Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  10. Broadberry and Gupta, “Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence,” 27. Robert C. Allen rightly emphasizes the importance of the demand for more efficient machinery as a core driver for the Industrial Revolution. However, that demand for machines ultimately derived from the existence of vast markets for cotton goods and the ability of British capitalists to serve them. See Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), for example p. 137.

  11. The best exposition of this argument is to be found in Allen, The British Industrial Revolution; See also Broadberry and Gupta, “Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence”; K. N. Chaudhuri, “The Organisation and Structure of Textile Production in India,” in Tirthankar Roy, ed., Cloth and Commerce: Textiles in Colonial India (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996), 74; Friedrich Hassler, Vom Spinnen und Weben (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1952), 7.

  12. Almut Bohnsack, Spinnen und Weben: Entwicklung von Technik und Arbeit im Textilgewerbe (Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1981), 25, 201.

  13. Mike Williams and D. A. Farnie, Cotton Mills in Greater Manchester (Preston, UK: Carnegie, 1992), 9.

  14. S. & W. Salte to Samuel Oldknow, November 5, 1787, Record Group SO/1,265, Oldknow Papers, John Rylands Library, Manchester.

  15. S. D. Chapman, The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1972), 20; Broadberry and Gupta, “Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence,” 23.

  16. Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London; H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835) 353; Price of Mule Yarn from 1796 to 1843 sold by McConnel & Kennedy, Manchester, in McConnel & Kennedy Papers, record group MCK, file 3/3/8, John Rylands Library, Manchester; C. Knick Harley, “Cotton Textile Prices and the Industrial Revolution,” Economic History Review, New Series, 51, no. 1 (February 1998): 59.

  17. These numbers are just approximations. See Broadberry and Gupta, “Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence,” 8, 26; Chapman, The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution, 22, 29; Howe, The Cotton Masters, 6.

  18. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 46; Allen, The British Industrial Revolution, 191; Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, 269; Salvin Brothers of Castle Eden Co., Durham, to McConnel & Kennedy, Castle Eden, July 22, 1795, Letters, 1795, record group MCK, box 2/1/1, in McConnel & Kennedy Papers, John Rylands Library, Manchester.

  19. Patrick O’Brien, “The Geopolitics of a Global Industry: Eurasian Divergence and the Mechanization of Cotton Textile Production in England,” in Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 360. See also, Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, 258.

  20. For instance, the first “large purpose-built cotton-spinning mill” in the greater Manchester area was the Shudehill Mill, built around 1782. It was two hundred feet in length, thirty feet wide, and five stories high. See Williams and Farnie, Cotton Mills in Greater Manchester, 50; Stanley D. Chapman, The Early Factory Masters: The Transition to the Factory System in the Midlands Textile Industry (Newton Abbot, Devon, UK: David & Charles, 1967), 65.

  21. Williams and Farnie, Cotton Mills in Greater Manchester, 4–9; Harold Catling, The Spinning Mule (Newton Abbot, Devon, UK: David & Charles, 1970), 150.

  22. Charles Tilly, “Social Change in Modern Europe: The Big Picture,” in Lenard R. Berlanstein, ed., The Industrial Revolution and Work in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 53.

  23. M. Elvin, “The High-Level Equilibrium Trap: The Causes of the Decline of Invention in the Traditional Chinese Textile Industries,” in W. E. Willmott, ed., Economic Organization in Chinese Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972), 137ff. See also Sucheta Mazumdar, Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology and the World Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 183; Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 44.

  24. For this argument see Roy Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Chaudhuri, “The Organisation and Structure of Textile Production in India,” 57.

  25. Rose, The Gregs of Quarry Bank Mill, 39–40; Chapman, The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution, 29; William Emerson to McConnel & Kennedy, Belfast, December 8, 1795, in John Rylands Library, Manchester.

  26. Chapman, The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution, 29, 32; Howe, The Cotton Masters, 9, 11–12.

  27. A. C. Howe, “Oldknow, Samuel (1756–1828),” in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); George Unwin, Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights: The Industrial Revolution at Stockport and Marple (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1968), 2, 6, 45, 107, 123, 127, 135, 140.

  28. Chapman, The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution, 31, 37–41; Howe, The Cotton Masters, 24, 27; M. J. Daunton, Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1700–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 199; Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, 268.

  29. Partnership Agreement Between Benjamin Sanford, William Sanford, John Kennedy, and James McConnel, 1791: 1/2; Personal Ledger, 1795–1801: 3/1/1, Papers of McConnel & Kennedy, John Rylands Library, Manchester.

  30. N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth During the Industrial Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 22; Bohnsack, Spinnen und Weben, 26; Allen, The British Industrial Revolution, 182; Howe, The Cotton Masters, 1, 51.

  31. Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 109.

