Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  In India as well, the struggle for higher wages and better working conditions merged with the anticolonial struggle. Indian cotton workers had mobilized collectively since the late nineteenth century; indeed, the first strike had occurred in 1874, followed by many more during the 1880s. In 1895 workers rioted for better working conditions, and in 1918 Gandhi himself played a leading but conciliatory role in an Ahmedabad textile workers’ strike. Narayan Malhar Joshi’s Bombay Textile Labor Union was founded in 1925, in the context of a general strike against the mill owners’ effort to cut wages by 10 percent. By 1927 that union had approximately one hundred thousand members, and four hundred thousand by 1938, a powerful group of workers in conflicts with their employers, yet also an important pillar in the struggle for national independence.90

  As cotton workers assumed an important role in anticolonial struggles, they would eventually translate their role into further social and economic gains. In China, just a few years after the revolution, the cotton industry was nationalized and set on an enormous trajectory of expansion (albeit one that brought little benefit to China’s rural masses). In India, protectionism and state investments channeled by five-year plans led to the growth of the cotton industry, while postindependence labor activism led to significant wage gains. Wages for Indian cotton workers increased by 65 percent between 1950 and 1963, even as the price of output only rose 18 percent. In Egypt, independence at first brought significant new protective labor legislation and, especially, an important role for the state in the mediation of labor conflict. Eventually, independence brought significant changes to the Egyptian economy, as raw cotton exports—the staple export of the Egyptian economy for more than a hundred years—stagnated as more and more cotton was used in domestic manufacturing. “Arab socialism” brought improvements to workers, but also the repression of independent trade union activities. During the 1960s, under Gamal Abdel Nasser, the cotton industry was nationalized. The strength and political importance of the working class had in effect resulted in the expropriation of local cotton capitalists, coupled with the belief that industrialization was necessary for the defense of the state itself. Capitalists’ dependence on workers (and peasants) in the struggle against the colonial state had now translated into diminished powers.91

  Indian cotton workers organize: textile unionists in Bombay, early 1920s (illustration credit 13.13)

  Not only was the balance of social power between workers and capitalists different in these postcolonial societies; the state’s relationship to society was different as well. As these latecomers to cotton industrialization faced a world unlike that confronted by the first wave of industrializers in England, continental Europe, and North America, they believed that they needed to make the transition to industrial capitalism more swiftly, including the mobilization of labor, territory, markets, and raw materials. As industrial capitalism rested on the state, such “Great Leaps Forward” led as often as not to extreme statist outcomes in the postcolonial world—with postcolonial or even postcapitalist regimes now deploying the tools of the colonial integration of territory, resources, and especially labor with much greater radicalism.92 Industrial capitalism had become central to the survival of the state itself, a state that often now prioritized the industrial in industrial capitalism. In fact, capitalism at times seemed to stand in the way of industrialization.

  Yet even though Soviet Russia, Communist China, and independent India and Egypt represented variations of the most radical merger of the state and capital, of industrialization and political consolidation, capital by the 1950s had been hedged in by nation-states more generally. It was only after the 1970s, as we shall see, that industrialists began to emancipate themselves from their age-old dependence on particular states. Capitalists, so long dependent on strong states to pursue their project of industrial capitalism, now began overcoming their greatest weakness—the territorialization of capital. It was at this point that the empire of cotton took on the shape of today.

  Chapter 14

  The Weave and the Weft: An Epilogue

  The empire of cotton I: Walmart, 2013 (illustration credit 14.1)

