by Sven Beckert
Acknowledgments
Researching and writing this book in many ways parallels its subject, involving, as it did, people and documents from all over the world. The journey was a great adventure. I will never forget the days during the depths of the Argentine financial crisis when I was sitting in the basement archives of the Banco de la Provincia de Buenos Aires and heard the heavy metal gates of the bank’s front door go noisily up and down in a predictable rhythm, to protect the building from demonstrators who passed the bank. I will never forget the reception room of the National Archives of Cairo, where I spent many hours sipping tea with its director as he tried to get me access to early nineteenth-century records that the state deemed too sensitive to be perused by a historian. I will never forget the moment a librarian at the Musée de l’Impression sur Etoffes in the French city of Mulhouse opened the door to a room filled to the ceiling with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cotton textile samples. And I will never forget sitting in the courtyard of the bar of the Colònia Vidal in the Llobregat valley of Catalonia in Spain imagining the lives that generations of workers spent in this company town, serving the needs of a voracious cotton mill.
This book has been researched on every continent and I am grateful to the librarians and archivists who, under often difficult circumstances, have protected the materials on which this book is based and made them accessible to me. I specifically thank those who helped me at the archives of the Japanese Spinners Association in Osaka, the National Archives of Australia, the National Archives and Library of Egypt, the rare books collection at the American University of Cairo, the National Archives of India, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, the Maharashtra State Archives in Mumbai, the Bombay Chamber of Commerce, the Bombay Millowners’ Association, the (Bombay) Asia Library, the Archives nationales d’outre mer in Aix-en-Provence, the Archives Nationales and the Archives diplomatiques—Quai d’Orsay in Paris, the Société Industrielle and the Musée de l’Impression sur Etoffes in Mulhouse, the Volkart Archives in Winterthur, the Chamber of Commerce in Barcelona, the Bundesarchiv Berlin, the Handelskammer Hamburg, the Handelskammer Bremen, the Bremer Baumwollbörse, the Staatsarchiv Bremen, the ING Baring Archives, the National Archives of the United Kingdom in Kew, the Guildhall Library, the British Library, and the Bank of England Archive in London, the Manchester Archives and Local Studies, the John R. Rylands Library, the Greater Manchester County Record Office, the Liverpool Record Office, the library of the University of Liverpool, the Merseyside Maritime Museum, the Historical Collections at Harvard Business School, Widener Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New-York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico, the Biblioteca Pedro Sainz de Baranda of Valladolid, the Banco de Provincia de Buenos Aires, and the Biblioteca Tornquist in Buenos Aires.
Along the way, many research assistants helped me master the materials. In Canberra, Australia, Lawrence Niewójt assisted me, as did Natsuko Kitani in Osaka. Amit Mishra supported my work in Delhi, Dr. Abdel-Wahid in Cairo, Amilcar Challu in Buenos Aires, and Pauline Peretz in Paris. Over the years, many research assistants also helped me work through what became a very complicated history, among them, in Cambridge, Rudi Batzell, Par Cassel, Lui Chang, Jane Chen, Marlee Chong, Eli Cook, Rui Dong, Balraj Gill, Heather Souvaine Horn, Louis Hyman, Diana Kimball, Noam Maggor, Maximillian Mason, Paul Mathis, Shaun Nichols, Nathan Pearl-Rosenthal, Arjun Ramamurti, Leonid Sidorov, Liat Spiro, Luise Tremel, Niki Usher, Ann Wilson, Julie Yen, and Jenny Zhang, and, in Freiburg, Lukas Bowinkelmann, Ralf Meindl, Lukas Nemela, and Carsten Vogelpohl. Thank you to all of you—I could not have done it without your help. And also thanks to my students at Harvard University, whose never-ending curiosity helped propel my own.
I also want to thank the people and audiences who engaged with my work in Sydney, Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Hong Kong, New Delhi, Kolkata, Tel Aviv, Dakar, Leipzig, Jena, Frankfurt, Munich, Linz, Amsterdam, Basel, Zurich, Geneva, Nottingham, London, Manchester, Brighton, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires, as well as at universities all over the United States.
