read something of world history and geography in my search for the source of wealth, the military power, the civilization, and the enlightenment of present-day Western nations, I realized that the source must lie in technology, industry, commerce, and foreign trade. In order to apply these precepts and make the nation rich and strong, we must first of all instruct the people about industry. Then we can manufacture a variety of goods and export them, import those articles we lack, and accumulate wealth from abroad.37

  Zhang Jian, advocate of Chinese industrialization (illustration credit 13.6)

  Such ideas became a mainstay of anti-imperialist conversations, from Japan to India, from West Africa to Southeast Asia. Strong nation-states, these thinkers hoped, might one day protect domestic manufacturers, build infrastructure, mobilize labor, and help manufacturers capture export markets. There was no little irony in the fact that anticolonial nationalism as often as not drew on the lessons of colonialism itself.38

  Yet putting such ideas into practice remained difficult. First, budding industrialists had to gain control of the levers of state power, overcoming competing elites. In the U.S. South, for example, cotton manufacturers could dominate state governments only because of the loss of power of slaveholding elites. In Brazil, Japan, and elsewhere, the struggle against rival agrarian elites was far more protracted.

  Brazil’s cotton industry, for example, unlike the region’s poster child, Mexico, was weak until the 1890s, despite a significant market for cotton goods, significant local capital accumulation, and large foreign imports. In 1866, Brazil counted as few as nine spinning mills, with a negligible 15,000 spindles as most textiles were either imported or produced on plantations. The number of mills increased very slowly in the following decades, but then it virtually exploded. By 1921, the industry had 242 cotton mills with 1,521,300 spindles and 57,208 looms, employing 108,960 workers. The industry continued to grow, and by 1927, on the eve of the Depression, it consisted of 354 mills.39

  The three decades after 1892 have been called the golden age of Brazilian cotton manufacturing. It was in the wake of the abolition of slavery in 1888 that manufacturing elites gained greater influence over the government and managed to create policies conducive to their interests, especially tariffs. In 1860, the tariff on cotton had been at a low 30 percent of the value of imports, by 1880 it had doubled to around 60 percent, and after drawn-out battles it increased to as much as 100 percent in 1885. It rose further in 1886, 1889, and 1900. The protectionist 1900 tariffs then remained in effect for three decades, creating a protected market hugely profitable to manufacturers. As a result, by 1920, 75 to 85 percent of all cotton goods used in Brazil were spun and woven domestically. As an Englishman put it in 1921 with some regret, “Twenty-five years ago Brazil was an excellent market for Manchester…. First the grays dropped out, and now all these goods are being manufactured in the country and only the very finest qualities remain to be imported.”40

  By the 1890s, Brazilian manufacturers had helped shape the state in ways congenial to their interests. At the same time, unlike their European and New England competitors, they retained access to extremely cheap labor. The vast majority of workers came “from local orphanages, foundling homes, and poorhouses, and from the unemployed urban classes of the cities.” Children as young as ten, along with women, populated the shop floors. As late as 1920, when the minimum legal age for employment in mills had been raised to fourteen, children much younger were found laboring in the mills and in some instances women and children would work fourteen or even seventeen hours per day. As a cynical contemporary observer saw it, Brazilian children gave a “few years of their labor, at an age when character is forming and regular habits of industry can be acquired.”41

  After emancipation, Brazil’s cotton industry takes off: number of spindles, 1866–1934. (illustration credit 13.7)

  Cheap labor and tariffs combined with more dynamic markets. Slavery had suppressed internal markets, as many plantations engaged in production of rough textiles, and free-labor immigration had stagnated because of competition from slave labor. Now huge numbers of immigrants came into Brazil, and they, along with newly emancipated agricultural workers, began to purchase textiles in domestic markets. As a result, Brazil finally joined the region’s leading cotton producer, Mexico (whose industry continued to expand in no small part due to a national policy of protectionism), on the road to cotton industrialization. From Brazil, the model spread to neighboring Argentina, which saw the opening of its first cotton mill in 1906. There too, the promotion of cotton industrialization became a deliberate project of the state.42

  Japan experienced an even greater boom in cotton manufacturing. Indeed, it was of such magnitude that Japan became in the course of just a few decades the world’s dominant cotton manufacturing power.43 Japan’s history shares some features with Brazil in the late nineteenth century: Neither of these countries was subject to direct colonial rule, but they were vulnerable to significant influences from abroad. They faced huge cotton textile imports. Their economic elites were rooted in a political economy radically different from that of domestic industrialization, but those elites saw new elements emerging that altered the sources of their income and the policy predilections of their class. At the turn of the twentieth century, they were poised for a revolutionary transformation of the state, made no less revolutionary by sharp differences in outcomes.

