Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  Across the Atlantic, the government also came to play an ever more important role in the cotton industry. In response to the devastating agricultural crisis of the 1920s and the subsequent Great Depression, the New Deal created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which regulated production to match demand and provided subsidies to cotton farmers—roles that continue to this day with ever increasing controversy. Cotton growers and manufacturers themselves, cognizant of the increasing importance of government, founded the National Cotton Council in 1939 to lobby Washington and promote market and scientific research on cotton. The Foreign Agricultural Service, an agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was founded in 1953 to open markets for American cotton all over the world. Its mission continues unabated today. Throughout this period, tariffs and other protectionist measures tried to keep America’s increasingly besieged cotton spinning and weaving industry afloat. Yet in 1965, even in the cotton center of Fall River, the last cotton mill closed its doors.10 By the 1970s, America’s cotton complex, as well as the remnants of its British counterpart, was completely dependent on government policies.

  Though cotton merchants had facilitated the rise of the cotton empire in the nineteenth century, by the middle of the twentieth they could do little more than watch the state’s ascendancy. On the most extreme edge, Spain’s Francisco Franco and Argentina’s Juan Perón, among others, pushed for domestic cotton growing to insulate the nation from the world market. Yet the power of government projected itself nowhere more than in postcolonial and postcapitalist states, best exemplified by China’s “leap forward” and India’s five-year plans. In Communist China and independent India, state planners envisioned vast expansions in growth and manufacturing; production skyrocketed. In China, low prices for seeds, fertilizers, and farm supplies and generous farm credits, along with the encouragement of the use of fertilizers and insecticides on consolidated, state-owned land, and the preferential treatment of high-yield cotton strains, resulted in startling increases in cotton output. Cotton manufacturing took off as well: In 1952, the People’s Republic of China produced 656,000 tons of cotton thread, a remarkable increase from previous decades but still well behind the world’s leaders. By 1957 China had turned itself into the world’s third largest manufacturer of cotton yarns, its output two and a half times that of the United Kingdom. And in 1983 3.27 million tons poured out of its huge state-owned cotton mills.11 The growth of India’s industry followed suit.12

  The dominance of China, a self-proclaimed peasants’ and workers’ state, would have seemed like a hallucination to the cotton kings of the early nineteenth century—to the Hammonds of South Carolina, the Rylandses of Manchester, the Dollfuses of Mulhouse, the Barings of Liverpool, and the Volkarts of Winterthur. They could not have imagined that by 2008 a semimilitary unit of the People’s Republic of China, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, would grow 1.3 million tons of cotton, or 5 percent of the world’s total. Yet the coupling of state building and industrialization was the norm. That marriage would succeed in other parts of the world as well, such as the Soviet Union, which further recast cotton agriculture in Central Asia to facilitate a truly spectacular increase in the output of raw cotton. In 1980 the Soviet Union produced nearly 6 billion pounds of cotton, making it the world’s largest producer after China. These stratospheric gains—production increased by about 70 percent between 1950 and 1966 alone—were only possible because of massive state investments in irrigation, fertilizers, and machinery.13

  Chinese propaganda poster: We sell dry, clean, neat, and selected cotton to the state, Wu Shaoyun, 1958 (illustration credit 14.4)

  Such recourse to the state in postcolonial and postcapitalist societies was not a return to the war capitalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but a sharpening of the tools and an enhancing of the methods of industrial capitalism. Even though force continued to play an important role in mobilizing labor, outright physical coercion now represented industrial capitalism’s most extreme edge. While differences between the global South and Europe and North America were significant, from a long-term perspective what is most remarkable is the way that over the course of the twentieth century the trajectory of the empire of cotton converged more and more with the goals of state-led development.14 State-directed economic planning, which had claimed its first great victories in Europe’s scattered imperial possessions, was by the 1950s the globe’s efficient and seemingly inevitable norm.

  Yet the particular form of the state’s reign in the twentieth century would be as brief as the merchant’s reign in the nineteenth century. As mentioned, by the 1970s, with the decline of cotton manufacturing in Europe and the United States, and with the slow dissolution of the alliance between manufacturers and the state, the empire of cotton saw the emergence of a new breed of merchant—not the well-connected individual walking the streets of Liverpool inspecting cotton bales, but immense corporations that source their branded goods globally to sell them to consumers worldwide. The growth of this new group was aided immeasurably by two broader shifts that they had nothing to do with. As manufacturing, particularly of cotton textiles, became much less important to European and North American economies, the ability of north Atlantic states to shape the cotton industry shrank accordingly. But these merchants also grew more powerful as an unintended result of one of the state’s great successes. By the mid-twentieth century, governments had transformed the global countryside; the capitalization of everyday life had reached an unprecedented level. Most of the world’s people were now inextricably tied to both commodity production and consumption. As a result, capitalists no longer needed the state to turn rural cultivators into cotton growers, a reservoir of factory labor, and consumers of those textiles. That process was already far advanced, meaning that these new merchants can now profit from a larger market of consumers and a larger labor reservoir than has ever existed in human history.

