Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  49. H. V. Bowen, “British Exports of Raw Cotton from India to China During the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” in Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, eds., How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850 (Boston: Brill, 2009), 130; Elena Frangakis, “The Ottoman Port of Izmir in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, 1695–1820,” Revue de L’Occident Musulman et de la Méditerranée 39 (1985): 149–62; Wolfgang Müller, “Die Textilindustrie des Raumes Puebla (Mexiko) im 19. Jahrhundert” (PhD dissertation, University of Bonn, 1977), 99–102.

  50. Johannes Niederer to Salomon Volkart, Batavia, December 20, 1854, typed copy in copy book, letters, vol. 1, Volkart Archive, Winterthur, Switzerland; Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain, 181, 185; Hall, “The Emergence of the Liverpool Raw Cotton Market,” 80; Milne, Trade and Traders in Mid-Victorian Liverpool, 100; Alexander Brown to William Brown, October 27, 1819, reprinted in Brown, A Hundred Years of Merchant Banking, 68.

  51. Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain, 181, 183.

  52. See letters in RPXXIV.2.6., machine copies of William Rathone VI Correspondence in America, Rathbone Papers, Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool, Liverpool; Adam Hodgson to Rathbone, Hodgson, New York, November 2, 1819, in record group RP.XXIII.3.1–25, ibid.; Adam Hodgson to Messrs. Rathbone, Hodgson, & Co., New York, January 11, 1821, in record group XIII 3.20, ibid.; William Rathbone VI to William Rathbone V, New York, April 26, 1841, in record group RP.IX.3.53–82, ibid.; William Rathbone VI to William Rathbone V, Baltimore, May 13, 1841, in record group RP.IX.3.53–82, ibid.; machine copies of William Rathbone VI Correspondence in America, in record group RP.XXIV.2.6., ibid.; William Rathbone VI to Messrs. Hicks, New York, November 10, 1848, in record group RP.XXIV.2.4., ibid.; William Rathbone VI to Messrs. Rathbone, Baltimore, December 2, 1848, in record group RP.XXIV.2.4., ibid.

  53. Hidy, The House of Baring, 95, 174; House Correspondence, HC3.35,1, ING Baring Archive, London; Ziegler, The Sixth Great Power, 144; Malon, Jules Le Cesne, 17–18; William Rathbone to William Rathbone Jr., Liverpool, December 11, 1850, in record group RP.IX.4.1–22, Rathbone Papers, Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool, Liverpool; Adam Hodgson to Rathbone, Hodgson, & Co., September 27, 1820, in record group RP.XXIII.3.1–15, in ibid.; William Rathbone VI to Messrs. Rathbone, New York, March 3, 1849, in record group RP.XXIV.2.4, ibid.; Adam Hodgson to Messrs. Rathbone, Hodgson, & Co., New York, January 10, 1821, in record group XIII 3.18, in ibid.

  54. Milne, Trade and Traders in Mid-Victorian Liverpool, 154–55.

  55. Menge & Niemann, Hamburg, to Phelps, Dodge, Hamburg, July 14, 1841, in Phelps, Dodge Papers, Box 4, Folder July 1841, New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York.

  56. Smith, My Life-Work, 30; Gisborne to Baring Brothers, Calcutta, August 7, 1846, House Correspondence, record group HC 6, file 3, ING Baring Archive, London; Shofner, Daniel Ladd, 37; Nolte, Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres, 275. See also one of Nolte’s circulars, for example dated New Orleans, March 23, 1839, in Brown Family Business Records, B 40 f5, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island. Thanks to Seth Rockman for bringing this document to my attention.

  57. Shofner, Daniel Ladd, 37; on the general question of how agricultural statistics came into being see Conrad Taeuber, “Internationally Comparable Statistics on Food and Agriculture,” Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 27 (July 1949): 299–313; see also Lettres des Indes etc. de 1844/45 écrites par F. C. Dollfus, à Jean Dollfus président du Comité pour l’Export des Tissus Imprimés d’Alsace, no call number, Archives du Musée de l’Impression sur Étoffes, Mulhouse, France.

  58. See for example sample books, vol. 1247 (1825) and 1239 (1819), in Archives du Musée de l’Impression sur Étoffes, Mulhouse, France.

  59. William Rathbone VI to Messrs. Rathbone, New York, January 8, 1849, in record group RP.XXIV.2.4., Rathbone Papers, Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool, Liverpool.

  60. British Packet and Argentine News, August 4, 1826, and thereafter, in National Library of Argentina, Buenos Aires; Reinhart, “Les Reinhart,” 27; Bremer Handelsblatt, every issue; Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 12 (February 1845): 195; Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 14 (April 1846): 380.

  61. Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany, Third Series, 2 (London: Wm. H. Allen & Co., 1844), 148, 156.

