Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  9. Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South, 13; Gray, History of Agriculture, 735.

  10. Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South, 13; on Whitney see Scherer, Cotton as a World Power, 155–67; Stuart W. Bruchey, Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 1790–1860: Sources and Readings (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 45; Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) disagrees, in my eyes unpersuasively, with this account; David Ramsay, Ramsay’s History of South Carolina, From Its First Settlement in 1670 to the Year 1808, vol. 2 (Newberry, SC: W. J. Duffie, 1858), 121.

  11. Stanley Dumbell, “Early Liverpool Cotton Imports and the Organisation of the Cotton Market in the Eighteenth Century,” Economic Journal 33 (September 1923): 370; Chaplin, “Creating a Cotton South,” 187; here she summarizes one such story; Gray, History of Agriculture, 685; Lacy K. Ford, “Self-Sufficiency, Cotton, and Economic Development in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860,” Journal of Economic History 45 (June 1985): 261–67.

  12. The numbers are from Adam Rothman, “The Expansion of Slavery in the Deep South, 1790–1820” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2000), 20; Allan Kulikoff, “Uprooted People: Black Migrants in the Age of the American Revolution, 1790–1820,” in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 149; Peter A. Coclanis and Lacy K. Ford, “The South Carolina Economy Reconstructed and Reconsidered: Structure, Output, and Performance, 1670–1985,” in Winfred B. Moore Jr. et al., Developing Dixie: Modernization in a Traditional Society (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 97; Allan Kulikoff, “Uprooted People,” 149; Gray, History of Agriculture, 685.

  13. Farmer’s Register, vol. 1, 490, as quoted in William Chandler Bagley, Soil Exhaustion and the Civil War (Washington, DC: American Council on Public Affairs, 1942), 18–19; Bruchey, Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 80–81.

  14. United States, Department of Commerce and Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), 518; Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835), 302; Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 89, 95; Ramsay, Ramsay’s History of South Carolina, 121.

  15. Coxe, A Memoir of February 1817, 3.

  16. For a most interesting discussion on frontier spaces see John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2003), 72–76.

  17. Note by Thomas Baring, Sunday, June 19, in NP 1. A. 4. 13, Northbrook Papers, Baring Brothers, ING Baring Archive, London.

  18. Gray, History of Agriculture, 686, 901; the story is summarized in Rothman, “The Expansion of Slavery in the Deep South,” 155–69; see also Daniel H. Usner Jr., American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 83–89; James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 7; Lawrence G. Gundersen Jr., “West Tennessee and the Cotton Frontier, 1818–1840,” West Tennessee Historical Society Papers 52 (1998): 25–43; David Hubbard to J. D. Beers, March 7, 1835, in New York and Mississippi Land Company Records, 1835–1889, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison. Thanks to Richard Rabinowitz for bringing this source to my attention.

  19. Dewi Ioan Ball and Joy Porter, eds., Competing Voices from Native America (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2009), 85–87.

  20. This story is related in fascinating detail in Rothman, “The Expansion of Slavery in the Deep South,” 20ff.; Gray, History of Agriculture, 709; Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom, 6; John F. Stover, The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads (New York: Routledge, 1999), 15.

  21. American Cotton Planter 1 (1853): 152; De Bow’s Review 11 (September 1851): 308; see also James Mann, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1860), 53; Elena Frangakis-Syrett, The Commerce of Smyrna in the Eighteenth Century (1700–1820) (Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies, 1992), 237.

  22. Charles Mackenzie, Facts, Relative to the Present State of the British Cotton Colonies and to the Connection of Their Interests (Edinburgh: James Clarke, 1811), 35; “Cotton. Cultivation, manufacture, and foreign trade of. Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury,” March 4, 1836 (Washington, DC: Blair & Rives, 1836), 16, accessed July 29, 2013, http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011159609.

  23. Allan Kulikoff, “Uprooted People,” 143–52; James McMillan, “The Final Victims: The Demography, Atlantic Origins, Merchants, and Nature of the Post-Revolutionary Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783–1810” (PhD dissertation, Duke University, 1999), 40–98; Walter Johnson, “Introduction,” in Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 6; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Rothman, “The Expansion of Slavery in the Deep South,” 59, 84, 314; Scherer, Cotton as a World Power, 151; Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 12.

