Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  25. This is also explicitly argued in regard to the Ottoman Empire by Elena Frangakis-Syrett, The Commerce of Smyrna in the Eighteenth Century (1700–1820) (Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies, 1992), 14; Svoronos, Le commerce de Salonique au XVIIIe siècle, 246.

  26. Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 429–31.

  27. Arasaratnam, “Weavers, Merchants and Company,” 100; K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 259; Debendra Bijoy Mitra, The Cotton Weavers of Bengal, 1757–1833 (Calcutta: Firma KLM Private Limited, 1978), 5; Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Merchants and the Rise of Colonialism,” in Burton Stein and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 89.

  28. Arasaratnam, “Weavers, Merchants and Company,” 85; Diary, Consultation, 18 January 1796, in Surat Factory Diary No. 53, part 1, 1795–1796, Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai; the importance of economic and political power is also emphasized by Mitra, The Cotton Weavers of Bengal, 4; B. C. Allen, Eastern Bengal District Gazetteers: Dacca (Allahabad: Pioneer Press, 1912), 38–39; Subramanian, Indigenous Capital, 202–3, 332.

  29. K. N. Chaudhuri, “The Organisation and Structure of Textile Production in India,” in Roy, Cloth and Commerce, 59.

  30. Commercial Board Minute laid before the Board, Surat, September 12, 1795, in Surat Factory Diary No. 53, part 1, 1795–1796, Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai.

  31. Copy of Letter from Gamut Farmer, President, Surat, to Mr. John Griffith, Esq., Governor in Council Bombay, December 12, 1795, in Surat Factory Diary No. 53, part 1, 1795–1796, Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai; Arasaratnam, “Weavers, Merchants and Company,” 86; Board of Trade, Report of Commercial Occurrences, September 12, 1787, in Reports to the Governor General from the Board of Trade, RG 172, Box 393, Home Miscellaneous, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London; Letter from John Griffith, Bombay Castle to William [illegible], Esq., Chief President, October 27, 1795, in Surat Factory Diary No. 53, part 1, 1795–1796, Maharashtra State Archives; Hossain, “The Alienation of Weavers,” 121, 125; Mitra, The Cotton Weavers of Bengal, 9; Dispatch, London, May 29, 1799, in Bombay Dispatches, E/4, 1014, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London.

  32. Parthasarathi, “Merchants and the Rise of Colonialism,” 99–100; Arasaratnam, “Weavers, Merchants and Company,” 107, 109; Chaudhuri, “The Organisation and Structure of Textile Production in India,” 58–59; Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 261.

  33. Arasaratnam, “Weavers, Merchants and Company,” 102, 107; Mitra, The Cotton Weavers of Bengal, 48; Hossain, “The Alienation of Weavers,” 124–25.

  34. Bowanny Sankar Mukherjee as quoted in Hossain, “The Alienation of Weavers,” 129; Om Prakah, “Textile Manufacturing and Trade Without and with Coercion: The Indian Experience in the Eighteenth Century” (unpublished paper, Global Economic History Network Conference Osaka, December 2004), 26, accessed July 3, 2013, http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/Research/GEHN/GEHNPDF/PrakashGEHN5.pdf; Hossain, The Company Weavers of Bengal, 52; Vijaya Ramaswamy, Textiles and Weavers in South India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), xiii, 170; Copy of Letter from Board of Directors, London, April 20, 1795, to our President in Council at Bombay, in Surat Factory Diary No. 53, part 1, 1795–1796, in Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai.

  35. The importance of resistance is also stressed by Mitra, The Cotton Weavers of Bengal, 7; the importance of mobility is stressed by Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 252; Arasaratnam, “Weavers, Merchants and Company,” 103; see also Details Regarding Weaving in Bengal, Home Miscellaneous Series, 795, pp. 18–22, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London.

  36. Commercial Board Minute laid before the Board, Surat, September 12, 1795, in Surat Factory Diary No. 53, part 1, 1795–1796, Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai; Homes Miscellaneous Series, 795, pp. 18–22, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London. See also Parthasarathi, “Merchants and the Rise of Colonialism,” 94.