  62. Carl Johannes Fuchs, “Die Organisation des Liverpoolers Baumnwollhandels,” in Gustav Schmoller, ed., Jahrbuch fuer Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im deutschen Reich 14 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1890), 112; Ellison, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain, 180–81; Minute Book of Weekly Meetings, Liverpool Cotton Brokers’ Association, January 28, 1842, in record 380 COT, file 1/1, Papers of the Liverpool Cotton Association, Liverpool Records Office, Liverpool; R. Robson, “Raw Cotton Statistics,” Incorporated Statistician: The Journal of the Association of Incoroporated Statisticians 5 (April 1955): 191; André Corvisier, Histoire du Havre et de l’estuaire de la Seine (Toulouse: Privat, 1983), 164; Eugene W. Ridings, “Business Associationalism, the Legitimation of Enterprise, and the Emergence of a Business Elite in Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” Business History Review 63 (Winter 1989): 766–67; List of Members, Report of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce for the Year 1861–62 (Bombay: Chesson & Woodhall, 1862), 10–12. For a detailed history of the political activities of Manchester merchants see Arthur Redford, Manchester Merchants and Foreign Trade, 1794–1858, vol. 1 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1934).

  63. Trust as a core prerequisite for the emergence of markets, and thus the dependence of markets on relationships not generated in the market itself, is also emphasized by Hartmut Berghoff, “Vertrauen als Ökonomische Schlüsselvariable: Zur Theorie des Vertrauens und der Geschichte seiner Privatwirtschaflichen Produktion,” in Karl-Peter Ellerbrook and Clemens Wischermann, eds., Die Wirtschaftsgeschichte vor der Herausforderung durch die New Institutional Economics (Dortmund: Gesellschaft für Westfälische Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 2004), 58–71; M. C. Casson, “An Economic Approach to Regional Business Networks,” in John F. Wilson and Andrew Popp, eds., Industrial Clusters and Regional Business Networks in England, 1750–1970 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 28; Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, “Les négoces Atlantique français: Anatomie d’ un capitalisme relationnel,” Dix-huitième Siècle 33 (2001): 38. See also Geoffrey Jones, “Multinational Trading Companies in History and Theory,” in Geoffrey Jones, ed., The Multinational Traders (London: Routledge, 1998), 5. For an important case study of Boston’s Perkins family see Rachel Van, “Free Trade and Family Values: Free Trade and the Development of American Capitalism in the 19th Century” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2011).

  64. Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835), 319; Milne, Trade and Traders in Mid-Victorian Liverpool, 151.

  65. William Rathbone VI to William Rathbone V, New York, April 26, 1841, in record group RP.IX.3.53–82, Rathbone Papers, Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool, Liverpool; Adam Hodgson to Messrs. Rathbone, Hodgson & Co., New York, January 9, 1821, in record group XXIII 3/19, ibid.; Adam Hodgson to Messrs. Rathbone, Hodgson, & Co., New York, January 2, 1821, in record group XIII 3.17, ibid.; J. Anderegg, “Volkart Brothers, 1851–1976” (unpublished manuscript, Volkart Brothers Archives, Winterthur, Switzerland), vol. 1, 42; Salomon Volkart to “Freund Heitz,” Winterthur, February 3, 1851, Copy book, letters, vol. 1, in ibid.; John Richards to Baring Brothers London, Bombay October 24, 1832, House Correspondence, HC 6.3, India and Indian Ocean, vol. 5, in ING Baring Archive, London.

  66. William Rathbone IV to Joseph Reynolds Rathbone, June 25, 1805, in record group RP. IV.1.112–151, Rathbone Papers, University of Liverpool, Special Collections and Archives, Liverpool; William Rathbone IV to Joseph Reynolds Rathbone, Greenbank, December 3, 1807, in record group RP. IV.1.112–151, in ibid.; Brown, A Hun
dred Years of Merchant Banking, 262, 265; Milne, Trade and Traders in Mid-Victorian Liverpool, 152; Reinhart, “Les Reinhart,” 27, 30.

  67. Leoni M. Calvocoressi, “The House of Ralli Brothers,” handwritten manuscript, dated Chios 1852, in record group MS 23836, Guildhall Library, London.

  68. See Ralli Brothers Limited (n.p.: n.p., 1951), in Ralli Papers, Historical Materials of the Firm, record group MS 23836, Guildhall Library, London. On the Rallis see also Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain, 155.

  69. Ressat Kasaba, The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy: The Nineteenth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 21; Alexander Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 1919–1937 (London: Ithaca Press, 1989), 1, 76, 82, 88; Christos Hadziiossif, “La colonie grecque en Égypte, 1833–1856” (PhD dissertation, Sorbonne, 1980), 118, 119.

