by Sven Beckert
6. The general point is also made by Herbert S. Klein and Stanley Engerman, “The Transition from Slave to Free Labor: Notes on a Comparative Economic Model,” in Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Frank Moya Pons, and Stanley L. Engerman, Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish-Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 260.
7. Commission Coloniale, Rapport à M. le Ministre de la Marine et des Colonies sur l’Organisation du Travail Libre, p. 61, in Record Group Gen 40, box 472, Fonds Ministérielles, Archives d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, France.
8. The persistence of coercion is also emphasized by Lutz Raphael, “Krieg, Diktatur und Imperiale Erschliessung: Arbeitszwang und Zwangsarbeit 1880 bis 1960,” in Elisabeth Herrmann-Ott, ed., Sklaverei, Knechtschaft, Zwangsarbeit: Untersuchungen zur Sozial-, Rechts- und Kulturgeschichte. (Hildesheim: Olms, 2005), 256–80; Robert Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Donald Holley, The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), 104–5; Charles S. Aiken, The Cotton Plantation South Since the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 101.
9. Barbara Fields, “The Advent of Capitalist Agriculture: The New South in a Bourgeois World,” in Thavolia Glymph et al., eds., Essays on the Postbellum Southern Economy (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985), 74; Southern Cultivator, February 26, 1868, 61.
10. Edward Atkinson, Cheap Cotton by Free Labor (Boston: A. Williams & Co., 1861); Commercial and Financial Chronicle (November 11, 1865): 611–12.
11. Southern Cultivator, January 24, 1866, 5; W. A. Bruce to Earl Russell, Washington, May 10, 1865, in Letters from Washington Minister of Great Britain top Foreign Office, Earl Russell, 1865 (Private Correspondence), 30/22/38, National Archives of the UK, Kew; J. R. Busk to Messrs. Rathbone Brothers and Co., New York, April 24, 1865, in Rathbone Papers, Record number XXIV.2.22, RP, Rathbone Papers, Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool; Commercial and Financial Chronicle (August 26, 1865): 258ff.; George McHenry, The Cotton Supply of the United States of America (London: Spottiswoode & Co., 1865), 25ff.; Bengal Chamber of Commerce, Reports, 1864–1866, 809, as cited in Frenise A. Logan, “India’s Loss of the British Cotton Market After 1865,” Journal of Southern History 31, no. 1 (1965): 47; G. F. Forbes to Under Secretary of State for India, August 16, 1866, Secretariat Records Office, as quoted in Logan, “India’s Loss of the British Cotton Market,” 49.
12. Bliss Perry, Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson, vol. 1 (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1921), 247, Southern Cultivator, May 26, 1868, 133, 135. For examples of this discussion see Southern Cultivator, February 25, 1867, 42; August 25, 1867, 258; October 25, 1867, 308; January 26, 1868, 12; May 26, 1868, 135; Joseph P. Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 137; Southern Cultivator, February 27, 1869, 51; Macon Telegraph, May 31, 1865.
13. Contract dated Boston, December 23, 1863, in various letters and notes, file 298, Edward A. Atkinson Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 53, 54, 58; Edward Atkinson to his mother, Washington, July 5, 1864, in various letters and notes, file 298, Edward A. Atkinson Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
14. Macon Daily Telegraph, May 31, 1865, 1; Joseph D. Reid Jr., “Sharecropping as an Understandable Market Response: The Post-bellum South,” Journal of Economic History 33, no. 1 (March 1973): 107.
15. Contract of January 29, 1866, in Alonzo T. and Millard Mial Papers, North Carolina Department of Archives and History, as cited in Reid, “Sharecropping as an Understandable Market Response,” 108; Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 127, 129, 131; James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 48–50.
16. Foner, Reconstruction, 103, 104. It has been argued that throughout the Americas, former slaves desired “control over their own labor and access to their own lands.” See Klein and Engerman, “The Transition from Slave to Free Labor,” 256; “A Freedman’s Speech,” Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Bulletin (January 1867): 16.
17. Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism, 144.