  Japan’s history of mechanical cotton production came later than Brazil’s, but with equally inauspicious beginnings. In 1867, in Kagoshima City in Kyushu, local rulers of the domain of Satsuma imported six thousand spindles from England. Two other small factories opened around the same time, one in Sakai and the other near Tokyo. Confronted by a flood of imported yarn thanks to the forced opening of the Japanese market by the Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1858, none of these pioneering projects succeeded commercially.44

  Faced with these failures and an ever-rising tide of imported cotton goods that had captured a third of the Japanese market, the government began to take a more active role in promoting cotton industrialization. The 1868 Meiji Restoration had brought a more centralized and modernizing regime to power, concentrating the once dispersed powers from the feudal domains of the Tokugawa samurai, whose system of vandalage had dominated Japan for 270 years. From the 1870s, the new nation-state began to pursue a more active policy to promote industry—and cottons were foremost on the new rulers’ minds. A member of the Diet, the Japanese parliament, explained: “Because Japanese are clever and can work for cheap wages, they must buy simple goods from abroad, add manual labor, and ship them abroad”—a project for which cotton was superbly suited. The pressure of Western imperialism, as elsewhere, had inspired manufacturing as a nationalist project.45

  From 1879 to the mid-1880s, the minister of home affairs, Ito Hirobumi, expanded domestic spinning capacity by organizing ten spinning mil
ls with two thousand spindles each, importing them from Great Britain, and giving them on favorable terms to local entrepreneurs. These mills failed as commercial enterprises because their scale of production was too small to make them profitable. But unlike their predecessors they introduced new policies that turned into the key factors for the success of Japan’s industrialization: a switch to much cheaper Chinese cotton (in lieu of domestically grown cotton); experimental labor systems that would structure Japanese textile industrialization long into the future (such as the day and night shift system, which gave cost advantages over Indian competitors); and encouragement of government managers to become entrepreneurs themselves. These mills, moreover, created the “ideological roots” of low-wage, harsh-labor regimes, drawing on women whose pay was below subsistence levels, combined with a powerful rhetorical commitment to paternal care, and a transfer of power from samurai and merchants to managers and factory owners.46

  Easing the shock of such rapid industrialization was Japan’s long history in cotton textiles. For centuries, Japanese farmers had grown, spun, and woven cotton in their households for domestic consumption and local markets. By the nineteenth century a thriving putting-out industry had emerged in the countryside, an industry that at first received an enormous boost from the importation of cheap yarns in the wake of the forced opening of Japan’s ports.47

  By 1880, with the possibilities of mechanized cotton spinning demonstrated by government-organized mills, merchants created more—and much more substantial—factories, supported by a state committed to domestic industrialization. That year, the head of the (private) First National Bank, Shibusawa Eiichi, backed the Osaka Spinning Co., which would start operations in 1883 with 10,500 spindles. It was profitable from the beginning. Encouraged, others followed suit, opening several mills of similar size. Using English-trained Japanese engineers, these mills were all incorporated and tapped capital from nobles and wealthy merchants. These new factories were able to outperform British imports in price and even quality. Indeed, as early as 1890, Japan’s mill owners were able to dominate their home market, and by 1895 hand spinning had almost completely disappeared. Such successful spinning industrialization, in turn, allowed for the further expansion of weaving in the countryside.48

  This industrial capitalism forged in Japan, however, was not solely the offspring of nationalist politicians: Emerging industrial interests had applied tremendous pressures on the state and had organized early on for political coordination. The Japanese Spinners’ Association had formed itself as a leading lobby in 1882, pressuring the government for policies favorable to cotton industrialization, most importantly the discontinuation of the import tax on raw cotton (which was meant to protect Japanese cotton farmers) and an end to export fees on yarn. The Greater Japan Cotton Spinners’ Association followed suit in 1888. In fact, industrialists helped build the very state that supported their interests. Capitalists and rulers were able to implement these lessons because they defeated the visions of rival elites but faced no significant democratic mass movements to contest their control over the state.49

  A strong state dedicated to the political economy of domestic industrialization mattered tremendously to Japan, but in ways quite different from Brazil. Tariffs at first played no role in Japan’s industrialization because the international treaties that had been forced on the nation by Western powers precluded protectionism, and there was indeed no tariff protection before 1911. The state, however, played a key role in importing the new technology, and, perhaps more importantly, helped Japanese capitalists gain access to foreign markets that could be served competitively because of Japan’s extremely low labor costs. Prefectural author ities set up “industrial laboratories” that investigated the special needs of foreign markets and provided weaving companies with blueprints as to what kind of cloth would sell where—just as the French and British governments had done in the eighteenth century. The Japanese state also collected market information, which included consular commercial reports, industrial exhibitions, trade missions, “the dispatch of specific students to foreign countries in order to conduct research on specific industries, and commodity exhibition centres abroad…, export cartels from 1906, trade commissioners from 1910, and world tours and business missions undertaken by exporters.” The government, moreover, stood as the ultimate guarantor for all kinds of debts that were essential for the success of the industry.50

