Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  36. Adelmann, Die Baumwollgewerbe Nordwestdeutschlands, 67; Herkner, Die oberelsässische Baumwollindustrie, 92, 95; Hau, L’industrialisation de l’Alsace, 209ff.; Oberlé, “La siècle des lumières,” 164; Meerwein, “Die Entwicklung,” 23, 28, 37, 68.

  37. Bodmer, Die Entwicklung der schweizerischen Textilwirtschaft, 278; Tanner, Spulen, Weben, Sticken, 24, 33, 44.

  38. Douglas A. Irwin and Peter Temin, “The Antebellum Tariff on Cotton Textiles Revisited,” Journal of Economic History 61, no. 3 (September 2001): 795; U. S. Department of the Treasury, Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury, “Cultivation, Manufacture and Foreign Trade of Cotton,” March 4, 1836, Doc. No. 146, Treasury Department, House of Representatives, 24th Congress, 1st Session (Washington, DC: Blaire & Rives, Printers, 1836); Jeremy, Transatlantic Industrial Revolution, 96; Mary B. Rose, The Gregs of Quarry Bank Mill: The Rise and Decline of a Family Firm, 1750–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 46.

  39. Wright Armitage to Rev. Benjamin Goodier, Dunkinfield, March 2, 1817, in Box 1, Armitage Family Papers, Special Collections, New York Public Library, New York.

  40. Temin, “Product Quality,” 898; Dunham, “The Development of the Cotton Industry,” 281; Meerwein, “Die Entwicklung,” 43; United States Department of State, Report in the Commercial Relations of the United States with Foreign Nations: Comparative Tariffs; Tabular Statements of the Domestic Exports of the United States; Duties on Importation of the Staple or Principal Production of the United States into Foreign Countries (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1842), 534–35.

  41. Paul Leuilliot, “L’essor économique du XIXe siècle et les transformations de la cité,” in Livet and Oberlé, eds., Histoire de Mulhouse, 190; Dietsche, “Die industrielle Entwicklung,” 56–57; Meerwein, “Die Entwicklung,” 47, 51–52. For the importance of tariffs see also R. Dehn, The German Cotton Industry, 4; Kirchhain, “Das Wachstum,” 185; Friedrich List, National System of Political Economy (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904), 169; Angel Smith et al., “Spain,” in Van Voss et al., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 455. There were many other states that charged high import duties; for a survey see United States Department of State, Report in the Commercial Relations of the United States with Foreign Nations, 534–35.

  42. Temin, “Product Quality,” 897, 898; Irwin and Temin, “The Antebellum Tariff,” 780–89, 796. The 84 percent number (which is probably not entirely accurate) is taken from Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads: New England Mill Girls and Magnates (New York: Russell & Russell, 1949), 30. For the role of the “Boston Associates” in the import of Indian cottons, see James Fichter, “Indian Textiles and American Industrialization, 1790–1820” (unpublished paper, GEHN Conference, University of Padua, November 17–19, 2005, in author’s possession).

  43. Müller, “Die Textilindustrie des Raumes Puebla,” 14, 16, 31, 35, 39, 43, 45, 48, 55; Rafael Dobado Gonzáles, Aurora Gómez Galvarriato, and Jefferey G. Williamson, “Globalization, De-industrialization and Mexican Exceptionalism, 1750–1879,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 12316, June 2006, 5, 12, 13, 15, 35, 36, 40; see also Colin M. Lewis, “Cotton Textiles and Labour-Intensive Industrialization Since 1825” (unpublished paper, Global Economic History Network Conference, Osaka, December 16–18, 2004, in author’s possession); Esteban de Antuñano, Memoria breve de la industria manufacturera de México, desde el año de 1821 hasta el presente (Puebla: Oficina del Hospital de S. Pedro, 1835); Esteban de Antuñano to Señor D. Carlos Bustamente, Puebla, December 4, 1836, as reprinted in Esteban de Antuñano, Breve memoria del estado que guarda la fabrica de hildaos de algodon Constancia Mexicana y la industria de este ramo (Puebla: Oficinia des Hospital de San Pedro, 1837), 4; David W. Walker, Kinship, Business, and Politics: The Martinez del Rio Family in Mexico, 1824–1867 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 138; Camera de Disputados, Dictamen de la Comisión de Industria, sobre la prohibición de hilaza y ejidos de algodón (1835).