  24. See John H. Moore, “Two Cotton Kingdoms,” Agricultural History 60, no. 4 (Fall 1986): 1–16; numbers are from Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South, 27–28; Ronald Bailey, “The Other Side of Slavery: Black Labor, Cotton, and Textile Industrialization in Great Britain and the United States,” Agricultural History 68 (Spring 1994): 38.

  25. John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England: Electronic Edition, ed. Louis Alexis Chamerovzow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2001), 11, 27, 171–72, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jbrown/jbrown.html, originally published in 1854; Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself: Electronic Edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2000), 132, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/bibb.html, originally published in 1815.

  26. William Rathbone VI to Rathbone Brothers, February 2, 1849, RP/ XXIV.2.4, File of Correspondence, Letters from William Rathbone VI while in America, Rathbone Papers, Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool, Liverpool; The Liverpool Chronicle is quoted in Bremer Handelsblatt 93 (1853): 6.

  27. This whole story is developed in John Casper Branner, Cotton in the Empire of Brazil: The Antiquity, Methods and Extent of Its Cultivation, Together with Statistics of Exportation and Home Consumption (Washington, DC: Goverment Printing Office, 1885), 25–27, and Luiz Cordelio Barbosa, “Cotton in 19th Century Brazil: Dependency and Development” (PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 1989), 7, 9, 65; Eugene W. Ridings Jr., “The Merchant Elite and the Development of Brazil: The Case of Bahia During the Empire,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 15, no. 3 (August 1973): 343; Gray, History of Agriculture, 694; see also Rothman, “The Expansion of Slavery in the Deep South,” 55; Chaplin, “Creating a Cotton South,” 193.

  28. At 400 pounds to the bale. The numbers are from Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom, 129.

  29. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 7–10.

  30. Bonnie Martin, “Slavery’s Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property,” Journal of Southern History 76, no. 4 (November 2010): 840–41.

  31. C. Wayne Smith and J. Tom Cothren, eds., Cotton: Origin, History, Technology, and Production (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999), 103, 122; on the various origins of American cotton see also Whitemarsh B. Seabrook, A Memoir of the Origin, Cultivation and Uses of Cotton (Charleston, SC: Miller & Browne, 1844), 15; John H. Moore, “Cotton Breeding in the Old South,” Agricultural History 30 (1956): 97; Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton
Kingdom, 35; Gray, History of Agriculture, 691.

  32. American Cotton Planter 2 (May 1854): 160.

  33. W. E. B. DuBois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America (New York: General Books LLC, 2009), 140; Edgar T. Thompson, Plantation Societies, Race Relations, and the South: The Regimentation of Population: Selected Papers of Edgar T. Thompson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975), 217; Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “Slave Productivity on Cotton Production by Gender, Age, Season, and Scale,” accessed June 11, 2012, www.iga.ucdavis.edu/Research/all-uc/conferences/spring-2010; Bailey, “The Other Side of Slavery,” 36.

  34. 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); Frederick Law Olmstead, A Journey in the Back Country (Williamstown, MA: Corner House, 1972), 153–54, originally published in 1860; Bill Cooke, “The Denial of Slavery in Management Studies,” Journal of Management Studies 40 (December 2003): 1913. The importance of “biological innovation” has been shown most recently by Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “Biological Innovation and Productivity Growth in the Antebellum Cotton Economy,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 14142, June 2008; Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). It has also been effectively critiqued by Edward Baptist, “The Whipping-Machine” (unpublished paper, Conference on Slavery and Capitalism, Brown and Harvard Universities, March 10, 2011, in author’s possession). For the importance of falling prices to gaining dominance in markets, see Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta, “Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence: Lancashire, India and Shifting Competitive Advantage, 1600–1850,” Center for Economic Policy Research (April 12, 2005), accessed December 12, 2012, www.cepr.org/meets/wkcn/1/1626/papers/Broadberry.pdf.

