by Sven Beckert
Women’s principal strategy of resistance to such conditions was absconding, the same tactic Ellen Hootton had employed a century earlier at Eccles’ Mill in Lancashire. Turnover, indeed, was tremendous—in 1897, 40 percent of all workers left the factories within six months of taking up employment. In 1900, fewer than half of all spinning workers in Kwansai had worked for their employer for more than a year. Employers responded by locking boarding houses at night, forbidding women to leave them during their free time, and retaining part of their wages until they had served out their employment contracts.58
Thanks to this availability of extraordinarily cheap and disenfranchised labor, Japan’s cotton industry continued its rapid expansion.59 By 1902, domestic production had largely replaced imports. By 1909, Japanese spinning factories were the fifth largest consumers of raw cotton in the world. With spinning concentrated in large factories, weaving, including handloom weaving, continued to thrive in the countryside, with multiple small entrepreneurs organizing labor, and eventually, by the 1910s and 1920s, the introduction of power looms in their often very small shops. The value of the cotton industry’s output continued to increase thereafter from 19 million yen in 1903 to 405 million yen in 1919. The years between 1920 and 1937 were a golden age for the Japanese cotton industry. In 1933, Japan for the first time exported more cotton cloth than Great Britain, France, and Germany, and was the world’s third cotton power after the United Kingdom and the United States. By 1937, Japan had captured 37 percent of the globally traded cotton cloth market, compared to just 27 percent for England. Thanks to this explosion of cotton manufacturing in Japan, Asia as a whole had become again a net exporter of cottons, after a hiatus of about a century and a half.60
In the U.S. South, Brazil, and Japan, budding manufacturers overcame competing elites and won the support of the state for domestic industrialization only with considerable difficulty. Yet their difficulties paled in comparison to those in the global South who confronted powerful colonial overlords. Those capitalists fought not just competing elites domestically, or other social groups, but also powerful imperial states and their economic elites, who were determined to preserve their access to colonial markets and who opposed alternative projects of industrialization. To sustain that struggle, they were forced far beyond the other cotton upstarts to cultivate a mass ideology of nationalism, and to work in concert with other social groups. For them, colonial dependency on the global scene translated into often devastating weakness domestically.
Asian industrialists turn the tables: cotton yarn imports and exports, Japan (in thousands of tons), 1868–1918 (illustration credit 13.9)
Take Egypt, for example. One of the world’s premier cotton-growing countries and one of the earliest cotton industrializers, it failed in its efforts to build a thriving cottage industry until the 1930s. The failure was not for lack of trying. In 1895 a number of capitalists formed the Société Anonyme Egyptienne pour la Filature et le Tissage du Cotton in Cairo, and four years later two additional mills opened their doors. Never very profitable, these mills expired under the weight of an 8 percent tax on the value of their yarn and cloth production and competition from textile imports, especially after Egypt became essentially a free-trade appendage of the British Empire. One-quarter to one-third of all imports into Egypt between 1880 and 1914 consisted of cotton textiles—profitably spun and woven in Britain. There and elsewhere, the colonial state subordinated the project of local industrialization to its efforts to secure export markets for European manufacturers.61
Things began to change slowly during World War I, and the newly created Filature Nationale d’Egypte blossomed for a short while. It expanded further in anticipation of tariff reforms in 1930, promoted by an increasingly strident nationalist movement. That tariff reform increased import duties substantially, and soon made domestic industrialization possible, especially in cottons. Most prominently, the ardently nationalist economist and entrepreneur Tal’at Harb, who had created Bank Misr in 1920, drawing on the capital of wealthy landowners, created the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company in the early 1930s, which was well capitalized and expanded rapidly. By 1945, 25,000 of the 117,272 Egyptian textile workers spun and wove cottons in this mill. Tariffs, in effect, had been a gift of the state to its “nascent bourgeoisie.”62
Stories like Egypt’s indicated to capital owners throughout the global South that they needed to create a state supportive of their project of domestic industrialization, and that under conditions of colonialism such a state could not be forged. India, more than any other country, exemplifies this history. On the face of it, India enjoyed all the preconditions for successful cotton industrialization—markets, access to technology, skilled labor, low wages, and capital-rich merchants. There was even a powerful state lording over India. Overcoming competing elites also proved not to be overwhelmingly difficult. Still, dominated by a foreign colonial power, Indian industrialists faced insurmountable hurdles to molding the kind of state they so urgently wanted—hurdles that eventually would draw them into an anticolonial struggle that, while successful, would also weaken their dominance over workers and peasants.
