Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  7. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 72; in chapter 6 Polanyi writes about land, labor, and money as fictitious commodities.

  8. As cited in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), 190; see also S. D. Chapman, The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1972), 53.

  9. Charles Tilly, “Did the Cake of Custom Break?” in John M. Merriman, ed., Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979); Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976).

  10. Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 20.

  11. Ibid., 47, 74–75, 317; “Gesetzesammlung für die Königlichen Preussischen Staaten, 1845,” as cited in ibid., 245.

  12. Marta Vicente, “Artisans and Work in a Barcelona Cotton Factory, 1770–1816,” International Review of Social History 45 (2000): 3, 4, 12, 13, 18.

  13. Employment Ledger for Dover Manufacturing Company, 1823–4 (Dover, NH), Dover-Cocheco Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA.

  14. Benjamin Martin, The Agony of Modernization: Labor and Industrialization in Spain (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1990), 21; Georg Meerwein, Die Entwicklung der Chemnitzer bezw. Sächsischen Baumwollspinnerei von 1789–1879 (PhD dissertation, University of Heidelberg, 1914), 21; Walter Bodmer, Die Entwicklung der Schweizerischen Textilwirtschaft im Rahmen der übrigen Industrien und Wirtschaftszweige (Zürich: Verlag Berichthaus, 1960), 220, 224, 227; L. Dunham, “The Development of the Cotton Industry in France and the Anglo-French Treaty of Commerce of 1860,” Economic History Review 1, no. 2 (January 1928): 286; Robert Lévy, Histoire économique de l’industrie cotonnière en Alsace (Paris: F. Alcan, 1912), 1ff.; David Allen Harvey, Constructing Class and Nationality in Alsace, 1830–1945 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), 56; Thomson, A Distinctive Industrialization, 259.

  15. Robert Marx Delson, “How Will We Get Our Workers? Ethnicity and Migration of Global Textile Workers,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 662, 665; G. Bischoff, “Guebwiller vers 1830: La vie économique et sociale d’une petite ville industrielle à la fin de la Restauration,” Annuaire de la Société d’Histoire des Régions de Thann–Guebwiller 7 (1965–1967): 64–74; Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk et al., “The Netherlands,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 383; Joel Mokyr, Industrialization in the Low Countries, 1795–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 38.

  16. Bodmer, Die Entwicklung der Schweizerischen Textilwirtschaft, 295, 298; Delson, “How Will We Get Our Workers?” 652–53, 666–67; Erik Amburger, Die Anwerbung ausländischer Fachkräfte für die Wirtschaft Russlands vom 15. bis ins 19. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1968), 147.

  17. Meeting of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, 1st February 1826, Proceedings of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, 1821–1827, Record Group M8, Box 2/1, Archives of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, Manchester Archives and Local Studies, Manchester; Gary Saxonhouse and Gavin Wright, “Two Forms of Cheap Labor in Textile History,” in Gary Saxonhouse and Gavin Wright, eds., Technique, Spirit and Form in the Making of the Modern Economies: Essays in Honor of William N. Parker (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1984), 7; Robert F. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 33.

  18. For the information relating to the Dover Manufacturing Company see Payroll Account Books, 1823–1824, Dover Manufacturing Company, Dover, New Hampshire, in Cocheco Manufacturing Company Papers, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA; Barbara M. Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 139.

  19. Carolyn Tuttle and Simone Wegge, “The Role of Child Labor in Industrialization” (presentation, Economic History Seminar, Harvard University, April 2004), 21, 49; McConnel & Kennedy Papers, MCK/4/51, John Rylands Library, Manchester.

  20. Terry Wyke, “Quarry Bank Mill, Styal, Cheschire,” Revealing Histories, Remembering Slavery, accessed July 21, 2012, http://www.revealinghistories.org.uk/how-did-money-from-slavery-help-develop-greater-manchester/places/quarry-bank-mill-styal-cheshire.html; Mary B. Rose, The Gregs of Quarry Bank Mill: The Rise and Decline of a Family Firm, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 28, 31, 109–10; George Unwin, Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights: The Industrial Revolution at Stockport and Marple (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1924), 170–71; Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal 61, no. 124 (July 1835): 464.