  But their successes were also due to their ability to organize production globally, and to create branded goods and the sales channels to offer them for purchase all over the world. Unlike in the nineteenth century, these modern merchants focus not on the trade in raw cotton, yarn, and cloth, but on the apparel business. They source cotton, yarn, cloth, and clothing from the cheapest suppliers they can locate, without engaging in manufacturing themselves. They then focus their energies on developing channels to sell those goods, with branding, as in the case of the American company Gap (“Get together”), Chinese Meters/bonwe (“Be different”), and German Adidas (“Adidas is all in”), but also with the development of new forms of retailing, as in the case of Walmart (United States), Lojas Americanas S.A. (Brazil), and Carrefour (France). To dominate this global cotton supply chain, these merchants still depend on state power, but their reliance on any one specific state has lessened considerably. As a result, they foster competition not just between manufacturers and growers, but among states. In today’s empire of cotton, merchants have finally managed to emancipate themselves from their previous dependence on particular states. As a result, the protections that strong nation-states offered, to at least some of their workers, for at least part of the twentieth century, have been gradually eroded. Workers today are increasingly at the mercy of corporations that can easily shift all forms of production around the globe. Globalization is nothing new in the empire of cotton, but the ability of capitalists to utilize a number of states and thus remain free of the demands of all of them, is new. The state, the very institution that facilitated capitalists’ rise to wealth and power in the first place, is now increasingly desperate for their investments.

  Yet the prominence of today’s apparel giants and retailers should not blind us to ongoing patterns; these cotton capitalists continue to rely on the state—in many subtle ways, and some not so subtle ways. In the United States, as mentioned, huge subsidies keep cotton farmers in business: In 2001, the U.S. government paid a record $4 billion in subsidies to cotton growers, a cost that exceeded
the market value of the crop by 30 percent. To put it another way, these subsidies amounted to triple that year’s USAID payments to all of Africa, a part of the world where production costs for cotton were only about a third of what they were in the United States. In fact, in 2002, Brazil lodged a lawsuit against the United States through the World Trade Organization, alleging that the government’s cotton subsidies violated its own previous trade commitments. As part of the settlement, the U.S. government now also supports the Brazilian cotton economy, at a rate of $147.3 million a year. The European Union, in similar ways, produces its own small cotton harvest, in Spain and Greece, thanks to subsidies ranging from 160 to 189 percent of the world price for cotton. Highly subsidized cotton then is dumped onto world markets, depressing prices for the much more competitive cotton growers in Africa and elsewhere.15

  Elsewhere, states continue their active role in labor mobilization, making more cotton available for retailers to fashion into ever cheaper clothes. In Uzbekistan, the government forces children to help out in the cotton harvest (it has been estimated that up to 2 million children younger than fifteen are sent to the cotton fields), a “system [that] is only sustainable under conditions of political repression,” reports the International Crisis Group.16 In China the repression of independent trade union activity keeps wages low. The emancipation of capitalists from the state is thus not complete—the state still matters greatly—but because cotton capital itself has become fluid and not tied to particular territories, specific nation-states matter much less. Not only has the geographic shape of the empire of cotton shifted once more, but also the balance of power between growers, merchants, manufacturers, and the state. Capitalism’s endless revolution continues.

  Children harvesting cotton in Uzbekistan

  Today’s empire of cotton, just as it has for the last 250 years, connects growers, traders, spinners, weavers, manufacturers, and consumers over huge geographic distances in ever-changing spatial arrangements. This fundamental innovation—the connection across space—was first forged by connecting slavery and wage labor in the vicious cauldron of war capitalism, and has remained at the core of the empire of cotton ever since. Yet the geography of these connections has changed radically. Nodes once central within the empire of cotton—Lancashire, for example—have been marginalized, while formerly unimportant nodes, especially China, have become its very core.

  The geographical rearrangement of economic relations is not just a noteworthy element of capitalism or an interesting aspect of its history; rather the constant shifting recombination of various systems of labor, and various compositions of capital and polities is the very essence of capitalism. As capitalists search for ever cheaper labor, better infrastructure, and greater markets, they combine and recombine the world’s workers and consumers, and the world’s lands and its raw materials, in ever new ways.17 In that process, the collective action (or lack thereof) of workers matters a great deal, as do the policies (or lack thereof) of states. We have seen that the history of capital and cotton can only be understood if we consider the history of many different places and groups of people. Looking at just one part of the empire leads to vast misunderstandings, for example the characterization of the past fifty years as a world of deindustrialization (as some European and North American social scientists have described it), when exactly the opposite is true, as the greatest wave of industrialization ever has overtaken the globe.