  44. David W. Walker, Kinship, Business, and Politics: The Martinez del Rio Family in Mexico, 1824–1867 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 149, 151, 162; Gonzáles, Galvarriato, and Williamson, “Globalization,” 41. The number for India refers to the year 1887.

  45. J. Thomson, A Distinctive Industrialization, 204; Daniel, “Entrepreneurship and the Russian Textile Industry,” 8; W. Lochmueller, Zur Entwicklung der Baumwollindustrie in Deutschland (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1906), 17; Hans-Werner Hahn, Die industrielle Revolution in Deutschland (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1998), 27. For a survey on the impact of states on European industrialization see Barry Supple, “The State and the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1914,” in Carlo M. Cipolla, ed., The Fontana Economic History of Europe, vol. 3 (Glasgow: Collins, 1977), 301–57.

  46. J. Thomson, A Distinctive Industrialization, 270; Jordi Nadal, “Spain, 1830–1914,” in Carlo M. Cipolla, ed., The Fontana Economic History of Europe, vol. 4, part 2, 607; Smith et al., “Spain,” in Van Voss et al., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 453.

  47. Thomson, “Explaining,” 711–17.

  48. Thomson, A Distinctive Industrialization, 274–75, 299. In 1793, Spanish producers were using 16.06 percent as much raw cotton as in Britain, by 1808 that percentage had fallen to 6–7.25 percent, and by 1816 to 2.2 percent; James Clayburn La Force Jr., The Development of the Spanish Textile Industry, 1750–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 16; Jordi Nadal, “Spain, 1830–1914,” in Cipolla, The Fontana Economic History of Europe, vol. 4, part 2, 608.

  49. Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835), 525; Wilma Pugh, “Calonne’s ‘New Deal,’ ” Journal of Modern History 11, no. 3 (1939): 289–312; François-Joseph Ruggiu, “India and the Reshaping of the French Colonial Policy, 1759–1789,” in Itinerario 35, no. 2 (August 2011): 25–43; Alfons van der Kraan, “The Birth of the Dutch Cotton Industry, 1830–1840,” in Douglas A. Farnie and David J. Jeremy, eds., The Fibre that Changed the World: The Cotton Industry in International Perspective, 1600–1990s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 285; Jan Luiten van Zanden and Arthur van Riel, The Strictures of Inheritance: The Dutch Economy in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 39–40; Mokyr, Industry 32, 103, 105, 107, 108.

  50. Mokyr, Industry, 31, 34–35; Dhont and Bruwier, “The Low Countries, 1700–1914,” 358–59.

  51. Bodmer, Die Entwicklung der schweizerischen Textilwirtschaft, 290, 344–46; Bowring, Bericht an das Englische Parlament, 4. Tanner, “The Cotton Industry of Eastern Switzerland,” 150. The German cotton industry, in similar ways, relied to an important extent on its ability to export, especially to North America; Dehn, The German Cotton Industry, 18; Dietrich Ebeling et al., “The German Wool and Cotton Industry from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century,” in Van Voss et al., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 208.

  52. Mary Jo Maynes, “Gender, Labor, and Globalization in Historical Perspective: European Spinsters in the International Textile Industry, 1750–1900,” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 48.

  53. Chapman, The Cotton Industry, 22; C. H. Lee, “The Cotton Textile Industry,” in Roy Church, ed., The Dynamics of Victorian Business: Problems and Perspectives to the 1870s (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980), 161; Adelmann, Die Baumwollgewerbe Nordwestdeutschlands, 153; Dunham, “The Development of the Cotton Industry,” 288; Richard Leslie Hills, Power from Steam: A History of the Stationary Steam Engine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 117. These numbers are notoriously inaccurate and are just approximations. Chapman, The Cotton Industry, 29; Anthony Howe, The Cotton Masters, 1830–1860 (New York: Clarendon Press, 1984), 6; The Thirty-Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce and Manufactures at Manchester, for the Year 1855 (Manchester: James Collins, 1856), 15.

  54. Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in
England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 436; 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; Lee, “The Cotton Textile Industry,” 165; Lars G. Sandberg, “Movements in the Quality of British Cotton Textile Exports,” Journal of Economic History 28, no. 1 (March 1968): 15–19; Manchester Commercial Association Minutes, 1845–1858, record group M8/7/1, Manchester Archives and Library, Manchester.