Thank you also to Jane Garrett of Alfred A. Knopf for her early encouragement of this project; to William Kirby at Harvard for his belief in me; to Shigeru Akita and Takeshi Abe for helping me navigate the resources available in Osaka; to Jun Furuya for always making me feel welcome in Tokyo (and helping me navigate the worst earthquake in Japan’s history); to Babacar Fall and Omar Gueye for their hospitality in Dakar; to Rafael Marquese for debating the subjects of this book over a delicious meal of Maranhão cuisine in São Paulo; to Charles Forcey, the world’s foremost magician of words; to John Killick at Leeds for providing me with some of his unpublished work; to Gavin Wright for his feedback at an early stage; to Peter Knight for pointing me to some important sources; to Cyrus Veeser for his sharp insights; to Julia Seibert in Cairo for helping me understand the impact of colonialism on African labor regimes; to Mauro and all the Palas in Alghero for allowing me to write in their good company in a beautiful part of the world; to my extended family in Liverpool—John, Heather, Ian, and Andrew McFadzean—who introduced me to the city that like no other has been synonymous with the history of cotton when they allowed me to spend summers as a high school student working in their small corner store selling newspapers and sweets; to Dieter Plehwe in Berlin for our endless conversation about capitalism, and his friendship; to Christine Desan at Harvard Law School for having helped make capitalism studies respectable; to Gilles Palsky in Paris, who helped me get access to some extraordinary maps about the global cotton trade; to Uta Beckert for her leads on Mesopotamian cotton; to Neus Santamaria of the Consorci del Parc Fluvial del Llobregat for helping me understand the extraordinary story of Catalonian industrialization; to Aditya and Mridula Mukerjee, Prabhu Mohapatra, and all my friends in New Delhi for including me in their never-ending conversations on the great inequalities that characterize the world and India; and to Irfan Habib in New Delhi, Sakae Tsunoya in Sakai, Eric Foner in New York, Jürgen Osterhammel in Konstanz, and Ibrahima Thioub in Dakar for engaging with my ideas and for being such inspiring historians. Last but not least, a special thank-you to my colleague and friend Charles Maier, whose early encouragement made all the difference.
A book such as this needs significant resources to be written and I am grateful for the good luck of having had access to such resources, a privilege that very few historians in the world enjoy. A grant from the Kittredge Fund made the early stages of the research possible. Later, at Harvard, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Milton Fund, the Asia Center, the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies, and, especially, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs provided urgently needed resources. I started conceptualizing the book when I spent a year at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and its director, Peter Gay, created a most inspiring setting for thinking about a new project and for thinking big. Later the Humboldt Foundation awarded me a prize that allowed me to dedicate a year to the research of this book, and still later the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University provided me with time away from teaching to draft the manuscript. At a moment when support for the humanities and social sciences is rapidly shrinking I cannot thank these institutions enough for their belief that understanding how our world turned out the way it did continues to matter.
When the manuscript was nearly done, a group of friends read some or all of it and provided valuable feedback, and I thank Elizabeth Blackmar, Sugata Bose, Vincent Brown, Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Stanley Engermann, Eric Foner, Andrew Gordon, Steven Hahn, Noam Maggor, Terry Martin, Amit Mishra, Roger Owen, Michael Ralph, Seth Rockman, Dan Smail, Marcel van der Linden, Cyrus Veeser, and John Womack. Their wisdom and insights made a significant difference, even though I have ignored, at my peril, some of their advice.
Many people have helped
put this manuscript into shape. David Lobenstine and Martha Schulmann made a heroic effort to help me edit, and Victoria Wilson and Audrey Silverman shepherded it expertly through production.
Most important, however, I want to thank my family. Lisa McGirr was there from the very beginning, read numerous drafts of every chapter, and helped me along when things got difficult. The dedication is a very small thank-you for all her support. My children, Noah and Pascal, grew up alongside this book. Only recently did they tell me that discussions on cotton were such a prominent feature in our house that for many years they had believed that I was a “professor of cotton.” They will be relieved to see me move on to something else.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. The Thirty-Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce for the Year 1859 (Manchester: Cave & Sever, 1860), 18, 19, 22, 23, 33, 34, 38, 39, 45.
2. “Liverpool. By Order of the Liverpool Cotton Association Ltd., Catalogue of the Valuable Club Furnishings etc. to be Sold by Auction by Marsh Lyons & Co., Tuesday, 17th December 1963,” Greater Manchester County Record Office, Manchester, UK.
3. “Monthly Economic Letter: U.S. and Global Market Fundamentals,” Cotton Incorporated, accessed January 23, 2013, http://www.cottoninc.com/corporate/Market-Data/MonthlyEconomicLetter/; “The Fabric of Our Lives,” accessed July 1, 2012, http://www.thefabricofourlives.com/.
4. The average weight of a sheep fleece in the United States is 7.3 pounds according to “Fast Facts…About American Wool,” American Sheep Industry Association, accessed March 10, 2013, www.sheepusa.org. The total weight of the world’s cotton crop was divided by this number to find how many sheep it would take to produce the same amount of wool by weight. Government of South Australia, “Grazing livestock—a sustainable and productive approach,” Adelaide & Mt Lofty Ranges Natural Resource Management Board, accessed March 10, 2013, www.amlrnrm.sa.gov.au/Portals/2/landholders_info/grazing_web.pdf; “European Union,” CIA—The World Factbook, accessed March 16, 2013, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ee.html. According to the first source, it was assumed that one hectare of land can support ten dry sheep, if available for grazing twelve months of the year. This was used to calculate the area of land required to sustain 7 billion sheep and then that was compared to the size of the EU, which is 4,324,782 km2 according to the CIA World Factbook.
5. Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835), 5–6; see Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
6. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1998); David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: Norton, 1998); Niall Ferguson, The West and the Rest (New York: Allen Lane, 2011); Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe,” Past and Present no. 70 (February 1976): 30–75; Robert Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” Past and Present, no. 97 (November 1982): 16–113; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1963).
