Empire of Cotton
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24. Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta, “Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence: Lancashire, India and Shifting Competitive Advantage, 1600–1850: The Neglected Role of Factor Prices,” Economic History Review 62, no. 2 (May 2009): 285; Jim Matson, “Deindustrialization or Peripheralization? The Case of Cotton Textiles in India, 1750–1950,” in Sugata Bose, ed., South Asia and World Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 215.
25. Bombay Chamber of Commerce, Report of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce for the Year 1852–53, 23; J. Forbes Watson, Collection of Specimens and Illustrations of the Textile Manufacturers of India (Second Series) (London: India Museum, 1873), in Library of the Royal Asiatic Society Library of Bombay, Mumbai; Part A, No. 1, November 1906, 1, Industries Branch, Department of Commerce and Industry, National Archives of India, New Delhi. Very similar also R. E. Enthoven, The Cotton Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: n.p., 1897).
26. “Report on the Native Cotton Manufacturers of the District of Ning-Po” (China), in Compilations Vol. 75, 1887, Compilation No. 919, Revenue Department, Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai; 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), 10–11; Contract Book, George Robinson & Co. Papers, record group MSf 382.2.R1, in Manchester Archives and Local Studies, Manchester; Broadberry and Gupta, “Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence,” 285; Matson, “Deindustrialization or Peripherialization?” 215; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Aufstand in Indien (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1978 [1853]), 2; Konrad Specker, “Madras Handlooms in the Nineteenth Century,” in Tirthankar Roy, ed., Cloth and Commerce: Textiles in Colonial India (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996), 216; T.G.T., “Letters on the Trade with India,” in Asiatic Journal (September–December 1832): 256, as quoted in Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835), 81–82. It is interesting to note that Baines quotes these Bengal merchants approvingly. He does not give any source for this letter, nor does he give any of the names of these 117 merchants. See also Arno S. Pearse, The Cotton Industry of India, Being the Report of the Journey to India (Manchester: Taylor, Garnett, Evans, 1930), 20.
27. Guha, “The Decline of India’s Cotton Handicrafts,” 56; quoted in Times of India, Overland Summary, July 8, 1864, 4; Times of India, Overland Summary, October 29, 1863, 1; see also J. Talboys Wheeler, Assistant Secretary to the Government of India, “Memorandum on the Effect of the Rise in Cotton upon the Manufactured Article,” December 15, 1864, as reprinted in Times of India, Overland Summary, January 13, 1865, 3.
28. A. J. Dunlop to the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, Bombay, Camp Oomraoti, November 6, 1874, 4, Proceedings, Part B, November 1874, No. 5, Fibres and Silk Branch, Agriculture and Commerce Department, Revenue, National Archives of India, New Delhi; V. Garrett, Monograph on Cotton Fabrics in the Hyderabad Assigned Districts (New Delhi: Residency Government Press, 1897), 3; Report by E. A. Hobson, in Proceedings, Part B, Nos. 22–23, November 1887, Fibres and Silk Branch, Department of Revenue and Agriculture, National Archives of India; Rivett-Carnac, Report of the Cotton Department for the Year 1868–69, 35.
29. 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), 22–23.
30. Nitya Naraven Banerjei, Monograph on the Cotton Fabrics of Bengal (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1898), 2, 8; “Final Report on the Famine of 1896/97 in the Bombay Presidency,” in 1898, Compilations Vol. 8, Revenue Department, Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai.
31. Donald Quataert, “The Ottoman Empire, 1650–1922,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 480; on China see the brilliant piece by Jacob Eyferth, “Women’s Work and the Politics of Homespun in Socialist China, 1949–1980,” in International Review of Social History (2012): 9–10; D. C. M. Platt, Latin America and British Trade, 1806–1914 (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1972), 16; Lars Sundström, The Trade of Guinea (Lund: Håkan Ohlssons Boktryckerei, 1965), 160; Part A, No. 1, November 1906, 1, Industries Branch, Department of Commerce and Industry, National Archives of India, New Delhi.
32. Specker, “Madras Handlooms in the Nineteenth Century,” 185; Bombay Chamber of Commerce, Report of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce for the Year 1852–53, 27; Report, Part C, No. 1, March 1906, Industries Branch, Commerce and Industry Department, National Archives of India, New Delhi; Tirthankar Roy, “The Long Globalization and Textile Producers in India,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 266; M. P. Gandhi, The Indian Cotton Textile Industry: Its Past, Present and Future (Calcutta: G. N. Mitra, 1930), 82.
33. Beinin, “Egyptian Textile Workers,” 181; Quataert, “The Ottoman Empire, 1650–1922,” 479–80; for Africa, see Marion Johnson, “Technology, Competition, and African Crafts,” in Clive Dewey and A. G. Hopkins, eds., The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India (London: Athlone Press, 1978), 267; Part A, No. 1, November 1906, 3, Industries Branch, Department of Commerce and Industry, National Archives of India, New Delhi.
34. Robert Cliver, “China,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 111.
35. Letter to the Secretary of the Revenue Department, Fort St. George, November 21, 1843, Revenue Branch, Revenue Department, National Archives of India, New Delhi.
36. Petition of the Weavers of the Chingleput District Complaining against the Loom Tax in the Madras Presidency, June 8, 1844, Revenue Branch, Revenue Department, National Archives of India, New Delhi.
37. Roy, “The Long Globalization and Textile Producers in India,” 259; Guha, “The Decline of India’s Cotton Handicrafts,” 55; Matson, “Deindustrialization or Peripheralization?” 215.