Anticolonialism reshapes global capitalism: Tal’at Harb, nationalist economist and builder of one of the world’s largest cotton mills in Mahalla al-Kubra, Egypt
India’s cotton industry emerged, as we have seen, principally in the cities of Bombay and Ahmedabad in the wake of the American Civil War. To be sure, the Bombay Spinning and Weaving Company had commenced production as early as 1854, and by 1861 there were 12 spinning mills in India. Yet the true expansion occurred only after 1865, drawing on the profits Indian merchants had accumulated during the years of very high raw cotton prices. Indian capitalists, increasingly pushed out of the raw cotton trade by European dealers such as the Volkarts, redirected their capital into cotton mills. By 1875, they had opened 27 mills. In 1897, there were 102 mills in the Bombay Presidency alone. The number of spindles exploded, from 1.5 million in 1879 to nearly 9 million in 1929. Cotton manufacturing would come to dominate the Indian manufacturing economy.63
India’s dynamic entrepreneurial class drew to the best of their ability upon the British colonial state. Export markets within the colonial empire, for example, became highly prized, with much of the industry’s markets to be found within the British sphere of influence—by the 1890s, 80 percent of the yarn exported from Bombay went to China.64 This state also created infrastructures, laws, regulations, and rules within which economic life was increasingly embedded. As the state pushed for a massive commercialization of the countryside, more dynamic markets for manufactured goods emerged, which benefited Indian cotton manufacturers.
Indian cotton industrialists initially also drew on the colonial state for the mobilization of labor—after all, changes within the countryside drove huge numbers of workers into cities and into cotton mills. During 1896, an estimated 146,000 workers labored in Indian cotton mills, and 625,000 in 1940, a significant figure for a country that hardly saw any other factory production. As elsewhere, the first generation of mill workers remained in touch with the villages from which they hailed. For many families, sending one member into the city to work in a factory was a strategy to retain access to land. But unlike elsewhere in the empire of cotton, most of these workers were men. The roots of India’s proletariat, like its bourgeoisie, were to be found in cottons. Indeed, “cheap labor” was widely seen as India’s most distinctive competitive advantage—a proletariat created by, among other factors, the decisive actions of a powerful colonial state.65
But while no doubt crucial to many aspects of cotton industrialization, the colonial state in India was peculiar and often destructive of local industrial dreams—it was, after all, subject to the pressures of statesmen and capitalists in England, not in India. This peculiarity showed with regard to labor. As elsewhere, working conditions in the Indian cotton textile mills were terrible. Days lasted thirteen to fourteen hours during summer, and ten to twelve hours in winter.