7. There is a vibrant literature on slavery and capitalism, including Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961); Rafael de Bivar Marquese, “As desventuras de um conceito: Capitalismo histórico e a historiografia sobre escravidão brasileira,” Revista de Historia 169 (July/December 2013), 223–53; Philip McMichael, “Slavery in the Regime of Wage Labor: Beyond Paternalism in the U.S. Cotton Culture,” Social Concept 6 (1991): 10–28; Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman, British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 1978); Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Dale Tomich, “The Second Slavery: Mass Slavery, World-Economy, and Comparative Microhistories,” Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 31, no. 3 (2008); Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011).
8. Cotton Supply Reporter, no. 37 (March 1, 1860): 33.
9. Andrew Ure, The Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain Systematically Investigated, and Illustrated by 150 Original Figures, vol. 1 (London: Charles Knight, 1836), 67–68.
10. Bruno Biedermann, “Die Versorgung der russischen Baumwollindustrie mit Baumwolle eigener Produktion” (PhD dissertation, University of Heidelberg, 1907), 4; Edward Atkinson, Cotton: Articles from the New York Herald (Boston: Albert J. Wright, 1877), 4.
11. E. J. Donnell, Chronological and Statistical History of Cotton (New York: James Sutton & Co., 1872), v.
12. There exists a vast literature on this topic, including Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 3, The Second Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730–1840s (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989); Dale W. Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy, 1830–1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Abdoulaye Ly, La théorisation de la connexion capitaliste des continents (Dakar: IFAAN, 1994); John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review, Second Series, 51 (1953): 1–15; Patrick Wolfe, “History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory,” American Historical Review 102 (April 1997): 388–420.
13. Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 530–31.
14. See, for example, Gene Dattel, Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2009); Morris de Camp Crawford, The Heritage of Cotton: The Fibre of Two Worlds and Many Ages (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924).
15. The global history literature is burgeoning. It is hardly a new invention, however. Just recall early contributions such as Abdoulaye Ly, La Compagnie du Sénégal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1958); Marc Bloch, “Toward a Comparative History of European Societies,” in Frederic Chapin Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma, eds., Enterprise and Secular Change: Readings in Economic History (Homewood, IL: R. D. Irwin, 1953); Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938). See also C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004); Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). For overviews of the literature see Sebastian Conrad, Globalgeschichte: Eine Einführung (Munich: Beck, 2013); Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives in Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global History Globally (forthcoming); Bruce Mazlich and Ralph Buultjens, Conceptualizing Global History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993); Jerry Bentley, “The Task of World History” (unpublished paper, in author’s possession). See also Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Jan Luiten van Zanden, The Long Road to Industrial Revolution: The European Economy in a Global Perspective, 1000–1800 (Amsterdam: Brill, 2009) and the excellent work of Patrick O’Brien, for example, “European Economic Development: The Contribution of the Periphery,” Economic History Review, Second Series, 35 (February 1982): 1–18.
16. Studies on commodities have been many in recent years. See especially Sydney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985); Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (New York: Walker and Co., 2002); Barbara Freese, Coal: A Human History (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2003); Pietra Rivoli, The Travels of a T‑shirt in the Global Economy: An
Economist Examines the Markets, Power and Politics of World Trade (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005); Larry Zuckerman, The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1998); Wolfgang Mönninghoff, King Cotton: Kulturgeschichte der Baumwolle (Düsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler, 2006); Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York: Walker & Co., 1997); Allan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin, Glass: A World History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Stephen Yaffa, Big Cotton: How a Humble Fiber Created Fortunes, Wrecked Civilizations, and Put America on the Map (New York: Penguin, 2005); Erik Orsenna, Voyage aux pays du coton: Petit précis de mondialisation (Paris: Fayard, 2006); Iain Gateley, Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization (New York: Grove, 2001); Heinrich Eduard Jacob, Kaffee: Die Biographie eines weltwirtschaftlichen Stoffes (Munich: Oekom Verlag, 2006). A beautiful discussion of the “biography of things” can be found in the 1929 discussion of Sergej Tretjakow, “Die Biographie des Dings,” in Heiner Boehnke, ed., Die Arbeit des Schriftstellers (Reinbeck: Ro-wolt, 1972), 81–86; more generally on commodities, see Jens Soentgen, “Geschichten über Stoffe,” Arbeitsblätter für die Sachbuchforschung (October 2005): 1–25; Jennifer Bair, “Global Capitalism and Commodity Chains: Looking Back, Going Forward,” Competition and Change 9 (June 2005): 153–80; Immanuel Wallerstein, Commodity Chains in the World-Economy, 1590–1790 (Binghamton, NY: Fernand Braudel Center, 2000). A good example for a successfully recast economic history is William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991). Good discussions on the rich historiography on the Industrial Revolution can be found in Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, chapter 2; William J. Ashworth, “The Ghost of Rostow: Science, Culture and the British Industrial Revolution,” Historical Science 46 (2008): 249–74. For an emphasis on the importance of the spatial aspects of capitalism see David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001).