  The empire of cotton II: Bangladesh, April 2013

  Europe’s reign over the cotton empire ended with a whimper. It was the year 1963, the year Liverpool’s most renowned band, the Beatles, was first heard in the United States, the year the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had “a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi…will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice,” and the year when the huge Bhakra Dam opened in India, providing water to 2.8 million acres of land, much of it cotton fields. On a rainy and cold December morning, a group of Liverpudlians met at the Cotton Exchange Building on Old Hall Street. They were there not to rule over their empire, but to dismantle it. The day’s task was to auction off the “valuable club furnishings” that for the previous century had graced the offices of the Liverpool Cotton Association. Attendees purchased close to a hundred items, including a “trader’s Desk in Mahogany,” “Mahogany Quotation Board frames,” a “Weather Map of the United States in Mahogany Frame,” and S. A. Hobby’s painting Cotton Plant. The Cotton Exchange Building itself had been sold a year earlier for lack of business.1

  Founded in 1841, for more than a century the association had played a central role in regulating the global cotton trade. As the buyers of chairs, desks, lamps, shelves, sofas, and paintings carted their loot through the streets of this increasingly sad city, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for them to imagine that a mere hundred years earlier, Liverpool was one of the world’s wealthiest cities, a vital linchpin connecting cotton growers in the Americas, Africa, and Asia with European manufacturers and customers all across the globe.

  But by 1963, Europe’s domination of the empire of cotton was over. By the late 1960s, the United Kingdom could only claim 2.8 percent of global cotton cloth exports, a market it had so decisively dominated for a century and a half. Of the more than six hundred thousand workers who had once labored in British mills, only thirty thousand remained. Cotton towns crumbled as workers whose families had labored on mules and looms for generations found themselves unemployed. The symbolic evidence of the continent’s fall had come in 1958, when the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, long an adamant champion of free trade, reversed course and declared that the British cotton industry needed protection—an unintended but obvious expression of defeat. Yet while Europe, and increasingly the United States, had become marginal to this marvelously productive and frighteningly violent system of production, the empire itself persisted. Indeed, while today’s cotton industry would be nearly unrecognizable to the nineteenth-century members of the Liverpool Cotton Association or the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, the world today creates and consumes more cotton than ever before.2

  Chances are the shirt or pants or socks you are wearing as you read this are made out of cotton. Those pieces have found their way to you, just as cotton has clothed your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, thanks to the efforts of growers, spinners, weavers, tailors, and merchants in distant parts of the globe, each inhabiting a world quite different from one another. Yet while a century ago your shirt would have likely been sewn in a shop in New York or Chicago, using fabric spun and woven in New England, from bolls grown in the American South, today it is probably made of cotton grown in China, India, Uzbekistan, or Senegal, spun and woven in China, Turkey, or Pakistan, and then manufactured in a place like Bangladesh or Vietnam. If any part of the cotton empire, whose rise this book has charted, was involved in your shirt at all, that unlikely, vestigial element would be American-grown cotton. Twenty-five thousand highly capitalized cotton farmers remain in the United States, mostly in Arizona and Texas. The cotton they grow is so uncompetitive on the world market that they receive enormous federal subsidies to continue to farm it, subsidies that in some years equal the GDP of the country of Benin (coincidentally, another important cotton grower).3

  While a small group of
American cotton farmers hangs on, the cotton mills that were once so important to the economies of Europe and North America alike are nearly gone. If those hulking buildings have not been torn down, they have been turned into shopping malls, artist studios, industrial-chic condos, or museums. Indeed, the downfall of the cotton industry in the global North has created a boom in textile museums. You can visit the Boots Cotton Mills Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts, Quarry Bank Mill near Manchester, the former Wesserling mill turned museum just outside Mulhouse, the Memphis Cotton Museum housed in the former Memphis Cotton Exchange, the textile museum of Wiesenthal in the Black Forest, James Henry Hammond’s Redcliffe Plantation in South Carolina, the twenty-mile-long hiking trail of the Ruta de les Colònies along the Llobregat River in Spain’s Catalonia with its eighteen abandoned cotton mills, and dozens, perhaps hundreds of other sites as well. The empire of cotton, which for a century and a half shaped and reshaped global capitalism in its image, is now the object of family outings. Parents and their kids wander the quaint-looking factories in their often idyllic surroundings; they watch the spinners and weavers in period costume who demonstrate the workings of the antiquated machines, holding their ears to block the noise of power looms and staring at photographs of children—prematurely aged, as if from a different planet—who not too long ago worked sixty-hour weeks on those same machines. Cotton plantations, too, have been reshaped for tourists. Here, though, the horrors of slave labor are downplayed or hidden—often intentionally overpowered by the sights of magnificent mansions, beautiful vistas, and well-tended gardens. But none of these historic curiosities can display the greatest invention of the empire of cotton: the globe-spanning network that connected growers, manufacturers, and consumers, a network, that, though radically altered and far from these museums, persists to this day.