  55. For this argument, see also Jeremy Adelman, “Non-European Origins of European Revolutions” (unpublished paper, Making Europe: The Global Origins of the Old World Conference, Freiburg, 2010), 25.

  56. Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 162; Robert L. Tignor, Egyptian Textiles and British Capital, 1930–1956 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1989), 9; Joel Beinin, “Egyptian Textile Workers: From Craft Artisans Facing European Competition to Proletarians Contending with the State,” in Van Voss et al., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 174.

  57. Tignor, Egyptian Textiles, 9; Marsot, Egypt, 166; Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 23–24.

  58. Jean Batou, “Muhammad-Ali’s Egypt, 1805–1848: A Command Economy in the 19th Century?,” in Jean Batou, ed., Between Development and Underdevelopment: The Precocious Attempts at Industrialization of the Periphery, 1800–1870 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1991), 187; Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 44.

  59. Marsot, Egypt, 171, 181. By 1838, as many as thirty thousand workers might have labored in Egypt’s cotton spinning mills. Colonel Campbell, Her Britannic Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General in Egypt to John Bowring, Cairo, January 18, 1838, as reprinted in John Bowring, Report on Egypt and Candia (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1840), 186; Batou, “Muhammad-Ali’s Egypt,” 181, 185, 199; Ausland (1831), 1016.

  60. Marsot, Egypt, 171; Colonel Campbell, Her Britannic Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General in Egypt to John Bowring, Cairo, January 18, 1838, as reprinted in Bowring, Report on Egypt, 35; Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India, China, and Australia, New Series, 4 (March 1831): 133.

  61. Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India, China, and Australia, New Series, 5 (May–August 1831): 62; Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India, China, and Australia, New Series, 4 (April 1831): 179, quoting an article from the Indian Gazette, October 5, 1830.

  62. Rapport à Son Altesse Mehemet Ali, Vice Roi d’Égypt, sur la Filature et le Tissage du Cotton, par Jules Poulain, f78, Add. Mss. 37466, Egyptian State Papers, 1838–1849, Manuscript Division, British Library, London.

  63. Marsot, Egypt, 169, 184; Beinin, “Egyptian Textile Workers,” 177.

  64. Batou, “Muhammad-Ali’s Egypt,” 182, 201–2; Historical Dictionary of Egypt, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 388; Marsot, Egypt, 177; Tignor, Egyptian Textiles, 8; Beinin, “Egyptian Textile Workers,” 178; Joel Beinin, “Egyptian Textile Workers: From Craft Artisans Facing European Competition to Proletarians Contending with the State” (unpublished paper, Textile Conference IISH, November 2004), 6.

  65. The existence of a vibrant proto-industry is rightly emphasized in John Dickinson and Robert Delson, “Enterprise Under Colonialism: A Study of Pioneer Industrialization in Brazil, 1700–1830” (working paper, Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool, 1991), esp. 52; see also Hercuclano Gomes Mathias, Algodão no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Index Editoria, 1988), 67, 83; Maria Regina and Ciparrone Mello, A industrialização do algodão em São Paulo (São Paulo: Editoria Perspectiva, 1983), 23; Stein, The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture, 2, 4, 20–21; Roberta Marx Delson, “Brazil: The Origin of the Textile Industry,” in Van Voss et al., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 75, 77, 934; Gonzáles, Galvarriato, and Williamson, “Globalization,” 17.

  66. Stein, The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture, 15.

  67. Ibid., 7, 13; 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): 336, 337, 342–45.

  68. Stein, The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture, 5–6, 51–52; Ridings Jr., “The Merchant Elite and the Development of Brazil,” 344.

  69. W. A. Graham Clark, Cotton Goods in Latin America: Part 1, Cuba, Mexico, and Central America: Transmitted to Congress in Compliance with the Act of March 4, 1909 Authorizing Investigations of Trade Conditions Abroad (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), 9.

  70. Even an author who tries to show the importance of “southern industrialization” ends up providing ample evidence for the feeble nature of these efforts. See Michael Gagnon, Transition to an Industrial South: Athens, Georgia, 1830–1870 (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 2012); Broadus Mitchell, The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1921), 21. In 1831, cloth output in the North was seventeen times as large as that in the slave states. See Friends of Domestic Industry, Reports of the Committees of the Friends of Domestic Industry, assembled at New York, Octber 31, 1831 (1831), 9–47. There is also a fundamental discontinuity between these mills and later southern industrialization.