18. Foner, Reconstruction, 108, 134; Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism, 125, 150, 152; Amy Dru Stanley, “Beggars Can’t Be Choosers: Compulsion and Contract in Postbellum America,” Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (March 1992): 1274, 1285; Cobb, The Most Southern Place, 51; U.S. Congress, House, Orders Issue by the Commissioner and Assistant Commissioners of the Freedmen’s Bureau, 65, as cited in Stanley, “Beggars Can’t Be Choosers,” 1284.
19. Commercial and Financial Chronicle (November 11, 1865): 611–12; “A Freedman’s Speech,” Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Bulletin (January 1867): 115.
20. O’Donovan, Becoming Free, 162, 189, 224, 227, 240; Foner, Reconstruction, 138, 140; Cobb, The Most Southern Place, 51; James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), xv.
21. Gavin Wright, “The Strange Career of the New Southern Economic History,” Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (December 1982): 171; Foner, Reconstruction, 174; Fields, “The Advent of Capitalist Agriculture,” 84; Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism, 159; Southern Cultivator 25, no. 11 (November 1867): 358; Aiken, The Cotton Plantation South, 34ff. Cobb, The Most Southern Place, 55, 70; W. E. B. DuBois, “Die Negerfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft 22 (1906): 52.
22. Reid, “Sharecropping as an Understandable Market Response,” 114, 116, 118; Grimes Family Papers, #3357, Southern Historical Collection, as cited in Reid, “Sharecropping as an Understandable Market Response,” 128–29.
23. Wright, “The Strange Career,” 172, 176. Cobb, The Most Southern Place, 102; Harold D. Woodman, “Economic Reconstruction and the Rise of the New South, 1865–1900,” in John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolan, eds., Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 268; DuBois, “Die Negerfrage,” 41; C. L. Hardeman to John C. Burns, December 11, 1875, John C. Burrus Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, as cited in Cobb, The Most Southern Place, 63; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 36.
24. Wright, “The Strange Career,” 170, 172; John R. Hanson II, “World Demand for Cotton During the Nineteenth Century: Wright’s Estimates Re-examined,” Journal of Economic History 39, no. 4 (December 1979): 1015, 1016, 1018, 1019.
25. Southern Cultivator, January 26, 1868, 13; Telegram, Forstall and Sons to Baring Brothers, London, September 16, 1874, in record group HC 5.2.6.142, ING Baring Archive, London; O’Donovan, Becoming Free, 117; Cobb, The Most Southern Place, 91, 104, 114; Woodman, “Economic Reconstruction,” 173; Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism, 222, 225; Aiken, The Cotton Plantation South, 23.
26. Steven Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 95, no. 1 (February 1990): 83, 84, 96.
27. David F. Weiman, “The Economic Emancipation of the Non-slaveholding Class: Upcountry Farmers in the Georgia Cotton Economy,” Journal of Economic History 45, no. 1 (1985): 72, 76, 78.
28. Weiman, “The Economic Emancipation of the Non-slaveholding Class,” 84; DuBois, “Die Negerfrage,” 38; Ernst v
on Halle, Baumwollproduktion und Pflanzungswirtschaft in den Nordamerikanischen Südstaaten, Zweiter Teil, Sezessionskrieg und Rekonstruktion (Leipzig: Dunker & Humboldt, 1906), 518, 661ff.; Foner, Reconstruction, 394.
29. Southern Cultivator, June 29, 1871, 221; Cobb, The Most Southern Place, 110; Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale, La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 185; Aiken, The Cotton Plantation South, 61; E. Merton Coulter, James Monroe Smith: Georgia Planter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1961), 9, 14, 17, 35, 37, 67–69, 84, 90.
30. Julia Seibert, “Travail Libre ou Travail Forcé?: Die ‘Arbeiterfrage’ im belgischen Kongo 1908–1930,” Journal of Modern European History 7, no. 1 (March 2009): 95–110; DuBois, “Die Negerfrage,” 44.