  As European and North American tourists gaze at the remnants of the empire of cotton, and communities and workers from Fall River to Oldham struggle with the aftereffects of postindustrial devastation, millions of workers stream into textile mills in China, India, Pakistan, and elsewhere, while further millions of farmers tend to cotton crops in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Thanks to their often ill-paid efforts, about 98 percent of all garments sold in the United States today are made abroad. China alone supplies the United States with about 40 percent of all apparel, followed by Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Honduras, Cambodia, Mexico, India, El Salvador, and Pakistan. Fabric and yarn no longer come primarily from the United Kingdom or even the American South: China, India, Pakistan, and Turkey spin and weave the most cotton globally. Today, China’s factories contain nearly half of the world’s spindles and looms, working up 43 percent of the world’s raw cotton (Asia’s total is 82.2 percent), while North America uses 4.2 percent and western Europe 0.7 percent of the global cotton harvest. After more than two hundred years, most global cotton use is once again concentrated in the pre-1780 heartlands of the cotton industry. As a managing director of the New York textile firm Olah Inc. put it, “China’s industry is such a large portion of the global market that, plainly put, the global industry goes the way of China.” Moreover, it is less and less likely that the shirt on your back is made of cotton at all: Beginning in the mid-1990s, production of synthetic fiber began to outpace cotton textile manufacturing. Today, about 52 million metric tons of petroleum-based synthetic fiber is produced annually to make, for instance, the fleece jacket you might be wearing, almost twice the worldwide figure for cotton.4

  The ruins of the empire of cotton: Cal Rosal, Spain, 2013 (illustration credit 14.2)

  The centers of growing have shifted in parallel with the shift in manufacturing. While in 1860 the United States had a near monopoly on cotton growing for export, today only 14 percent of cotton worldwide is grown in North America. Instead, China and India lead the way, producing 34 million and 26 million bales of cotton yearly, compared to the United States’ 17 million bales. Global production has increased by a factor of seven since 1920, with cotton growing becoming immensely important to the economies of many countries, particularly in Asia and West Africa. It has been estimated that 10 million farmers in Central and West Africa alone depend on cotton. Worldwide, estimates of the number of people involved in the growing and manufacturing of cotton range from approximately 110 million households involved in the growing of cotton, 90 million in its transportation, ginning, and warehousing, and another 60 million workers operating spinning and weaving machines and stitching together clothing, to a total for all branches of that industry of 350 million people. This number, never before reached in one industry, represents between 3 and 4 percent of the world’s population. More than 35 million hectares of land are dedicated to the growing of cotton, the equivalent of the surface area of Germany.5

  Some nations, just like European colonial powers in Africa a century earlier, have policies in place to force farmers to produce cotton, despite its often devastating environmental and financial consequences. Uzbekistan, for instance, one of the globe’s top ten cotton exporters, continues to force its farming population to grow cotton despite the fact that the need to irrigate its dry lands has essentially drained the Aral Sea and turned much of the country into virtual salt flats. As one Uzbek cotton farmer told a journalist, “We are destroying ourselves…. Why are we planting cotton, and what are we getting from it?” Moreover, the emergence of new, genetically modified cotton plants has doubly amplified the burdens of many farmers. The seeds for these plants are more expensive to buy and maintain, but they are also far more productive, thus pushing costs up at the same time that they push cotton prices down. Many Tajik cotton farmers, for instance, are locked in a cycle of debt and forced cotton production just like their counterparts a century ago in India and the American South. Indeed, cotton growers have remained relatively powerless. In India in 2005, after a season of weak rains and crop failures, hundreds of heavily indebted farmers of genetically modified cotton committed suicide by drinking their own pesticides, a trend that persists to this day. Cotton production continues to be an often brutal ordeal. For most farmers and workers, cotton is far from the cuddly “fabric of our lives” touted by marketers for the American cotton industry.6