  Building a Japanese cotton industry: Shibusawa Eiichi (1840–1931) (illustration credit 13.8)

  The Japanese government acquired the ability to support local cotton industrialists in part because of the spoils of war. Indeed, the Japanese story once more demonstrates the tight link between colonial expansion and industrial capitalism—the one, in effect, enabling the other. Reparations gained from the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War—essentially a land grab—were used to subsidize the nation’s shipping industry, thus helping cotton exports, and fueled the government’s ability to provide credit to the country’s trading firms and forgo the revenue generated by duties on raw cotton imports, which were removed in 1896, cheapening the industry’s essential raw material.51

  The Rise of the Global South in the Empire of Cotton, 1880–1940

  In one of its most decisive effects, the war also provided new markets, which would soon become supremely important to Japan’s industrialization. China turned into Japan’s most important buyer of yarn and cloth, until 1929, when it gained itself the ability to impose tariffs. By 1894 China consumed 92 percent of all Japanese exports, and by 1897–98, exports of cotton yarn, especially to China, constituted 28 percent of total Japanese spinning output. During World War I, with British manufacturers sidelined, Japan made its deepest penetration to date of the Chinese market. When exports of yarn declined, those of cotton cloth expanded. Between 1903 and 1929, indeed, more than half of all Japanese cotton cloth exports went to China.52

  During the 1920s, the percentage share of cotton cloth exports to India increased as well, from about 12 percent in 1926 to about 50 percent in 1932. And, again, a state committed to industrialization mattered greatly: The Japanese government exerted political pressure on the British colonial government in India to facilitate their entry into that market. As India’s cotton growers became dependent on the Japanese export market, the Japanese government was able to negotiate low tariff barriers for the import of manufactured cottons into India, despite objections from Lancashire manufacturers. When in 1930 the Indian government began discriminating against such imports from Japan in response to pressures from Lancashire, Japanese cotton manufacturers decided to boycott raw cotton from India. That created a problem for India, because remittances to London were paid from these exports. In the Indo-Japanese trade negotiations of 1933 these differences were reconciled, allowing for a freer flow of goods to India from Japan and vice versa. In 1913–14, Japan had exported 7 million yards of cotton piece goods to India; in 1933 it exported 579 million yards.53

  Low-cost labor was as important as state support to Japan’s success. Japanese cotton manufacturers, like manufacturers elsewhere, spent much time thinking about the “problem of labor.” Labor costs in Japanese mills were even lower than in India and about one-eighth of those in Lancashire. Initially, mills recruited their workers from their immediate surroundings, but as time went on they increasingly relied on labor recruiters who brought workers from more distant locations, literally scouring the countryside in search of poor farming families.54

  Women especially were pushed out of the countryside and into factories. In 1897, 79 percent of workers in Japanese cotton factories were female. Most of these women were very young, between fifteen and twenty-five years old, and 15 percent were below age fourteen. Typically they would start working at age thirteen and retire at age twenty, upon marriage. For women workers themselves, employment in factories was a particular moment in their life cycle, related to their preindustrial spinning and weaving within the household, and often motivated by an effort to accumulate
savings for a dowry. This massive wave of very young women moving into factories was facilitated by Japanese manufacturers’ early embrace of ring spinning, which required mostly unskilled labor.55

  These young women were subject to extreme exploitation. Away from the protection that their families might have provided, most lived in dormitories next to the mills—company boarding houses that were places of surveillance and disciplinary action. (In this way conditions were quite similar to those in Lowell, Massachusetts, nearly a century earlier.) One 1911 study found that workers often shared beds, and had as little as twenty-seven square feet of space. To stem high rates of labor turnover, companies embraced a rhetoric of paternalism, and at times also more substantive paternalist policies. For the companies, short commutes and total control over the workforce allowed them to exploit their labor to the utmost, operating under a two-shift system, each lasting twelve hours, making perfect use of capital expenses by continuously running the machines.56

  The state had made possible such low-wage competitiveness by resisting any protective legislation for factory workers in the cotton industry. The Factory Act of 1911 was only extended to cover women and children in the textile industry in 1920. The collective action of Japanese mill owners had postponed the passage of protective labor legislation for forty years—undoubtedly helped by a franchise restricted to propertied men.57