  37. Amalendu Guha, “The Decline of India’s Cotton Handicrafts, 1800–1905: A Quantitative Macro-study,” Calcutta Historical Journal 17 (1989): 41–42; Chaudhuri, “The Organisation and Structure of Textile Production in India,” 60; in 1786–87 it was estimated that 16,403 weavers were active in and around Dhaka. Homes Miscellaneous Series, 795, pp. 18–22, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London; Diary, Consultation, January 18, 1796, in Surat Factory Diary No. 53, part 1, 1795–1796, Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai.

  38. Dispatch from East India Company, London to Bombay, March 22, 1765, in Dispatches to Bombay, E/4, 997, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London, p. 611.

  39. Report of the Select Committee of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, Upon the Subject of the Cotton Manufacture of this Country, 1793, Home Miscellaneous Series, 401, p. 1, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London.

  40. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, 430; Inalcik, “The Ottoman State,” 355.

  41. M. D. C. Crawford, The Heritage of Cotton: The Fibre of Two Worlds and Many Ages (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924), xvii; the parliamentary debate is quoted in Cassels, Cotton, 1; the pamphlet is quoted in Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 75; Defoe and McVeagh, A Review of the State of the British Nation, vol. 4, 605–6; Copy of Memorial of the Callicoe Printers to the Lords of the Treasury, Received, May 4, 1779, Treasury Department, T 1, 552, National Archives of the UK, Kew. See, along very similar lines, “The Memorial of the Several Persons whose Names are herunto subscribed on behalf of themselves and other Callico Printers of Great Britain,” received July 1, 1780, at the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty’s Treasury, Treasury Department, T1, 563/72–78, National Archives of the UK, Kew.

  42. As quoted in S. V. Puntambekar and N. S. Varadachari, Hand-Spinning and Hand-Weaving: An Essay (Ahmedabad: All India Spinners’ Association, 1926), 49, 51ff., 58; Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, 431–32; Crawford, The Heritage of Cotton, xvii; Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 79; Wadsworth and Mann, The Cotton Trade, 132; Crawford, The Heritage of Cotton, xvii; Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite, 42; Petition to the Treasury by Robert Gardiner, in Treasury Department, T1, 517/ 100–101, National Archives of the UK, Kew; Wadsworth and Mann, The Cotton Trade, 128; Letter of Vincent Mathias to the Treasury, July 24, 1767, Treasury Department, T 1, 457, National Archives of the UK, Kew.

  43. Cousquer, Nantes, 12, 23, 43; Arrêt du conseil d’état du roi, 10 juillet 1785 (Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1785); André Zysberg, Les Galériens: Vies et destiny de 60,000 porçats sur les galeres de France, 1680–1748 (Paris: Sevid, 1987); Marc Vigié, Les Galériens du Roi, 1661–1715 (Paris: Fayard, 1985).

  44. Wadsworth and Mann, The Cotton Trade, 118–19; Examen des effets que doivent produire dans le commerce de France, l’usage et la fabrication des toiles peintes (Paris: Chez la Veuve Delaguette, 1759); Friedrich Wilhelm, King of Prussia, Edict dass von Dato an zu rechnen nach Ablauf acht Monathen in der Chur-Marck Magdeburgischen, Halberstadtschem und Pommern niemand einigen gedruckten oder gemahlten Zitz oder Cattun weiter tragen soll (Berlin: G. Schlechtiger, 1721); Yuksel Duman, “Notables, Textiles and Copper in Ottoman Tokat, 1750–1840” (PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1998), 144–45.

  45. François-Xavier Legoux de Flaix, Essai historique, géographique et politique sur l’Indoustan, avec le tableau de son commerce, vol. 2 (Paris: Pougin, 1807), 326; Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite, 3–42.