  Capitalists, from the Barings of the eighteenth century to the titans of today’s global retailers, forged many of the connections that created the world we recognize today. Exploration of this history, however, reveals that capitalists and states arose hand in hand, each facilitating the ascendancy of the other. It is easy to assume, in our relentlessly branded world, that today’s vast corporations exist entirely on their own. Yet such a simplification misses the reality that, historically, capitalists’ greatest source of strength was their ability to rely on unusually powerful states—and simultaneously, for much of capitalism’s history, the greatest weakness of these same capitalists was that dependence on the state. It was this dependence that gave workers an opening to improve the conditions of their labor. We now know that the increasing emancipation of capital from particular nation-states has dramatic consequences for the world’s workers. Workers’ successes in improving their conditions almost always lead to the reallocation of capital. For the last several decades, Walmart and other retail giants have continually moved their production from one poor country to a slightly poorer one, lured by the promise of workers even more eager and even more inexpensive. Even Chinese production is now threatened by lower-wage producers.18 The empire of cotton has continued to facilitate a giant race to the bottom, limited only by the spatial constraints of the planet.

  The constant reshuffling of the empire of cotton, ranging from its geography to its systems of labor, points toward an essential element of capitalism: its ability to constantly adapt. Again and again, a seemingly insurmountable crisis in one part of the empire generated a response elsewhere; capitalism both demands and creates a state of permanent revolution.

  This permanent revolution is only possible because of the existence of places and people whose lives can be turned upside down. These frontiers of capitalism are often to be found in the world’s countryside, and the journey through the empire of cotton reveals that the global countryside should be at the center of our thinking about the origins of the modern world. Although our historical imaginations are usually dominated by cities, factories, and industrial workers, we have seen that much of the emergence of the modern world occurred in the countryside—by the often violent turning of rural people into the creators and consumers of commodities made or used elsewhere.

  This emphasis on the countryside allows for an equally important emphasis—the importance of coercion and violence to the history of capitalism. Slavery, colonialism, and forced labor, among other forms of violence, were not aberrations in the history of capitalism, but were at its very core. The violence of market making—forcing people to labor in certain locations and in certain ways—has been a constant throughout the history of the empire of cotton.

  This emphasis calls into question some of the most ingrained insights into the history of the modern world—for example, conceptualizing the nineteenth century, as is so often done, as an age of “bourgeois civilization,” in contrast with the twentieth century, which historian Eric Hobsbawm has termed the “age of catastrophe.”19 An assessment such as this can only be derived from a vision of the world that focuses its moral judgments on Europe. Looked at from the perspective of much of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, one can argue just the opposite—that the nineteenth century was an age of barbarity and catastrophe, as slavery and imperialism devastated first one pocket of the globe and then another. It is the twentieth century, by contrast, that saw the weakening of imperial powers and thus allowed more of the world’s people to determine their own futures and shake off the shackles of colonial domination. Without its Eurocentric distortions, decolonialization would be at the very center of the narrative we tell about the twentieth century—and this retelling would allow us to see that global capitalism today is most fundamentally shaped by the struggles for independence. Either way, our journey through the empire of cotton has shown that civilization and barbarity are linked at the hip, both in the evolution of the world’s first global industry and in the many other industries that have modeled themselves after it.

  Violence and coercion, in turn, are as adaptive as the capitalism they enable, and they continue to play an important role in the empire of cotton to this day. Cotton growers are still forced to grow the crop; workers are still held as virtual prisoners in factories. Moreover, the fruits of their activities continue to be distributed in radically unequal ways—with cotton growers in Benin, for example, making a dollar a day or less, while the owners of cotton growing businesses in the United States have collectively received government subsidies of more than $35 bi
llion between 1995 and 2010.20 Workers in Bangladesh stitch together clothing under absurdly dangerous conditions for very low wages, while consumers in the United States and Europe can purchase those pieces with abandon, at prices that often seem impossibly low.

  Within this larger story of domination and exploitation, however, sits a parallel story of liberation and creativity. The unfolding of global capitalism, and its awesome adaptations during the past 250 years, has resulted in enormous advances in productivity. As late as the 1950s, it took sixty days of hard spinning and weaving labor to produce enough clothing to fulfill the most minimal subsistence needs of a family of five in northern China. Today, the average American family (albeit at 2.5 persons also smaller than the Chinese family of the 1950s) spends only 3.4 percent of its household income on much more ample clothing—that is, the equivalent of approximately eight days of labor. Agriculture and industry have virtually exploded, as capitalist social relations have enabled a growth in the churning out of goods that has never been matched by any other system of production. Tellingly, today there are expectations that cotton production will triple or quadruple again by 2050. The human capacity to organize our efforts in ever more productive ways should give us hope, the hope that our unprecedented domination over nature will allow us also the wisdom, the power, and the strength to create a society that serves the needs of all the world’s people—an empire of cotton that is not only productive, but also just. Considering the perpetual clashes of power at the center of cotton’s story, a just world might seem like an idle dream. Yet, as we have witnessed in the preceding pages, the least powerful members of cotton’s empire have consistently tried to create such a world and at times also have succeeded in effecting dramatic changes: A world that seems stable and permanent in one moment can be radically transformed in the next. The capitalist revolution, after all, perpetually re-creates our world, just as the world’s looms perpetually manufacture new materials.21