  32. Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

  33. Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, 335; R. C. Allen and J. L. Weisdorf, “Was There an ‘Industrious Revolution’ Before the Industrial Revolution? An Empirical Exercise for England, c. 1300–1830,” Economic History Review 64, no. 3 (2011): 715–29; 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), 184, 188, 200; Broadberry and Gupta, “Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence,” 5; Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, 349–50; For the general point see Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, 436, 450; Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 49. The table on page 74 is based on figures in Tables X and XI in Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter and T. S. Ashton, English Overseas Trade Statistics, 1697–1808 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 29–34. Table X provides values of the principal English exports of textile goods, excluding woolens, for the years 1697 to 1771, 1775, and 1780 in pounds sterling. Table XI provides quantities and values of the principal British exports of textile goods, excluding woolens, for 1772–1807 in pounds sterling, with the years 1772–91 including England and Wales and 1792–1807 including all of Great Britain.

  34. O’Brien and Engerman, “Exports and the Growth of the British Economy,” 185; Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, 349.

  35. Debendra Bijoy Mitra, The Cotton Weavers of Bengal, 1757–1833 (Calcutta: Firm KLM Private Ltd., 1978), 25; John Taylor, Account of the District of Dacca by the Commercial Resident Mr. John Taylor in a Letter to the Board of Trade at Calcutta dated 30th November 1800 with P.S. 2 November 1801 and Inclosures, In Reply to a Letter from the Board dated 6th February 1798 transmitting Copy of the 115th Paragraph of the General Letter from the Court of Directors dated 9th May 1797 Inviting the Collection of Materials for the use of the Company’s Historiographer, Home Miscellaneous Series, 456, Box F, pp. 111–12, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London;
The Principal Heads of the History and Statistics of the Dacca Division (Calcutta: E. M. Lewis, 1868), 129; Shantha Harihara, Cotton Textiles and Corporate Buyers in Cottonopolis: A Study of Purchases and Prices in Gujarat, 1600–1800 (Delhi: Manak, 2002), 75; “Extracts from the Reports of the Reporter of External Commerce in Bengal; from the year 1795 to the latest Period for which the same can be made up,” in House of Commons Papers, vol. 8 (1812–13), 23. See also Konrad Specker, “Madras Handlooms in the Nineteenth Century,” in Roy, ed., Cloth and Commerce, 179; G. A. Prinsep, Remarks on the External Commerce and Exchanges of Bengal (London: Kingsbury, Parbury, and Allen, 1823), 28; “The East-India and China Trade,” Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India and Its Dependencies 28, no. 164 (August 1829): 150.

  36. O’Brien and Engerman, “Exports and the Growth of the British Economy,” 177–209; Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, 445, 447–48; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 266; 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), 263.

  37. To amplify: Institutions, as many observers have remarked, matter a great deal. The problem, however, is to define these institutions and root their emergence in a particular historical process. Institutions are not a question of the “will” of historical actors; they are instead the result of the confluence of a number of factors, and, most important of all, of particular balances of social power. As we will see in later chapters, the social and political configurations of many parts of the world did not lend themselves to such an embrace of industrial capitalism, or the institutions that usually go with it. The report of the French commission is cited in Henry Brooke Parnell, On Financial Reform, 3rd ed. (London: John Murray, 1832), 84; William J. Ashworth, “The Ghost of Rostow: Science, Culture and the British Industrial Revolution,” History of Science 156 (2008): 261.

  38. On the Royal Navy, see O’Brien and Engerman, “Exports and the Growth of the British Economy,” 189–90. I agree here with the more recent literature that emphasizes the crucial importance of institutions. The argument has been made most persuasively by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown Business, 2012). However, in Acemoglu and Robinson’s account, these institutions remain somewhat amorphous and their own histories (and with it their roots in war capitalism) remain unspecified. For an insistence on the importance of institutions see also Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The Six Killer Apps of Western Power (London: Penguin, 2012).

  39. See here also the intriguing argument by Acemoglu et al., “The Rise of Europe.”

  40. Howe, The Cotton Masters, 90, 94.

  41. Petition of manufacturers of calicoes, muslins and other cotton goods in Glasgow asking for extension of exemption for Auction Duty Act, July 1, 1789 (received), Treasury Department, record group T 1, 676/30, National Archives of the UK, Kew.

  42. See Allen, The British Industrial Revolution, 5.

  43. Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, 321–29.

  44. Ibid., 503–4; William J. Ashworth, Customs and Excise Trade, Production, and Consumption in England, 1640–1845 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4, 8; O’Brien and Engerman, “Exports and the Growth of the British Economy,” 206; Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal 61 (July 1835): 455.

  45. Making use of the numbers provided by Kenneth Pomeranz, which can only be considered rough estimates, the precise factor is 417. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 139, 337; Kenneth Pomeranz, “Beyond the East-West Binary: Resituating Development Paths in the Eighteenth-Century World,” Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 2 (May 1, 2002): 569; Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, 215.

  46. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 44; Thomas Ashton to William Rathbone VI, Flowery Fields, January 17, 1837, Record Group RP.IX.1.48–63, Rathbone Papers, University of Liverpool, Special Collections and Archives, Liverpool; the English visitor is quoted in Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), 89; Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, trans. George Lawrence and K. P. Mayer, ed. K. P. Mayer (London: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 107–8; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIX.

