Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  68. William K. Meyers, Forge of Progress, Crucible of Revolt: Origins of the Mexican Revolution in La Comarca Lagunera, 1880–1911 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 4, 6, 33–34, 48, 51.

  69. Ibid., 40, 116–17, 120, 346; Werner Tobler, Die mexikanische Revolution: Gesellschaft-licher Wandel und politischer Umbruch, 1876–1940 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 70ff.

  70. Meyers, Forge of Progress, 123–25, 131; for Peru, see Michael J. Gonzales, “The Rise of Cotton Tenant Farming in Peru, 1890–1920: The Condor Valley,” Agricultural History 65, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 71; for Egypt, see Mitchell, Rule of Experts.

  71. Toksöz, “The Çukurova,” 99.

  72. Manchester Chamber of Commerce, The Forty-Second Annual Report of the Board of Directors for the Year 1862 (Manchester: Cave & Server, 1863), 22; Rosa Luxemburg, “Die Akkumulation des Kapitals,” in Rosa Luxemburg, Gesammelte Werke, Band 5 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1981), 311–12, 317; Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 72–75.

  73. Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Geschichte der Globalisierung: Dimensionen, Prozesse, Epochen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003), 70.

  74. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 40, 42, 45, 54, 59, 62, 66, 67, 69; Osterhammel and Petersson, Geschichte der Globalisierung, 69. See also Sven Beckert, “Space Matters: Eurafrica, the American Empire, and the Territorial Reorganization of European Capitalism, 1870–1960” (article in progress); Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (June 2000): 807–31; Oldham Master Cotton Spinners’ Association, Report of the Committee, for Year Ending December 31, 1901 (Oldham: Dornan, 1902), 5, in record group 6/2/1–61m, Papers of the Oldham Master Cotton Spinners’ Association, John Rylands Library, Manchester; Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 1994), 11; Jan-Frederik Abbeloos, “Belgium’s Expansionist History Between 1870 and 1930: Imperialism and the Globalisation of Belgian Business,” Munich Personal RePEc Archive Paper No. 11295 (posted October 30, 2008), accessed July 9, 2009, http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/11295/.

  75. International Federation of Master Cotton Spinners’ and Manufacturers’ Associations, Official Report of the International Congress, Held in Egypt, 31; Commission Coloniale, “Rapport sur l’organisation du travail libre,” in 317/Gen 40/472, Fonds Ministérielle, Centre des archives d’outre-mer; Procès verbaux des séances de la commission du travail aux colonies, 1873–1874, 1105/Gen 127/473, Fonds Ministérielle, Centre des archives d’outre-mer, “Régime du travail dans les colonies, rapport, 1875,” in 1152/Gen 135/475, Fonds Ministérielle, Archives d’outre-mer; Liverpool Mercury, September 23, 1863, 6; Edward Atkinson, Cheap Cotton by Free Labor: By a Cotton Manufacturer (Boston: A. Williams & Co, 1861), 478. See also John Bright to Edward Atkinson, London, May 29, 1862, Box N 298, ibid. Note from the Ambassade d’Espagne à Paris, no date, 994/Gen 117/474, Fonds Ministérielle, Archives d’outre-mer; copy of a report by R. B. D. Morier to the Secretary of State, The Marquis of Salisbury, October 12, 1889, Compilations, Vol. 51, 1890, Compilation No. 476, “Establishment by the Russian Government of a Model Cotton Plantation in the Merva Oasis,” Revenue Department, Maharashtra State Archive, Mumbai; Rinji Sangyo Chosa Kyoku [Special Department of Research on Industries], Chosen ni Okeru Menka ni Kansuru Chosa Seiseki [The Research on Cotton in Korea] (August 1918); No-Shomu Sho Nomu Kyoku [Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, Department of Agriculture], Menka ni Kansuru Chosa [The Research on Cotton] (March 1913).

  76. This was also the case in many other countries. In Peru, for example, tenant farming and sharecropping became the dominant forms of cotton production in the wake of the Civil War and the enormous expansion of output that resulted from it. See Vincent Peloso, Peasants on Plantations: Subaltern Strategies of Labor and Resistance in the Pisco Valley, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Michael R. Haines, “Wholesale Prices of Selected Commodities: 1784–1998,” Table Cc205–266, in Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, eds., Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Peter Harnetty, Imperialism and Free Trade: Lancashire and India in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1972), 99.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: DESTRUCTIONS

  1. 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; Toyo Menka Kaisha, The Indian Cotton Facts 1930 (Bombay: Toyo Menka Kaisha Ltd., 1930), n.p.