  35. See for this argument Philip McMichael, “Slavery in Capitalism: The Rise and Demise of the U.S. Ante-Bellum Cotton Culture,” Theory and Society 20 (June 1991): 335; for the concept of social metabolism see the work of Juan Martinez Alier, for example Juan Martinez Alier and Inge Ropke, eds., Recent Developments in Ecological Economics (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008); see also Dale W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 61.

  36. Gray, History of Agriculture, 688; Eugene Genovese, “Cotton, Slavery and Soil Exhaustion in the Old South,” Cotton History Review 2 (1961): 3–17; on the prices of slaves see Adam Rothman, “The Domestic Slave Trade in America: The Lifeblood of the Southern Slave System,” in Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle, 95; on Clay see Savannah Unit Georgia Writers’ Project, Work Projects Administration in Georgia, “The Plantation of the Royal Vale,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 27 (March 1943): 97–99.

  37. Samuel Dubose and Frederick A. Porcher, A Contribution to the History of the Huguenots of South Carolina (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1887), 19, 21; Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 91; Coclanis and Ford, “The South Carolina Economy Reconstructed and Reconsidered,” 97; Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 10; Daniel W. Jordan to Emily Jordan, Plymouth, August 3, 1833, in Daniel W. Jordan Papers, Special Collections Department, Perkins Library, Duke University.

  38. Philo-Colonus, A Letter to S. Perceval on the Expediency of Imposing a Duty on Cotton Wool of Foreign Growth, Imported into Great Britain (London: J. Cawthorn, 1812), 9; Lowell Joseph Ragatz, Statistics for the Study of British Caribbean Economic History, 1763–1833 (London: Bryan Edwards Press, 1927), 16; Planters’ and Merchants’ Resolution Concerning Import of Cotton Wool from the United States, 1813, in Official Papers of First Earl of Liverpool, Add. Mss. 38252, f. 78, Liverpool Papers, Manuscript Collections, British Library; John Gladstone, Letters Addressed to the Right Honourable The Earl of Clancarty, President of the Board of Trade, on the Inexpediency of Permitting the Importation of Cotton Wool from the United States During the Present War (London: J. M. Richardson, 1813), 7. In western India alone, 4 million acres of land were cultivated with cotton in 1850, with significantly more land under cotton in other parts of India. In the United States in 1850, around 7 million acres were under cotton. Amalendu Guha, “Raw Cotton of Western India: 1750–1850,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 9 (January 1972): 25.

  39. U.S. Treasury Department Report, 1836, p. 16, as quoted in Barbosa, “Cotton in 19th Century Brazil,” 150; see also Rothman, “The Expansion of Slavery in the Deep South,” 15. For the importance of the Industrial Revolution to slavery’s dynamic in the United States, see also Barbara Jeanne Fields, “The Advent of Capitalist Agriculture: The New South in a Bourgeois World,” in Thavolia Glymph, ed., Essays on the Postbellum Southern Economy (Arlington: Texas A&M University Press, 1985), 77; Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South, 13; Scherer, Cotton as a World Power, 150; The Proceedings of the Agricultural Convention of the State Agricultural Society of South Carolina: From 1839 to 1845—Inclusive (Columbia, SC: Summer & Carroll, 1846), 322; Rohit T. Aggarwala, “Domestic Networks as a Basis for New York City’s Rise to Pre-eminence, 1780–1812” (unpublished paper presented at the Business History Conference, Le Creusot, France, June 19, 2004), 21; Michael Hovland, “The Cotton Ginnings Reports Program at the Bureau of the Census,” Agricultural History 68 (Spring 1994): 147; Bruchey, Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 2.

  40. Halle, Baumwollproduktion und Pflanzungswirtschaft, viii; Organization of the Cotton Power: Communication of the President (Macon, GA: Lewis B. Andrews Book and Job Printer, 1858), 7; American Cotton Planter 1 (January 1853): 11.