  46. See also George Bryan Souza, “Convergence Before Divergence: Global Maritime Economic History and Material Culture,” International Journ
al of Maritime History 17, no. 1 (2005): 17–27; Georges Roques, “La manière de négocier dans les Indes Orientales,” Fonds Français 14614, Bibliothèque National, Paris; Paul R. Schwartz, “L’impression sur coton à Ahmedabad (Inde) en 1678,” Bulletin de la Société Industrielle de Mulhouse, no. 1 (1967): 9–25; Cousquer, Nantes, 18–20; Jean Ryhiner, Traité sur la fabrication et le commerce des toiles peintes, commencés en 1766, Archive du Musée de l’Impression sur Étoffes, Mulhouse, France. See also the 1758 Réflexions sur les avantages de la libre fabrication et de l’usage des toiles peintes en France (Geneva: n.p., 1758), Archive du Musée de l’Impression sur Etoffes, Mulhouse, France; M. Delormois, L’art de faire l’indienne à l’instar d’Angleterre, et de composer toutes les couleurs, bon teint, propres à l’indienne (Paris: Charles-Antoine Jambert, 1770); Legoux de Flaix, Essai historique, vol. 2, 165, 331, as quoted in Florence d’Souza, “Legoux de Flaix’s Observations on Indian Technologies Unknown in Europe,” in K. S. Mathew, ed., French in India and Indian Nationalism, vol. 1 (Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1999), 323–24.

  47. Dorte Raaschou, “Un document Danois sur la fabrication des toiles Peintes à Tranquebar, aux Indes, à la fin du XVIII siècle,” in Bulletin de la Société Industrielle de Mulhouse, no. 4 (1967): 9–21; Wadsworth and Mann, The Cotton Trade, 119; Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, 432; Philosophical Magazine 30 (1808): 259; Philosophical Magazine 1 (1798): 4. See also S. D. Chapman, The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1972), 12; Philosophical Magazine 1 (1798): 126.

  48. Cotton Goods Manufacturers, Petition to the Lords Commissioner of His Majesty’s Treasury, Treasury Department, T 1, 676/30, National Archives of the UK, Kew; Dispatch, November 21, 1787, Bombay Dispatches, E/4, 1004, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London.

  49. Chapman, The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution, 16.

  50. Marion Johnson, “Technology, Competition, and African Crafts,” in Clive Dewey and A. G. Hopkins, eds., The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India (London: Athlone Press, 1978), 262; Irwin and Schwartz, Studies in Indo-European Textile History, 12. We know that throughout the eighteenth century, slaves were by far the most important “export” from Africa, amounting to between 80 and 90 percent of total trade. J. S. Hogendorn and H. A. Gemery, “The ‘Hidden Half’ of the Anglo-African Trade in the Eighteenth Century: The Significance of Marion Johnson’s Statistical Research,” in David Henige and T. C. McCaskie, eds., West African Economic and Social History: Studies in Memory of Marion Johnson (Madison: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 90; Extract Letter, East India Company, Commercial Department, London, to Bombay, May 4, 1791, in Home Miss. 374, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London; Cousquer, Nantes, 32; de Flaix is quoted in Richard Roberts, “West Africa and the Pondicherry Textile Industry,” in Roy, ed., Cloth and Commerce, 142.

  51. Wadsworth and Mann, The Cotton Trade, 116, 127, 147; Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, 434–35, 448; Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, bk. IV, ch. I, vol. I, 470.

  52. Wadsworth and Mann, The Cotton Trade, 122, 131, 151, 154; Extract Letter to Bombay, Commercial Department, May 4, 1791, in Home Miscellaneous 374, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London.

  53. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 277; George Unwin, in introduction to George W. Daniels, The Early English Cotton Industry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1920), xxx. This is brilliantly shown by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, “The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change and Economic Growth,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 9378, December 2002. What is missing in their account, however, is the continued importance of war capitalist institutions in other parts of the world, outside the European core.

  54. See here the important work of Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit, esp. 223–25; Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, 478–79; P. K. O’Brien and S. L. Engerman, “Exports and the Growth of the British Economy from the Glorious Revolution to the Peace of Amiens,” in Barbara Solow, ed., Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 191.