  2. On the occasion of the opening of the line the British viceroy himself linked the new state of affairs explicitly to the American Civil War. “Opening of the Khamgaon Railway,” Times of India, March 11, 1870, reprinted in Moulvie Syed Mahdi Ali, Hyderabad Affairs, vol. 4 (Bombay: Printed at the Times of India Steam Press, 1883), 199. On Khamgaon see also John Henry Rivett-Carnac, Report of the Cotton Department for the Year 1868–69 (Bombay: Printed at the Education Society’s Press, 1869), 98ff., 131; A. C. Lydall, Gazetteer for the Haidarabad Assigned Districts, Commonly Called Berar (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1870), 230, in record group V/27/65/112, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London.

  3. Haywood to Messers. Mosley and Hurst, Manchester, May 15, 1861, as reprinted in Times of India, July 18, 1861, 3. Very similar also Cotton Supply Reporter (June 15, 1861): 530; “Cotton Districts of Berar and Raichove Doab,” India Office, London, to Governor in Council Bombay, December 17, 1862, Compilation No. 119, Compilations, Vol. 26, 1862–1864, Revenue Department, Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai; J. B. Smith (Stockport) in Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, vol. 167, June 19, 1862 (London: Cornelius Buck, 1862), 761; Cotton Supply Reporter (January 2, 1865); Arthur W. Silver, Manchester Men and Indian Cotton, 1847–1872 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966), 179; printed letter from A. J. Dunlop to the Secretary of the Government of India, Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce, Hyderabad, April 2, 1878, Hyderabad Assigned Districts, India, Department of Land Records and Agriculture, Reports, 1876–1891, record group V/24, file 4266, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London.

  4. George Reinhart, Volkart Brothers: In Commemoration of the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Foundation (Winterthur: n.p., 1926); The Volkart’s United Press Company Limited, Dossier 10, Volkart Archives, Winterthur, Switzerland. For an account of the development of the Indian cotton trade from Volkarts’ perspective, see Jakob Brack-Liechti, “Einige Betrachtungen über den indischen Baumwollmarkt aus älterer Zeit, 23.2.1918,” Volkart Archives; Salomon Volkart to “Bombay,” Winterthur, March 17, 1870, and Salomon Volkart to “Bombay,” Winterthur, May 27, 1870, in Correspondence of Salomon Volkart, second copy book, Winterthur, 1865–1867, Volkart Archives.

  5. Hyderabad Assigned Districts, Land Records and Agriculture Department, Report on the Rail and Road-borne Trade in the Hyderabad Assigned Districts for the Year 1894–95 (Hyderabad: Residency Government Press, 1895), Appendix B; Laxman D. Satya, Cotton and Famine in Berar, 1850–1900 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997), 168; Hyderabad Assigned Districts, Land Records and Agriculture Department, Report on the Trade of the Hyderabad Assigned Districts for the Year 1882–83 (Hyderabad: Residency Government Press, 1883), 4, record group V/24, Reports, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London; Correspondence of Salomon Volkart, second copy book, Winterthur, 1865–1867, in Volkart Archives, Winterthur, Switzerland; The Volkart’s United Press Company Limited, Dossier 10, Volkart Archives; “Chronology of Events in Bombay,” in Dossier 3, Bombay 1:4, Volkart Archives; Walter H. Rambousek et al., Volkart: The History of a World Trading Company (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1991), 72; Kaisha, The Indian Cotton Facts 1930, 50�
�51; printed letter from A. J. Dunlop to the Secretary of the Government of India, Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce, Hyderabad, April 2, 1878, in Hyderabad Assigned Districts, Land Records and Agriculture Department, Report on the Trade of the Hyderabad Assigned Districts for the Year 1877–78 (Hyderabad: Residency Government Press, 1878), 4, in record group V/24, Reports, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London; Kagotani Naoto, “Up-Country Purchase Activities of Indian Raw Cotton by Tōyō Menka’s Bombay Branch, 1896–1935,” in S. Sugiyama and Linda Grove, Commercial Networks in Modern Asia (Curzon: Richmond, 2001), 199, 200.

  6. Christof Dejung, “The Boundaries of Western Power: The Colonial Cotton Economy in India and the Problem of Quality,” in Christof Dejung and Niels P. Petersson, eds., The Foundations of Worldwide Economic Integration: Power, Institutions, and Global Markets, 1850–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 148.