  Asia as the world center for cotton growing: the global cotton crop, 2012 (illustration credit 14.3)

  One of the few geographic consistencies between the beginning of the twenty-first century and the world before the Industrial Revolution of the 1780s is the reemergence of Asia in the world of cotton. Both the growing of cotton and the manufacturing of yarn and cloth continue on their remigration to Asia, a process that began in the 1920s. We have seen how budding Asian capitalists and state-building nationalists studied Europeans’ penetration of territory and mastery over labor and applied those techniques to their own postcolonial and, eventually, even postcapitalist hinterlands. These states found novel ways to wed the methods of industrial capitalism to nationalist development projects; bureaucrats and statesmen of all stripes dreamed of “great leaps” forward. In a century, these states redrew the geographic boundaries of the empire of cotton; the combination of low wages and powerful states enabled cotton growing and manufacturing to flourish once again in the corner of the world where cotton was first grown, five thousand years earlier. So powerful has the rise of Asia been that Asian states, China first among them, are increasingly eager to set the rules of the global cotton trade, a privilege once enjoyed by Liverpool merchants and, later, the American government.7

  In the course of that return to Asia, the balance of power between growers, manufacturers, merchants, and statesmen shifted again, starting after the 1970s. Consider that today it is commonplace for cotton grown in Uzbekistan, Togo, or India to make its way through a Hong Kong textile mill, then to a Vietnamese sewing shop, and finally onto a clothing rack in Kansas City. It is not the distances that are new; rather, it is the way the elaborate networks that move the fiber through its various iterations are held together. Instead of manufacturers, or cotton or cloth merchants
, it is massive retailers like Walmart, Metro, and Carrefour that have come to dominate the commodity chains linking contractors, subcontractors, farmers, mills, and sweatshops. Manufacturers no longer “push” their products upon consumers; instead, products are “pulled” across oceans by retailers, allowing them to pit manufacturers, contractors, and workers against one another to ensure the quickest speed and lowest cost.8

  This reemergence of merchants, particularly from the 1990s on, in the form of retailers and branded apparel sellers as key actors comes as a surprise. In some ways, of course, their power is reminiscent of the importance of merchants in the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet since the 1860s, as we have seen, the central actors in the empire of cotton had been states in conjunction with manufacturers. States moved to the forefront in the grand project of transforming the global cotton-growing countryside, and in the process created a central role for national manufacturers and, within careful limits, for organized textile workers as well. These trends further accelerated in the twentieth century. In the United Kingdom, to cite the most prominent example, the British government, in response to wartime conditions, took over the entire cotton market in 1941, including the purchase and distribution of raw cotton. After the war, government control continued, and to the great lament of the Liverpool Cotton Association, the government’s Raw Cotton Commission remained the sole purchaser and distributor of cotton in Britain. Merchants who had built a globe-spanning network were reduced to begging the government for some consideration of their interests. As the New York Times put it in 1946, “It would be difficult to imagine a more direct blow to the whole system of free world markets.” Yet the Times editors also registered, accurately, that “this action with regard to cotton seems to represent a world-wide bureaucratic distrust of the free market…combined with a boundless faith in the magic of government ‘planning.’ ” It was only when a Conservative government came to power and in 1953 passed the Cotton Bill that the Liverpool market reopened, but even then it continued to be structured by “subsidies, duties and currency imbalances.” And it was in response to “the contraction of the merchant element in the market” that the Liverpool Cotton Association would eventually reorganize itself in 1963—and sell its furniture.9