  21. Tuttle and Wegge, “The Role of Child Labor in Industrialization,” Table 1A, Table 2, Table 3a; Gerhard Adelmann, Die Baumwollgewerbe Nordwestdeutschlands und der westlichen Nachbarländer beim Übergang von der vorindustriellen zur frühindustriellen Zeit, 1750–1815 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2001), 96; M. V. Konotopov et al., Istoriia otechestvennoi tekstil’noi promyshlennosti (Moscow: Legprombytizdat, 1992), 97; Meerwein, Die Entwicklung der Chemnitzer, 35; M. M. Gutiérrez, Comercio libre o funesta teoría de la libertad económica absoluta (Madrid: M. Calero, 1834); Wolfgang Müller, “Die Textilindustrie des Raumes Puebla (Mexiko) im 19. Jahrhundert” (PhD dissertation, University of Bonn, 1977), 279, 281; “Rapport de la commission chargée d’examiner la question relative à l’emploi des enfants dans les filatures de coton,” in Bulletin de la Société Industrielle de Mulhouse (1837), 482, 493; Harvey, Constructing Class and Nationality in Alsace, 54; Marjatta Rahikainen, Centuries of Child Labour: European Experiences from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate 2004), 133.

  22. Maxine Berg, “What Difference Did Women’s Work Make to the Industrial Revolution?” in Pamela Sharpe, ed., Women’s Work: The English Experience, 1650–1914 (London: Arnold, 1998), 154, 158; 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): 56; Payroll Account Books, 1823–1824, Dover Manufacturing Company, Dover, New Hampshire, Cocheco Manufacturing Company Papers, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA; Janet Hunter and Helen Macnaughtan, “Gender and the Global Textile Industry,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 705.

  23. Hunter and Macnaughtan, “Gender and the Global Textile Industry,” 705; Maynes, “Gender, Labor, and Globalization in Historical Perspective,” 51, 54; William Rathbone VI to William Rathbone V, Baltimore, May 13, 1841, in Box IX.3.53–82, RP, Rathbone Papers, Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool; William Rathbone VI to William Rathbone V, Boston, June 18, 1841, in ibid.

  24. Hunter and Macnaughtan, “Gender and the Global Textile Industry,” 710, 715; Berg, “What Difference Did Women’s Work Make to the Industrial Revolution?” 154, 158, 168.

  25. Maynes, “Gender, Labor, and Globalization in Historical Perspective,” 55; Kenneth Pomeranz, “Cotton Textiles, Division of Labor and the Economic and Social Conditions of Women: A Preliminary Survey” (presentation, Conference 5: Cotton Textiles, Global Economic History Network, Osaka, December 2004), 20; Jack A. Goldstone, “Gender, Work, and Culture: Why the Industrial Revolution Came Early to England but Late to China,” Sociological Perspectives 39, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 1–21; Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 91 and 110ff.

  26. J. Dhondt, “The Cotton Industry at Ghent During the French Regime,” in F. Crouzet, W. H. Chaloner, and W. M. Stern, eds., Essays in European Economic History, 1789–1914 (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), 21; Wallace Daniel, “Entrepreneurship and the Russian Textile Indust
ry: From Peter the Great to Catherine the Great,” Russian Review 54 (January 1995): 7; I. D. Maulsby, Maryland General Assembly, Joint Committee on the Penitentiary, Testimony Taken Before the Joint Committee of the Legislature of Maryland, on the Penitentiary (Annapolis, 1837), 31; Rebecca McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776–1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 66; Dave Pretty, “The Cotton Textile Industry in Russia and the Soviet Union” (presentation, Textile Conference, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, November 2004), 7; M. L. Gavlin, Iz istorii rossiiskogo predprinimatel’stva: dinastiia Knopov: nauchno-analiticheskii obzor (Moscow: INION AN SSSR, 1995), 34–35; Wolfgang Müller, “Die Textilindustrie des Raumes Puebla (Mexiko) im 19. Jahrhundert,” 298–99; Max Hamburger, “Standortgeschichte der Deutschen Baumwoll-Industrie” (PhD dissertation, University of Heidelberg, 1911); Andrea Komlosy, “Austria and Czechoslavakia: The Habsburg Monarchy and Its Successor States,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 57.

  27. Delson, “How Will We Get Our Workers?” 657–58, 660; “In our country” cited in Stanley J. Stein, The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture: Textile Enterprise in an Underdeveloped Area, 1850–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 51; Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 30–31.

  28. Delson, “How Will We Get Our Workers?” 655; Aleksei Viktorovich Koval’chuk, Manufakturnaia promyshlennost’ Moskvy vo vtoroi polovine XVIII veka: Tekstil’noe proizvodstvo (Moscow: Editorial URSS, 1999), 311. The general story of disciplining workers to factory labor is told most powerfully by E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 56–97; Time Book, Oldknow Papers, Record Group SO, Box 12/16, John Rylands Library, Manchester; Chapman, The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution, 56.