  71. Richard Roberts, “West Africa and the Pondicherry Textile Industry,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 31, no. 2 (June 1994): 142–45, 151, 153, 158; Tirthankar Roy, “The Long Globalization and Textile Producers in India,” in Van Voss et al., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 266; Dwijendra Tripathi, Historical Roots of Industrial Entrepreneurship in India and Japan: A Comparative Interpretation (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997), 104, 105.

  72. Howard F. Cline, “The Spirit of Enterprise in Yucatan,” 138; Jorge Munoz Gonzalez, Valladolid: 450 Años de Luz (Valladolid: Ayuntamiento de Valladolid, 1993), 40; Ramírez, Sociedad, Estructura Agraria, 35.

  73. Dale W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littefield, 2004), 70.

  74. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951), chapter 26.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: MOBILIZING INDUSTRIAL LABOR

  1. “Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters,” translated by M. Hamburger, Bertolt Brecht: Poems, 1913–1956, (New York and London: Methuen, 1976).

  2. For the quotation, see forum post by “The Longford,” March 9, 2009, http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=823790, accessed March 8, 2013; Ellen Hootton’s case is documented in House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, First Report of the Central Board of His Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiring into the Employment of Children in Factories, 1833, xx, D.i, 103–15. Her history has also been beautifully analyzed by Douglas A. Galbi, “Through the Eyes in the Storm: Aspects of the Personal History of Women Workers in the Industrial Revolution,” Social History 21, no. 2 (1996): 142–59.

  3. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 272–73.

  4. Mike Williams and Douglas A. Farnie, Cotton Mills in Greater Manchester (Preston, UK: Carnegie, 1992), 236; 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), 170.

  5. Leone Levi, “On the Cotton Trade and Manufacture, as Affected by the Civil War in America,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 26, no. 8 (March 1863): 26.

  6. Mary B. Rose, Networks and Business Values: The British and American Cotton Industries Since 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 30; Günter Kirchhain, “Das Wachstum der Deutschen Baumwollindustrie im 19. Jahrhundert: Eine Historische Modellstudie zur Empirischen Wachstumsforschung” (PhD dissertation, University of Münster, 1973), 73; Gerhard Adelmann, “Zur regionalen Differen
zierung der Baumwoll-und Seidenverarbeitung und der Textilen Spezialfertigungen Deutschlands, 1846–1907,” in Hans Pohl, ed., Gewerbe und Industrielandschaften vom Spätmittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1986), 293; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 2 (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1987), 92; Michel Hau, L’industrialisation de l’Alsace, 1803–1939 (Strasbourg: Association des Publications près les Universités de Strasbourg, 1987), 89; Jean-François Bergier, Histoire économique de la Suisse (Lausanne: Payot, 1984), 192. Another source estimated the number of cotton workers in the United States in 1830 as 179,000. See Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury, Cultivation, Manufacture and Foreign Trade of Cotton, March 4, 1836, Doc. No. 146, Treasury Department, House of Representatives, 24th Congress, 1st Session, in Levi Woodbury, Woodbury’s Tables and Notes on the Cultivation, Manufacture, and Foreign Trade of Cotton (Washington, DC: Printed by Blaire & Rives, 1836), 51. On Russia, see A. Khromov, Ekonomicheskoe razvitie Rossii v XIX-XX Vekah: 1800–1917 (Moscow: Gos. Izd. Politicheskoi Literatury, 1950), 32; Dave Pretty, “The Cotton Textile Industry in Russia and the Soviet Union,” in Lex Heerma van Voss, Els Hiemstra-Kuperus, and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 1650–2000 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 425, 428; Michael Jansen, De industriële ontwikkeling in Nederland 1800–1850 (Amsterdam: NEHA, 1999), 149, 333–36; CBS, Volkstelling 1849, estimates by Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, correspondence with the author, October 29, 2013. For Spain see Angel Smith et al., “Spain,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 456; more than 90 percent of Spain’s cotton industry was located in Catalonia. J. K. J. Thomson, A Distinctive Industrialization: Cotton in Barcelona, 1728–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 262.