Temperatures in mills often exceeded 90 degrees. Mill owners justified these conditions, in the words of the Bombay Millowners’ Association in 1910, by arguing that their workers were “mere machines of blind industrialism, having no initiative of their own and with no great consideration for the future,” words that would have sounded strangely familiar to European manufacturers a century earlier. Yet unlike in Japan, and in a sign that Indian capitalists enjoyed significantly less sway over the state than their Japanese counterparts, working conditions improved and labor costs increased thanks to government intervention. The Indian Factory Act of 1891, passed at the behest of Lancashire cotton manufacturers concerned with Indian competition, limited the number of hours children were allowed to work in mills. Labor legislation in 1891 and 1911 further regulated child labor, women’s work, and hours. While working conditions and wages remained abysmal, Indian mill owners still opposed these acts, complaining about the low productivity of their workers and arguing that “any restrictive legislation sought to be imposed on us at the insistence of our friends of Lancashire will have to be resisted in a strenuous manner.” Yet confronted with British textile workers’ self-serving protests against “the excessive working hours in the Bombay mills and the employment of children” and with Lancashire mill owners fearing for their export markets, they failed. Subduing labor under conditions of colonialism proved difficult.66
Most striking, however, was the exceptional character of the colonial state in India when it came to the question of market access. Its greatest success, in many ways, was to facilitate the vast influx of British cotton goods, making India into Lancashire’s most important market, and severely damaging its handicraft industry.67 Industrialization and deindustrialization thus intersected on the Indian subcontinent—and it was the Janus-faced nature of the Indian state, strong but beholden to foreign interests, that delayed and stunted Indian cotton industrialization. Indian capitalists had to share the spoils of the British-initiated transformation of the subcontinent with a powerful group of foreign capitalists and statesmen.68
Capital-rich elites in the global South from Ahmedabad to Rowan County, North Carolina, from Petropolis to Osaka, from Mahalla-al-Kubra to Veracruz tried to jump on the cotton industrialization bandwagon, and in doing so they learned about the importance of strong states to industrialization. If they were unusually perceptive, they recognized the emerging weaknesses of European and North American cotton capital rooted in that same tight link to the nation-state. Their experiences were quite different. While in Brazil, the southern United States, and Japan they succeeded by gaining power over competing elites and then by forging a state responsive to their needs, in Egypt and India the project of domestic industrialization encountered a powerful hurdle—the colonial state itself. But wherever global South capitalists succeeded in carving out a niche for themselves in the global cotton industry, they did so because two processes emerged simultaneously: the nationalization of social conflict in the core countries of the first Industrial Revolution, which increased labor costs, and the construction of states favoring a project of domestic industrialization and keeping down labor costs in the global South. It was in China that these stories came together.
Cotton industrialization came to China later than to the U.S. South, Japan, India, or Brazil. This was not for lack of experience in cotton manufacturing, difficulty obtaining raw cotton, the absence of markets or capital, or lack of access to modern manufacturing technology. As we know, China had one of the world’s oldest and largest cotton manufacturing complexes, and indeed until the mid-nineteenth century Chinese peasants were the single most significant growers of cotton globally, nearly all of which was manufactured into yarn and cloth domestically. In turn, the spinning and weaving of cotton were China’s most important manufacturing activities.69
Despite such ideal preconditions for cotton industrialization, mechanization only began at the end of the nineteenth century. To some extent the very vibrancy of Chinese traditional cotton manufacturing made industrialization more difficult. As with much of the cotton belt prior to the nineteenth century, millions of peasants in China’s countryside produced cottons for their own use or for nearby markets, with little pressure to do otherwise. As late as midcentury, 45 percent of peasant households may have produced cloth. Moreover, Western imperialists began to put pressure on China’s port cities, deluging the country in the second half of the nineteenth century with yarn and cloth. European merchants and European governments (along with those from the United States) pressured the Chinese state for market access, with the 1877 Chefoo convention, for example, stipulating further access to deep-sea as well as Yangtze ports, and the abolition of internal duties. “The foreign merchant has waited long and patiently for the attainment of these objects,” argued one such Western merchant in 1877. “In his opinion they are essential for the successful development of his trade with China.” Indeed, market penetration was a clearly articulated political goal of all imperial powers. As a result, the import of cotton goods into China increased tremendously, yarn by a factor of twenty-four, while cloth imports doubled between the 1880s and 1910s. By 1916 the U.S. Department of Commerce called China “the largest market for cotton yarns in the world,” including for U.S. manufacturers. At first, the vast majority of cotton yarn and cloth imports into China originated from the United Kingdom and the United States. After 1900, imports came mostly from Japanese manufacturers.70
Such market opening rested on the uses of imperial power, that is, strong North Atlantic states committed to providing market access to their own industrialists. In 1882, for example, the United States sent a gunboat to Shanghai to support its cotton interests. Four years earlier, Peng Ruzong had founded a cotton company—the Shanghai Cotton Cloth Mill—which received a ten-year monopoly in 1882. When William S. Wetmore, head of the American merchant firm Frazer and Co., began acquiring Chinese investors for a competing mill, the Shanghai Cotton Cloth Mill immediately entreated the Chinese government to defend its interests. Trumped‑up arrest warrants were issued for the American firm’s two principal Chinese investors, forcing both into hiding. The newly appointed U.S. minister to China decided it was time “to impress upon the Chinese the fact that we were a government, with power to maintain our rights under the treaties.” The U.S. corvette Ashuelot was promptly stationed in Shanghai for the winter, on orders approved by President Chester A. Arthur himself.71
Faced with a flood of imports, the tantalizing prospects of profiting from mechanized cotton production, and the desire to strengthen the Chinese state vis-à-vis Western imperial powers, modernizing elites, both within the state bureaucracy and among capitalists, began to favor a project of domestic industrialization. As unlikely allies in that project, they teamed up with foreign entrepreneurs, especially from Japan, who in their search for ever cheaper labor invested heavily in the Chinese cotton industry. Together they created one of the most rapidly growing cotton industries in the world.