  7. Douglas E. Haynes, “Market Formation in Khandeshh, 1820–1930,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 36, no. 3 (1999): 294; Asiatic Review (October 1, 1914): 294; C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 138; Dwijendra Tripathi, “An Echo Beyond the Horizon: The Effect of American Civil War on India,” in T. K. Ravindran, ed., Journal of Indian History: Golden Jubilee Volume (Trivandrum: University of Kerala, 1973), 660; Marika Vicziany, “Bombay Merchants and Structural Changes in the Export Community 1850 to 1880,” in K. N. Chaudhuri and Clive Dewey, eds., Economy and Society: Essays in Indian Economic and Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979), 163–96; Marika Vicziany, “The Cotton Trade and the Commercial Development of Bombay, 1855–75” (PhD dissertation, University of London, 1975), 170–71.

  8. Arnold Wright, ed., Twentieth Century Impressions of Egypt: Its History, People, Commerce, Industries, and Resources (London: Lloyd’s Greater Britain Publishing Company, 1909), 285; Alexander Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 1919–1937 (Oxford: Middle East Centre, Oxford University, 1989), 76, 86; Cinquante ans de labeur: The Kafr-El-Zayat Cotton Company Ltd., 1894–1944, in Rare Books and Special Collections Library, American University in Cairo; Ekthesis tou en Alexandria Genikou Proxeniou tis Egyptou 1883–1913 (Athens: n.p., 1915), 169–70.

  9. Meltem Toksöz, “The Çukurova: From Nomadic Life to Commercial Agriculture, 1800–1908” (PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 2000), 103, 106, 120, 125, 137, 174, 191, 193, 245; W. F. Bruck, Türkische Baumwollwirtschaft: Eine Kolonialwirtschaftliche und -politische Untersuchung (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1919), 9; William K. Meyers, Forge of Progress, Crucible of Revolt: Origins of the Mexican Revolution in La Comarca Lagunera, 1880–1911 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 48; Charles S. Aiken, The Cotton Plantation South Since the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 60.

  10. L. Tuffly Ellis, “The Revolutionizing of the Texas Cotton Trade, 1865–1885,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 73, no. 4 (1970): 479.

  11. Harold D. Woodman, “The Decline of Cotton Factorage after the Civil War,” American Historical Review 71, no. 4 (1966): 1220ff., 1236; Ellis, “The Revolutionizing of the Texas Cotton Trade,” 505.

  12. Woodman, “The Decline of Cotton Factorage after the Civil War,” 1223, 1228, 1231, 1239; Bradstreet’s: A Journal of Trade, Finance and Public Economy 11 (February 14, 1885): 99–100; John R. Killick, “The Transformation of Cotton Marketing in the Late Nineteenth Century: Alexander Sprunt and Son of Wilmington, N.C., 1884–1956,” Business History Review 55, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 162, 168.

  13. Killick, “Atlantic and Far Eastern Models in the Cotton Trade,” 17; Thomas Ellison, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain (London: Effingham Wilson, 1886), 280.

  14. See, for example, Albert C. Stevens, “ ‘Futures’ in the Wheat Market,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 2, no. 1 (October 1887): 37–63; Jonathan Ira Levy, “Contemplating Delivery: Futures Trading and the Problem of Commodity Exchange in the United States, 1875–1905,” American Historical Review 111, no. 2 (April 2006): 314; Alston Hill Garside, Cotton Goes to Market: A Graphic Description of a Great Industry (New York: Stokes, 1935), 166. On the discussions that resulted in the introduction of futures trading in Bremen see W II, 3, Baumwollterminhandel, Archive of the Handelskammer Bremen, Bremen, Germany; Frankfurter Zeitung, February 4, 1914.

  15. Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 214; Kenneth J. Lipartito, “The New York Cotton Exchange and the Development of the Cotton Futures Market,” Business History Review 57 (Spring 1983): 54.

  16. Lipartito, “The New York Cotton Exchange,” 53; Garside, Cotton Goes to Market, 133, 166.

  17. Garside, Cotton Goes to Market, 54–55, 68, 145.

  18. Jamie L. Pietruska, “ ‘Cotton Guessers’: Crop Forecasters and the Rationalizing of Uncertainty in American Cotton Markets, 1890–1905,” in Hartmut Berghoff, Philip Scranton, and Uwe Spiekermann, eds., The Rise of Marketing and Market Research (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 49–72; Michael Hovland, “The Cotton Ginnings Reports Program at the Bureau of the Census,” Agricultural History 68, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 147; N. Jasny, “Proposal for Revision of Agricultural Statistics,” Journal of Farm Economics 24, no. 2 (May 1942): 402; H. Parker Willis, “Cotton and Crop Reporting,” Journal of Political Economy 13, no. 4 (September 1905): 507; International Institute of Agriculture, Bureau of Statistics, The Cotton-Growing Countries; Production and Trade (Rome: International Institute of Agriculture, 1922).