  47. Dale Tomich and Michael Zeuske, “The Second Slavery: Mass Slavery, World-Economy, and Comparative Microhistories,” Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 31, no. 3 (2008), 91–100; Michael Zeuske, “The Second Slavery: Modernity, Mobility, and Identity of Captives in Nineteenth-Century Cuba and the Atlantic World,” in Javier Lavina and Michael Zeuske, eds., The Second Slavery: Mass Slaveries and Modernity in the Americas and in the Atlantic Basin (Berlin, Münster, and New York: LIT Verlag, 2013); Dale Tomich, Rafael Marquese, and Ricardo Salles, eds., Frontiers of Slavery (Binghamton: State University of New York Press, forthcoming).

  48. J. De Cordova, The Cultivation of Cotton in Texas: The Advantages of Free Labour, A Lecture Delivered at the Town Hall, Manchester, on Tuesday, the 28th day of September, 1858, before the Cotton Supply Association (London: J. King & Co., 1858), 70–71.

  CHAPTER FOUR: CAPTURING LABOR, CONQUERING LAND

  1. A. Moreau de Jonnes, “Travels of a Pound of Cotton,” Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India and Its Dependencies 21 (January–June 1826) (London: Kingsbury, Parbury & Allen, 1826), 23.

  2. J. T. Danson, “On the Existing Connection Between American Slavery and the British Cotton Manufacture,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 20 (March 1857): 6, 7, 19. For a similar argument see also Elisée Reclus, “Le coton et la crise Améri-caine,” Revue des Deux Mondes 37 (1862): 176, 187. Arguments about the connection between capitalism and slavery can also be found in Philip McMichael, “Slavery in Capitalism: The Rise and Demise of the U.S. Ante-Bellum Cotton Culture,” Theory and Society 20 (June 1991): 321–49; Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

  3. “Cotton, Raw, Quantity Consumed and Manufactured,” in Levi Woodbury, United States Deptartment of the Treasury, Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury transmitting Tables and Notes on the Cultivation, Manufacture, and Foreign Trade of Cotton (1836), 40.

  4. For the concept of “second slavery” see Dale Tomich, “The Second Slavery: Mass Slavery, World-Economy, and Comparative Histories,” Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 31, no. 3 (2008). For the commodity frontier see Jason W. Moore, “Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy: Commodity Frontiers, Ecological Transformation, and Industrialization,” Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 23, no. 3 (2000): 409–33. See also Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011), 22.

  5. On cotton growing in France see C. P. De Lasteyrie, Du cotonnier et de sa culture (Paris: Bertrand, 1808); Notice sur le coton, sa culture, et sur la posibilité de le cultiver dans le département de la Gironde, 3rd ed. (Bordeaux: L’Imprimerie de Brossier, 1823); on this effort see also Morris R. Chew, History of the Kingdom of Cotton and Cotton Statistics of the World (New Orleans: W. B. Stansbury & Co., 1884), 48. On efforts to grow cotton in Lancashire see John Holt, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Lancaster (London: G. Nicol, 1795), 207.

  6. N. G. Svoronos, Le commerce de Salonique au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956), 67; Bombay Dispatches, IO/E/4, 996, pp. 351, 657; British Library, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London; Eliyahu Ashtor, “The Venetian Cotton Trade in Syria in the Later Middle Ages,” Studi Medievali, ser. 3, vol. 17 (1976): 676, 682, 686.
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  7. In 1790, the cotton consumption of Great Britain amounted to 30.6 million pounds. Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835), 215, 347, 348; Thomas Ellison, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain (London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, 1886), 49; Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 99; Bernard Lepetit, “Frankreich, 1750–1850,” in Wolfram Fischer et al., eds, Handbuch der Europäischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, vol. 4 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1993), 487; Bremer Handelsblatt 2 (1851): 4.

  8. Ellison, The Cotton Trade, 82–83; Michael M. Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 1780–1815 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 75.

  9. William Edensor, An Address to the Spinners and Manufacturers of Cotton Wool, Upon the Present Situation of the Market (London: The Author, 1792), 15. There was always a shortage of labor, which meant that production on plantations was unimaginable. Huri Islamoglu-Inan, “State and Peasants in the Ottoman Empire: A Study of Peasant Economy in North-Central Anatolia During the Sixteenth Century,” in Huri Islamoglu-Inan, ed., The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 126; Elena Frangakis-Syrett, The Commerce of Smyrna in the Eighteenth Century (1700–1820) (Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies, 1992), 11, 236; Resat Kasaba, The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy: The Nineteenth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 25–27. On the capital shortage see Donald Quataert, “The Commercialization of Agriculture in Ottoman Turkey, 1800–1914,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 1 (1980): 44–45. On the importance of political independence see Sevket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820–1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 53; Ellison, The Cotton Trade, 82–83; Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 86.