  55. Cited in Peter Spencer, Samuel Greg, 1758–1834 (Styal, Cheshire, UK: Quarry Bank Mill, 1989).

  56. See for example Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “After Columbus: Explaining Europe’s Overseas Trade Boom, 1500–1800,” Journal of Economic History 62 (2002): 417–56; Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, “Path Dependence, Time Lags and the Birth of Globalization: A Critique of O’Rourke and Williamson,” European Review of Economic History 8 (2004): 81–108; Janet Abu-Lughod, The World System in the Thirteenth Century: Dead-End or Precursor? (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1993); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). I am agreeing with Joseph E. Inikori, who has argued for the importance of “integrated commodity-production processes across the globe” to the history of globalization. See Joseph E. Inikori, “Africa and the Globalization Process: Western Africa, 1450–1850,” Journal of Global History (2007): 63–86.

  57. Mann, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain, 20.

  CHAPTER THREE: THE WAGES OF WAR CAPITALISM

  1. Anthony Howe, The Cotton Masters, 1830–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 41; Michael James, From Smuggling to Cotton Kings: The Greg Story (Cirencester, UK: Memoirs, 2010), 4, 8–9, 37–40; Mary B. Rose, The Gregs of Quarry Bank Mill: The Rise and Decline of a Family Firm, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5.

  2. Caitlin C. Rosenthal, “Slavery’s Scientific Management: Accounting for Mastery,” in Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming, 2015). A good discussion of the importance of slavery to industrialization can also be found in Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011), 104–7.

  3. The importance of the Atlantic trade in the great divergence is also emphasized by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, “The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change and Economic Growth,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 9378, December 2002, esp. 4; The depth of British society’s involvement with slavery, and the significant material benefits that it drew from it, are demonstrated by Nicholas Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  4. Rose, The Gregs of Quarry Bank Mill, 15–16, 20. He was, in fact, as his biographer Mary B. Rose argued, “responding to the growing demand for cloth”—a demand that he knew of firsthand. See Mary B. Rose, “The Role of the Family in Providing Capital and Managerial Talent in Samuel Greg and Company, 1784–1840,” Business History 19, no. 1 (1977): 37–53.

  5. James, From Smuggling to Cotton Kings, 21. For the conversion: Eric Nye, “Pounds Sterling to Dollars: Historical Conversion of Currency,” University of Wyoming, accessed January 9, 2013, http://www.uwyo.edu/numimage/currency.htm. Indeed, between 1801 and 1804, 59 percent of Greg’s production went to the United States; see Rose, The Gregs of Quarry Bank Mill, 24, 28, 30 33. For interest rates on bonds see David Stasavage, Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State: France and Great Britain, 1688–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 96.

  6. See David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technical Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: Norton, 1998); Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (New York: Penguin, 2011); Jared
Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1998). For an overview see also Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chapter 2.

  7. M. D. C. Crawford, The Heritage of Cotton: The Fibre of Two Worlds and Many Ages (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924), v; Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2001), 27. Even someone who emphasizes the slowness of the acceleration of economic growth in the Industrial Revolution like Nicholas Crafts still sees it as a watershed to “faster TFP growth.” See Nicholas Crafts, “The First Industrial Revolution: Resolving the Slow Growth/Rapid Industrialization Paradox,” Journal of the European Economic Association 3, no. 2/3 (May 2005): 525–39, here 533. But see Peter Temin, “Two Views of the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 57 (March 1997): 63–82, for a restatement of the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the British economy as a whole. There are nearly as many explanations for the Industrial Revolution as there are books on it. For a good overview see Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, chapter 2. But long-term and slow cultural or institutional change cannot explain the rather rapid divergence of Britain from other parts of the world.

  8. Peter Spencer, Samuel Greg, 1758–1834 (Styal: Quarry Bank Mill, 1989), 6.

  9. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 294; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London: Abacus, 1977), 49; Rose, The Gregs of Quarry Bank Mill, 7; Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta, “Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence: Lancashire, India and Shifting Competitive Advantage, 1600–1850,” CEPR Discussion Paper No. 5183, London, Centre for Economic Policy Research, August 2005, 7.