The first modern Chinese cotton mill, the Shanghai Cotton Cloth Mill, as we have seen, began operations in the early 1880s. At first the industry grew slowly. By 1896 there were only 12 mills with 412,000 spindles. Two decades later, the number had risen to 31 mills with somewhat more than 1 million spindles. Then came World War I, which played a similar role for Chinese cotton industrialization, and Asia’s more generally, as the Napoleonic Wars had done for continental Europe 125 years earlier. Its protectionist effects created a mill building boom, and by 1925 there were 118 mills with more than 3 million spindles, employing 252,031 workers, half of them in Shanghai alone. The growth of cotton manufacturing in China after 1914 was indeed the fastest in the world. Globally, the number of spindles increased by 14 percent between 1913 and 1931—but in China it skyrocketed by 297 percent, or twenty times as fast. Taking 1913 as the base year, by 1931 the number of China’s spindles increased to 397, Japan’s to 313, India’s to 150, the United States’ to 106, while Russia’s declined to 99, Great Britain’s to 99, and
Germany’s to 97. The same was the case with mechanical looms: The number of such looms more than tripled in China between 1913 and 1925, nearly tripled in Japan, but slightly declined in Great Britain.72
By the early 1920s, Chinese cotton yarn manufacturing had gained a dominant position in the domestic market, and by 1925 China was able to export more cotton manufactures than it imported. By 1937, it was once again self-sufficient in cotton yarn and goods: As recently as 1875, 98.1 percent of all yarn in China had still been spun by hand, but by 1931 only 16.3 percent of all yarn was so manufactured, while nearly all the rest came out of domestic factories. Cotton had become China’s most important factory industry; according to writer Chong Su, “Shanghai is fast becoming the Manchester of the Far East.”73
This industry drew, as elsewhere, on cheap labor; indeed, labor in China was cheaper than anywhere else in the world, including Japan. When the U.S. Department of Commerce reported in 1916 on the situation in Chinese cotton mills, it found tens of thousands of workers laboring day and night on twelve-hour shifts, with the only break for twelve hours on Sundays. Their pay amounted to about 10 U.S. cents a day. With working hours “longer than in any other country in the world” and no child labor laws on the books, China was the world’s lowest-cost producer. Even owners of cotton mills in Bombay feared Chinese competition, not least because, unlike them, China’s industry “enjoys perfect immunity from restrictive factory legislation.”74
Even in a context of low-cost labor, Chinese manufacturers showed a clear preference for the very cheapest workers—children and women. By 1897, 79 percent of workers in these spinning factories were female, and 15 percent boys and girls younger than fourteen years old. If earlier in the nineteenth century women could not be moved into factories, as mentioned, by the 1890s changes within the countryside, not least occasioned by low-cost imports of cotton yarn, had made women’s labor available. Female or male, rural migrants became the core of the workforce, often hired directly in the countryside under conditions involving significant coercion. Privileged male workers within the factories, so called “Number Ones,” engaged them in return for “gifts.” Workers, especially women, were often traded, as very poor families sold their daughters into mill labor, with their wages controlled at least in part by others, a status that closely resembled bonded labor and was very difficult to escape.75