  29. Dietrich Ebeling et al., Die deutsche Woll- und Baumwollindustrie presented at the International Textile History Conference, November 2004, 32. Harvey, Constructing Class and Nationality in Alsace, 59; Angel Smith et al., “Spain,” 460; Van Nederveen Meerkerk et al., “The Netherlands,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 385; see also the brilliant article by Marcel van der Linden, “Re-constructing the Origins of Modern Labor Management,” Labor History 51 (November 2010): 509–22.

  30. Ebeling et al., “The German Wool and Cotton Industry from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century,” 227; J. Norris to Robert Peel, Secretary of State, April 28, 1826, Manchester, Public Record Office, Home Office, Introduction of Power Looms: J. Norris, Manchester, enclosing a hand bill addressed to the COTTON SPINNERS of Manchester, 1826, May 6, HO 44/16, National Archives of the UK, Kew; Paul Huck, “Infant Mortality and Living Standards of English Workers During the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 55, no. 3 (September 1995): 547. See also Simon Szreter and Graham Mooney, “Urbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate: New Estimates of the Expectation of Life at Birth in Nineteenth-Century British Cities,” Economic History Review, New Series, 51, no. 1 (February 1998): 84–112; Hans-Joachim Voth, “The Longest Years: New Estimates of Labor Input in England, 1760–1830,” Journal of Economic History 61, no. 4 (December 2001): 1065–82, quote on 1065; Proceedings of 24 April 1822, 30 January 1823, 23 April 1825, Proceedings of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, 1821–1827, Record Group M8/2/1, Manchester Archives and Local Studies, Manchester; Seth Luther, Address to the Working Men of New England, on the State of Education, and on the Condition of the Producing Classes in Europe and America (New York: George H. Evans, 1833), 11.

  31. Jeff Horn, The Path Not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1830 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 107, 109–10, 116, 120.

  32. H. A. Turner, Trade Union Growth Structure and Policy: A Comparative Study of the Cotton Unions (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962), 385–86; Andrew Charlesworth et al., Atlas of Industrial Protest in Britain, 1750–1985 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 42–46.

  33. Howard F. Cline, “The Aurora Yucateca and the Spirit of Enterprise in Yucatan, 1821–1847,” Hispanic American Historical Review 27, no. 1 (1947): 30; Max Lemmenmeier, “Heimgewerbliche Bevoölkerung und Fabrikarbeiterschaft in einem laöndlichen Industriegebiet der Ostschweiz (Oberes Glattal) 1750–1910,” in Karl Ditt and Sidney Pollard, eds., Von der Heimarbeit in die Fabrik: Industrialisierung und Arbeiterschaft in Leinen- und Baumwollregionen Westeuropas während des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1992), 410, 428ff.; Bodmer, Die Entwicklung der Schweizerischen Textilwirtschaft, 295–96; Van Nederveen Meerkerk et al., “The Netherlands,” 386.

  34. John Holt, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Lancashire (Dublin: John Archer, 1795), 208.

  35. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class; Horn, The Path Not Taken, 91, 95, 97–98. In France, one thousand out of twenty-five thousand water frames were destroyed; John Brown, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy; Sent from the Workhouse of St. Pancras, London at Seven Years of Age to Endure the Horrors of a Cotton-Mill, Through His Infancy and Youth, with a Minute Detail of His Sufferings, Being the First Memoir of the Kind Published (Manchester: Printed for and Published by J. Doherty, 1832), 2.

  36. Turner, Trade Union Growth Structure and Policy, 382–85; W. Foster to Robert Peel, July 13, 1826, Manchester, Home Office, Introduction of Power Looms: J. Norris, Manchester, enclosing a hand bill addressed to the COTTON SPINNERS of Manchester, 1826, May 6, HO 44/16, National Archives of the UK, Kew; Aaron Brenner et al., eds., The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2011), xvii; Mary H. Blewett, “USA: Shifting Landscapes of Class, Culture, Gender, Race and Protest in the American Northeast and South,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 536; Angel Smith et al., “Spain,” 457; Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly, Strikes in France, 1830–1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 195; Hunter and Macnaughtan, “Gender and the Global Textile Industry,” 721.