  41. The importance of locating the southern plantation economy within the global economy is often lost among historians of the American South. See Immanuel Wallerstein, “American Slavery and the Capitalist World-Economy,” American Journal of Sociology 81 (March 1976): 1208; Francis Carnac Brown, Free Trade and the Cotton Question with Reference to India (London: Effingham Wilson, 1848), 43; Copy of a Memorial Respecting the Levant Trade to the Right Honourable the Board of Privy Council for Trade and Foreign Plantations, as copied in Proceedings of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, meeting of February 9, 1825, in M8/2/1, Proceedings of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, 1821–27, Archives of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, Manchester Archives and Local Studies, Manchester; The Proceedings of the Agricultural Convention of the State Agricultural Society of South Carolina, 323.

  42. Letter by [illegible] to “My Dear Sir” (a former president of the Board of Trade), Liverpool, June 16, 1828, in Document f255, Huskisson Papers, Manuscript Collections, British Library, London; “Memorial of the Directors of the Chamber of Commerce and Manufactures Established by Royal Charter in the City of Glasgow, 15 December 1838,” in Official Papers Connected with the Improved Cultivation of Cotton (Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann, 1839), 6, 8; A Cotton Spinner, India Our Hope; Or, Remarks Upon our Supply of Cotton (Manchester: J. Clarke, 1844), 13; Mann, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain, 56; Mac Culloch, as quoted in Bremer Handelsblatt 1 (1851): 5.

  43. A Cotton Spinner, India Our Hope, 5; J. G. Collins, An Essay in Favour of the Colonialization of the North and North-West Provinces of India, with Regard to the Question of Increased Cotton Supply and Its Bearing on the Slave Trade (London: W. H. Allen & Co., n.d., c. 1859), 35; John Gunn Collins, Scinde & The Punjab: The Gems of India in Respect to Their Past and Unparalleled Capabilities of Supplanting the Slave States of America in the Cotton Markets of the World, or, An Appeal to the English Nation on Behalf of Its Great Cotton Interest, Threatened with Inadequate Supplies of the Raw Material (Manchester: A. Ireland, 1858), 10; these arguments are also summarized in Bremer Handelsblatt, August 8, 1857, 281.

  44. Baring Brothers Liverpool to Baring Brothers London, Liverpool, October 22, 1835, in HC3.35,2, House Correspondence, ING Baring Archive, London; for that issue see also Scho
en, The Fragile Fabric of Union, 1–10.

  45. A Cotton Spinner, The Safety of Britain and the Suppression of Slavery: A Letter to the Right Hon. Sir Robert Peel on the Importance of an Improved Supply of Cotton from India (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1845), 3, 4; A Cotton Spinner, India Our Hope, 6; Brown, Free Trade and the Cotton Question, 44; Collins, Scinde & The Punjab, 5; Anonymous, The Cotton Trade of India: Quaere: Can India Not Supply England with Cotton? (London: Spottiswoode, 1839); Committee of Commerce and Agriculture of the Royal Asiatic Society, On the Cultivation of Cotton in India (London: Harrison & Co., 1840); John Forbes Royle, Essay on the Productive Resources of India (London: Wm. H. Allen, 1840); Tench Coxe to Robert Livingston, June 10, 1802, in Papers of Tench Coxe, Correspondence and General Papers, June 1802, Film A 201, reel 74, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

  46. See, for example, Ministère de la Marine et des Colonies to the Secrétaire d’État de l’Intérieur, Paris, January 27, 1819; Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale to Secrétaire d’État de l’Intérieur, Paris, October 17, 1821, in F12–2196, “Machine à égrainer le coton,” Archives Nationales, Paris; A Cotton Spinner, India Our Hope, 15; An Indian Civil Servant, Usurers and Ryots, Being an Answer to the Question “Why Does Not India Produce More Cotton?” (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1856); Collins, Scinde & The Punjab, 5; Anonymous, The Cotton Trade of India; Committee of Commerce and Agriculture of the Royal Asiatic Society, On the Cultivation of Cotton in India; Royle, Essay on the Productive Resources of India, 314; J. Chapman, The Cotton and Commerce of India (London: John Chapman, 1851).