  70. John Foster, “The Jewish Entrepreneur and the Family,” in Konrad Kwiet, ed., From the Emancipation to the Holocaust: Essays on Jewish Literature and History in Central Europe (Kensington: University of New South Wales, 1987), 25; Bill Williams, The Making of Manchester Jewry, 1740–1875 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), 17–19, 22, 34; Thomas Fowell Buxton recounts a story told to him by Nathan Rothschild in a letter to Miss Buxton, February 14, 1834, reprinted in Charles Buxton, ed., Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton (London: John Murray, 1952), 289; S. D. Chapman, “The Foundation of the English Rothschilds: N. M. Rothschild as a Textile Merchant,” Textile History 8 (1977): 101–2, 113; Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets, 1798–1848 (New York: Viking, 1999), 53; Alexander Dietz, Frankfurter Handelsgeschichte (Glasshütten: Verlag Detlev Auvermann, 1970), 330–34.

  71. Anderegg, “Volkart Brothers, 1851–1976,” vol. 1, 23; Walter H. Rambousek, Armin Vogt, and Hans R. Volkart, Volkart: The History of a World Trading Company (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1991), 41, 69, 72; on this point, see the excellent work by Christof Dejung, for example, Dejung, “Hierarchie und Netzwerk: Steuerungsformen im Welthandel am Beispiel der Schweizer Handelsfirma Gebrueder Volkart, ” in Hartmut Berghoof and Jörg Sydow, eds., Unternehmerische Netzwerke: Eine Historische Organisationsform mit Zukunft? (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2007), 71–96.

  72. E. Rathbone to William Rathbone Jr., Greenbank, 1850 (no date given), in record group RP.IX.4.1–22, Rathbone Papers, Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool, Liverpool; Reinhart, “Les Reinhart,” 43; Weulersse, Le port du Havre, 88.

  73. Smith, My Life-Work, 16.

  74. See also Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

  75. Milne, Trade and Traders in Mid-Victorian Liverpool, 66, 82; Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain, 103; Bremer Handelsblatt, 1851, 6, 7; Minutes of the Meeting of the American Chamber of Commerce, Liverpool, October 29, 1824, in record 380 AME, vol. 1, American Chamber of Commerce Records, Liverpool Records Office, Liverpool; Dantwala, A Hundred Years of Indian Cotton, 31, 39; Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers, 188; Legoy, Le peuple du Havre et son histoire, 226; Daniel Lord Jr., “Popular Principles Relating to the Law of Agency,” Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine 1, no. 4 (October 1839): 338.

  76. Lord, “Popular Principles Relating to the Law of Agency,” 338.

  77. Dantwala, A Hundred Years of Indian Cotton, 43–46; Report of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce for the Year 1850–51 (Bombay: American Mission Press, 1851), 9. Defining markets as institutions has a long and distinguished history; Gustav Schmoller and Werner Sombart said as much in the nineteenth century, as summarized in Geoffrey M. Hodgson, How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science (New York: Routledge, 2001), as did John A. Hobson, The Social Problem: Life and Work (New York: J. Pott and Company, 1902), 144; see also Douglass North, “Markets and Other Allocations Systems in History: The Challenge of Karl Polanyi,” Journal of European Economic History 6, no. 3 (1977): 710. Michel Callon has also argued that the state does not intervene in the market, but constitutes it; see “Introduction: The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics,” in Michel Callon, ed., The Laws of the Markets (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers/Sociological Review, 1998), 40.

  78. Arthur Redford, Manchester Merchants and Foreign Trade, 1850–1939, vol. 2 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956), 3–11; Minutes of the Meeting of October 22, 1821, Proceedings of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, record group M8, box 2/1, Manchester Archives and Local Studies, Manchester; Minutes of the Meeting of February, 27, 1822, ibid.; Minutes of the Meeting of April 24, 1822, ibid.; Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce and Manufactures, Manchester, for the Year 1825 (Manchester: Robinson and Bent, 1825), 8; Tenth Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce and Manufactures, Manchester, for the Year 1830 (Manchester: Robinson and Bent, 1831), 4; Fifteenth Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce and Manufactures, Manchester, for the Year 1835 (Manchester: Henry Smith, 1836), 1; The Thirty-Sixth Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce and Manufactures at Manchester, for the Year 1856 (Manchester: James Collins, 1857), 10, 15; Legoy, Le peuple du Havre et son histoire, 226; John Benjamin Smith, “Reminiscences,” typescript, dated August 1913, in John Benjamin Smith Papers, record group MS Q, box 923.2.S 33, Manchester Archives and Local Studies, Manchester.