  37. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor, 245, 319.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: MAKING COTTON GLOBAL

  1. Beiblatt zu No. 6 of the Neue Bremer Zeitung, January 6, 1850, 1.

  2. Henry S. Young, Bygone Liverpool: Illustrated by Ninety-Seven Plates Reproduced from Original Paintings, Drawings, Manuscripts and Prints (Liverpool: H. Young, 1913), 36; James Stonehouse, Pictorial Liverpool: Its Annals, Commerce, Shipping, Institutions, Buildings, Sights, Excursions, &c. &c.: A New and Complete Hand-book for Resident, Visitor and Tourist (England: H. Lacey, 1844?), 143. In 1821, 3,381 ships arrived in the port. The Picture of Liverpool, or, Stranger’s Guide (Liverpool: Thomas Taylor, 1832), 31, 75. For a history of waterfront working-class activities, see Harold R. Hikins, Building the Union: Studies on the Growth of the Workers’ Movement, Merseyside, 1756–1967 (Liverpool: Toulouse Press for Liverpool Trades Council, 1973).

  3. Graeme J. Milne, Trade and Traders in Mid-Victorian Liverpool: Mercantile Business and the Making of a World Port (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 29; Captain James Brown to James Croft, New Orleans, March 16, 1844, in record group 387 MD, Letter book of Captain James Brown, 1843–1852, item 48, Shipping Records of the Brown Family, Liverpool Records Office, Liverpool; Captain James Brown to James Croft, New Orleans, October 18, 1844, in ibid.; Captain James Brown to James Croft, New Orleans, March 16, 1844, in ibid.

  4. Thomas Ellison, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain: Including a History of the Liverpool Cotton Market and of the Liverpool Cotton Brokers’ Association (London: Effingham Wilson, 1886), 168–70, 172; Samuel Smith, My Life-Work (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1902), 16; Henry Smithers, Liverpool, Its Commerce, Statistics, and Institutions: With a History of the Cotton Trade (Liverpool: Thomas Kaye, 1825), 140; High Gawthrop, Fraser’s Guide to Liverpool (London: W. Kent
and Co., 1855), 212.

  5. The art on page 202 is from Franklin Elmore Papers, Library of Congress (RASP Ser. C, Pt. 2, reel 3). Thanks to Susan O’Donovan for this source.

  6. Vincent Nolte, Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres or, Reminiscences of the Life of a Former Merchant (New York: Redfield, 1854), 278; De Bow’s Review 12 (February 1852): 123; Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 15 (1846): 537.

  7. John R. Killick argues that the international trade aspect of cotton, in contrast to the history of cotton planting, has been nearly completely ignored. John R. Killick, “The Cotton Operations of Alexander Brown and Sons in the Deep South, 1820–1860,” Journal of Southern History 43 (May 1977): 169.

  8. See Robin Pearson and David Richardson, “Networks, Institutional Innovation and Atlantic Trade before 1800,” Business History 50, no. 6 (November 2008): 765; Annual Profit and Loss Accounts of John Tarleton, 920 TAR, Box 2, Liverpool Records Office, Liverpool; Annual Profit and Loss Accounts of Messrs. Tarleton and Backhouse, 920 TAR, Box 5, in ibid.; Earle Collection, D/Earle/5/9, Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool; Milne, Trade and Traders in Mid-Victorian Liverpool, 48.

  9. Edward Roger John Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 1820–1914: A Study in Trade and Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 34, 90; J. Forbes Royle, On the Culture and Commerce of Cotton in India and Elsewhere: With an Account of the Experiments Made by the Hon. East India Company up to the Present Time (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1851), 80–81; Great Britain Board of Trade, Statistical Abstract for the United Kingdom, 1856–1870, 18th no. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1871), 58–59; Jean Legoy, Le peuple du Havre et son histoire: Du négoce à l’industrie, 1800–1914, le cadre de vie (Saint-Etienne du Rouvray: EDIP, 1982), 256; Ellison, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain, Appendix: Table 2; 350,448 pounds is converted from 3,129 cwt (1 pound is equal to 112 cwt according to Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter, English Overseas Trade Statistics, 1697–1808 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 34. Also, to cite another example, the import of British-manufactured yarn and cloth into Calcutta increased by a factor of four in the seventeen years after 1834. See Imports of Cotton, Piece Goods, Twist and Yarn in Calcutta 1833/34 to 1850/51, in MSS Eur F 78/44, Wood Papers, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London; Werner Baer, The Brazilian Economy: Growth and Development (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 17; Patrick Verley, “Exportations et croissance économique dans la France des Années 1860,” Annales 43 (1988): 80; 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): 32; Stanley Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain: From the Industrial Revolution to World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 6; Douglas A. Irwin, “Exports of Selected Commodities: 1790–1989,” Table Ee569–589, in Susan B. Carter et al., eds., Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Douglas A. Irwin, “Exports and Imports of Merchandise, Gold, and Silver: 1790–2002,” Table Ee362–375, in Carter et al., eds., Historical Statistics of the United States.