31. United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 518, 899; United States Bureau of Statistics, Department of the Treasury, Cotton in Commerce: Statistics of United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Egypt, and British India (Washington. DC: Government Printing Office, 1895), 29; France, Direction Générale des Douanes, Tableau décennal du commerce de la France avec ses colonies et les puissances étrangères, 1887–96 (Paris, 1896), 2, 108; Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich, vol. 13 (Berlin: Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, 1892), 82–83; Statistical Abstracts for the United Kingdom in Each of the Last Fifteen Years from 1886 to 1900 (London: Wyman and Sons, 1901), 92–93.
32. Bombay Chamber of Commerce, Report of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce for the Year 1865–66 (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1867), 213; B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Africa, Asia and Oceania, 1750–2005 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 354; F. M. W. Schofield, Department of Revenue and Agriculture, Simla, September 15, 1888, 10, in Proceedings, Part B, Nos 6–8, April 1889, Fibres and Silk Branch, Department of Revenue and Agriculture, National Archives of India, New Delhi; Statistical Abstract Relating to British India from 1903–04 to 1912–13 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1915), 188; Statistical Tables Relating to Indian Cotton: Indian Spinning and Weaving Mills (Bombay: Times of India Steam Press, 1889), 59; Toyo Menka Kaisha, The Indian Cotton Facts 1930 (Bombay: Toyo Menka Kaisha Ltd., 1930), 54; Dwijendra Tripathi, “India’s Challenge to America in European Markets, 1876–1900,” Indian Journal of American Studies 1, no. 1 (1969): 58; Bericht der Handelskammer Bremen über das Jahr 1913 (Bremen: Hauschild, 1914), 38; Bombay Chamber of Commerce, Report of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce for the Year 1865–66 (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1867), 213. The permanence of this change is also emphasized by Maurus Staubli, Reich und Arm mit Baumwolle: Exportorientierte Landwirtschaft am Beispiel des Baumwollanbaus im Indischen Distrikt Khandesh (Dekkan), 1850–1914 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1994), 66; James A. Mann, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain: Its Rise, Progress, and Present Extent (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1860), 132; Statistical Abstracts for British India from 1911–12 to 1920–21 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1924), 476–77. There is an unfortunate tendency in much of the literature on the effects of the Civil War on India to limit one’s view to the relationship between India and Britain, which entirely misses the more important trade in raw cotton between India and continental Europe as well as Japan. For the “Empire-centric” view, see for example Logan, “India’s Loss of the British Cotton Market,” and also Wright, “Cotton Competition.” On the importance of continental European markets see John Henry Rivett-Carnac, Report of the Cotton Department for the Year 1868–69 (Bombay: Printed at the Education Society’s Press, 1869), 139; C. B. Pritchard, Annual Report on Cotton for the Bombay Presidency for the Year 1882–83 (Bombay: Cotton Department, Bombay Presidency, 1883), 2. On the importance of the Japanese market, see S. V. Fitzgerald and A. E. Nelson, Central Provinces District Gazetteers, Amraoti District, vol. A (Bombay: Claridge, 1911), 192, in record group V/27/65/6, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London. On increased imports of Indian cotton to Europe see Tripathi, “India’s Challenge to America in European Markets, 1876–1900,” 57–65; Statistical Abstracts for the United Kingdom for Each of the Fifteen Years from 1910 to 1924 (London: S. King & Son Ltd, 1926), 114–15; John A. Todd, World’s Cotton Crops (London: A. & C. Black, 1915), 45; for the reasons why Indian cotton found a ready market on the continent see “Report by F. M. W. Schofield, Department of Revenue and Agriculture, Simla, 15 Sept. 1888,” in Department of Revenue and Agriculture, Fibres and Silk Branch, April 1889, Nos. 6–8, Part B, National Archives of India, New Delhi; A. J. Dunlop to the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, Bombay, Alkolale, June 11, 1874, Proceedings, Part B, June 1874, No. 41/42, Fibres and Silk Branch, Agriculture and Commerce Department, Revenue, National Archives of India; “Statement Exhibiting the Moral and Material Progress and Condition of India, 1895–96,” 109, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library.