  79. Minutes of the Meeting of the Society of Merchants, August 19, 1794, in Papers of the Society of Merchants, record group M8, box 1/1, Manchester Archives and Local Studies, Manchester; Copy of the Minutes of the Deputation from the Manchester of Commerce, 1841, in John Benjamin Smith Papers, record group MS f, box 932.2.S338, Manchester Archives and Local Studies; Minutes of the Meeting of March 15, 1824, Proceedings of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, record group M8, box 2/1, Manchester Archives and Local Studies; Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Directors…for the Year 1825, 5, 22. See also Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce and Manufactures, Manchester, for the Year 1827 (Manchester: Robinson and Bent, 1827), 3; Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce and Manufactures, Manchester, for the Year 1828 (Manchester: Robinson and Bent, 1829), 2; Proceedings of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, 1821–1827, Record group M8, Box 2/1, Manchester Archives and Local Studies.

  80. Minutes of the Meeting of the Society of Merchants, February 27, 1794, in Papers of the Society of Merchants, record group M8, box 1/1, Manchester Archives and Local Studies, Manchester; Minutes of the Meeting of the Society of Merchants, March 5, 1795, in ibid.; Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Directors…for the Year 1828, 4; Address, London March 5, 1803, in Scrapbook of William Rathbone IV, in record group RP.4.17, Rathbone Papers, Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool, Liverpool.

  81. Report of the Proceeding of the Board of Directors of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce from the Time of Its Institution in the Year 1820 to the End of 1821 (Manchester: C. Wheeler and Son, 1821), 6, 9; Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce and Manufactures, Manchester, for the Year 1829 (Manchester: Robinson and Bent, 1830), 5; The Thirty-Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce and Manufactures at Manchester, for the Year 1859 (Manchester: Cave and Sever, 1860), 19, 35; for the idea that economic thinking formats the economy, presented with much greater sophistication, see Michel Callon, “Introduction: The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics,” in Callon, ed., The Laws of the Markets, 2.

  82. Martin Murray to Baring Brothers London, Bombay, September 15, 1846, House Correspondence, HC 6.3, 9, in ING Baring Archive, London; Martin Murray to Baring Brothers London, Bombay, March 2, 1847, HC 6.3, 9, in ibid.; Hadziiossif, “La colonie grecque en Egypte,” 113; Ahmed Abdel-Rahim Mustafa, “The Breakdown of the Monopoly System in Egypt After 1840,” in Peter Malcom Holt, Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt: Historical Studies from the Ottoman Conquest to the United Arab Republic (London:
Oxford University Press, 1968), 291, 293, 296; Kenneth Cuno, The Pasha’s Peasants: Land, Society, and Economy in Lower Egypt, 1740–1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 125; Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 37, 57, 65–66, 67, 77; Vicziany, “Bombay Merchants and Structural Changes in the Export Community,” 168, 170.

  83. This has been very well argued for the Italian case. See Enrico Dal Lago, Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005).

  84. Beckert, The Monied Metropolis, 26.

  85. John R. Killick, “Atlantic and Far Eastern Models in the Cotton Trade, 1818–1980,” University of Leeds School of Business and Economic Studies, Discussion Paper Series, June 1994, 1, 16; Killick, “The Cotton Operations of Alexander Brown,” 189, 191.

  86. 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 (August 1973): 336, 348; Stanley J. Stein, The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture: Textile Enterprise in an Underdeveloped Area, 1850–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 6. The uniqueness of the United States in this regard is often overlooked, but emphasized to good effect by Robin Einhorn, “Slavery,” in Enterprise and Society 9 (September 2008): 498.

  CHAPTER NINE: A WAR REVERBERATES AROUND THE WORLD

  1. This chapter draws on Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review 109 (Dec. 2004), 1405–38. J. B. Smith (Stockport) in Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, vol. 167, June 19, 1862 (London: Cornelius Buck, 1862), 754; Élisée Reclus, “Le coton et la crise américaine,” La Revue des Deux Mondes 37 (January 1865): 176. The global population estimate is for the year 1850 and from Part 1, Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations Secretariat, The World at Six Billion (New York, 1999), 5, accessed February 14, 2013, http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/sixbillion/sixbilpart1.pdf; Dwijendra Tripathi, “A Shot from Afar: India and the Failure of Confederate Diplomacy,” Indian Journal of American Studies 10, no. 2 (1980): 75; D. A. Farnie, The English Cotton Industry and the World Market, 1815–1896 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 180; Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 45, no. 5 (November 1861): 481; Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 44, no. 6 (June 1861): 676; 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; Elijah Helm, “The Cotton Trade of the United Kingdom, During the Seven Years, 1862–1868, as Compared with the Seven Years, 1855–1861; With Remarks on the Return of Factories Existing in 1868,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 32, no. 4 (December 1869): 429.