  19. Sources for the data in the graph for the years 1820–1850 are: 1820—Tables of Revenue, Population, Commerce, &c. of the United Kingdom and Its Dependencies, Part I, from 1820 to 1831, Both Inclusive (London: William Clowes, 1833), 65, 67, 70; Richard Burn, Statistics of the Cotton Trade: Arranged in a Tabular Form: Also a Chronological History of Its Various Inventions, Improvements, etc., etc. (London: Simpkin, Marshall 1847), 1; Ellison, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain, 63–64; T. Bazley, “Cotton Manufacture,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 8th ed., vol. 7 (Edinburgh: Black, 1854), 453; Lars G. Sandberg, Lancashire in Decline: A Study in Entrepreneurship, Technology, and International Trade (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), 142, 145, 254–62; Andrew Ure, The Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain; Systematically Investigated…with an Introductory View of Its Comparative State in Foreign Countries, vol. 1 (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1970), 65–70, 328; Andrew Ure, The Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain; Systematically Investigated…with an Introductory View of Its Comparative State in Foreign Countries, vol. 2 (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1970), 328; I. Watts, “Cotton,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed., vol. 6 (Edinburgh: Black, 1877), 503–4.

  20. Amalendu Guha, “The Decline of India’s Cotton Handicrafts, 1800–1905: A Quantitative Macro-Study,” Calcutta Historical Journal 17 (1995): 44; Table No. 29, “Value of the Principal Articles of Merchandise and Treasure Imported into British India, by Sea, from Foreign Countries, in each of the Years ended 30th April,” in Statistical Abstracts Relating to British India from 1840 to 1865 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1867); Douglas A. Farnie, The English Cotton Industry and the World Market (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 101; Lars G. Sandberg, “Movements in the Quality of British Cotton Textile Exports, 1815–1913,” Journal of Economic History 28, no. 1 (March 1968): 1–27.

  21. Diary of Voyage to Calcutta, Record Group MSS EUR F 349, box 1, Richard Kay Papers, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London; Diary and notebook, Allahabad, 1820, in Record Group MSS EUR F 349, box 3, Richard Kay Papers, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library; Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register, New Series, 16 (January–April 1835): 125; Report of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce for the Year 1852–53 (Bombay: Bombay Gazette Press, 1853), 23.

  22. 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, no. 1 (1985): 150; Joel Beinin, “Egyptian Tex
tile Workers: From Craft Artisans Facing European Competition to Proletarians Contending with the State,” 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), 176; Patricia Davison and Patrick Harries, “Cotton Weaving in South-East Africa: Its History and Technology,” in Dale Idiens and K. G. Ponting, eds., Textiles of Africa (Bath: Pasold Research Fund, 1980), 189; G. P. C. Thomson, “Continuity and Change in Mexican Manufacturing,” in I. J. Baou, ed., Between Development and Underdevelopment (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1991), 275; Robert A. Potash, Mexican Government and Industrial Development in the Early Republic: The Banco de Avio (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), 27; H. G. Ward, Mexico (London: H. Colburn, 1829), 60; Robert Cliver as cited by Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Global Trade and Textile Workers,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 570.

  23. Gisborne to Joshua Bates, Walton, October 15, 1832, House Correspondence, HC 6.3, India and Indian Ocean, 1, ING Baring Archive, London; Ralph W. Hidy, The House of Baring in American Trade and Finance: English Merchant Bankers at Work, 1763–1861 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 104; Baring Brothers Liverpool to Baring Brothers London, August 1, 1836, House Correspondence, HC 3.35, 2, ING Baring Archive. The Brown Brothers engaged in the export of manufactured goods as well. D. M. Williams, “Liverpool Merchants and the Cotton Trade, 1820–1850” in J. R. Harris, ed., Liverpool and Merseyside: Essays in the Economic and Social History of the Port and Its Hinterland (London: Frank Cass & Co, 1969), 197; John A. Kouwenhoven, Partners in Banking: An Historical Portrait of a Great Private Bank, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., 1818–1968 (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1967), 41; see also Report of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce for the Year 1852–53, 24; Letterbook, 1868–1869, in Papers of McConnel & Kennedy, record group MCK, box 2/2/23, John Rylands Library, Manchester; Letterbook, May 1814 to September 1816, in Papers of McConnel & Kennedy, record group MCK, box 2/2/5, John Rylands Library; Dotter to Fielden Brothers, Calcutta, October 17, 1840, in Correspondence Related to Commercial Activities, May 1812–April 1850, in Record Group FDN, box 1/15, papers of Fielden Brothers, John Rylands Library.