38. Papers relating to Cotton Cultivation in India, MSS EUR F 78, 106, Wood Collection, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London. A similar story can also be found in Times of India, Overland Summary, August 24, 1863, 1. See also Memorandum by the Department of Agriculture, Revenue and Commerce, Fibres and Silk Branch, to the Home Department, Calcutta, June 24, 1874, in Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce Department, Fibres and Silk Branch, June 1874, No. 41/42, Part B, National Archives of India, New Delhi; Times of India, Overland Summary, April 27, 1864, 5, November 13, 1864, 3, and November 28, 1864, 1; Peter Harnetty, “The Imperialism of Free Trade: Lancashire, India, and the Cotton Supply Question, 1861–1865,” Journal of British Studies 6, no. 1 (November 1966): 92; Times of India, July 5, 1861, 3; Edward Mead Earle, “Egyptian Cotton and the American Civil War,” Political Science Quarterly 41, no. 4 (1926): 521; Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 66.
39. Orhan Kurmus, “The Cotton Famine and Its Effects on the Ottoman Empire,” in Huri Islamoglu-Inan, The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 165, 166, 168; Alan Richards, Egypt’s Agricultural Development, 1800–1980: Technical and Social Change (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982), 55; Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 60–64.
40. Rivett-Carnac, Report of the Cotton Department for the Year 1868–69, 132; John Aiton Todd, The World’s Cotton Crops (London: A. & C. Black, 1915), 429–32. David Hall-Matthews, “Colonial Ideologies of the Market and Famine Policy in Ahmednagar District, Bombay Presidency, c. 1870–1884,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 36, no. 3 (1999): 303–33; Samuel Smith, The Cotton Trade of England, Being a Series of Letters Written from Bombay in the Spring of 1863 (London: Effingham, Wilson, 1863), 12–13; Allen Isaacman and Richard Roberts, “Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Allen Isaacman and Richard Roberts, eds., Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995), 32, 34; Meyers, Forge of Progress, 126; Jorge Raul Colva
, El “Oro Blanco” en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Editorial Calidad, 1946), 15.
41. Data taken from “Index Numbers of Indian Prices 1861–1926,” No. 2121, Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch, 1928, Summary Tables III and VI, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London. On the new uncertainty introduced by world market integration see also A. E. Nelson, Central Provinces District Gazetteers, Amraoti District, vol. A (Bombay: Claridge, 1911), 226, in record group V/27/65/6, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London; Hall-Matthews, “Colonial Ideologies of the Market and Famine,” 307, 313; Memo by the Department of Agriculture, Revenue and Commerce, Fibres and Silk Branch, to the Home Department, Calcutta, June 24, 1874, Proceedings, Part B, June 1874, No. 41/42, Fibres and Silk Branch, Agriculture and Commerce Department, Revenue, National Archives of India, New Delhi; Frenise A. Logan, “India’s Loss of the British Cotton Market after 1865,” Journal of Southern History 31, no. 1 (1965): 46; Iltudus Thomas Prichard, who quoted Sir Trevelyan as saying in his budget statement for 1863 that “demand for exported produce could only be met by diverting to its production a large proportion of the land which has been previously employed in raising grain,” cited in Iltudus Thomas Prichard, The Administration of India, From 1859–1868, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1869), 9; for Egypt see E. R. J. Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 1820–1914: A Study in Trade and Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 159; for Brazil see Luis Cordelio Barbosa, “Cotton in 19th Century Brazil: Dependency and Development” (PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 1989), 31, 95–102, 105–8, 142; see also International Federation of Master Cotton Spinners’ and Manufacturers’ Associations, Official Report of the International Congress, Held in Egypt, 1927 (Manchester: International Federation of Master Cotton Spinners’ and Manufacturers’ Associations, 1927), 99.
42. Rivett-Carnac, Report of the Cotton Department for the Year 1868–69, 52.
43. Barbosa, “Cotton in 19th Century Brazil,” 105. The connection between famine and the extension of cotton agriculture is also emphasized by Sandip Hazareesingh, “Cotton, Climate and Colonialism in Dharwar, Western India, 1840–1880,” Journal of Historical Geography 38, no. 1 (2012): 16. On famines in the late nineteenth century in general see also Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York: Verso, 2001), 7; Nelson, Central Provinces District Gazetteers, Amraoti District, vol. A. “The scarcity of 1896–97 was caused by high prices and not by failure of crops,” reported the deputy commissioner of the Akola District (in Berar) to the Indian Famine Commission. See Indian Famine Commission, “Appendix, Evidence of Witnesses, Berar,” Report of the Indian Famine Commission (Calcutta: n.p., 1901), 43, 53. For the mortality figures see Indian Famine Commission, “Appendix, Evidence of Witnesses, Berar,” Report of the Indian Famine Commission, 54, 213. Total mortality between December 1899 and November 1900 was 84.7 per 1,000; see also Sugata Bose, “Pondering Poverty, Fighting Famines: Towards a New History of Economic Ideas,” in Kaushik Basu, ed., Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 428.
44. Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 63–64; on the riots see Neil Charlesworth, “The Myth of the Deccan Riots of 1875,” Modern Asian Studies 6, no. 4 (1972): 401–21; Deccan Riots Commission, Papers Relating to the Indebtedness of the Agricultural Classes in Bombay and Other Parts of India (Bombay: Deccan Riots Commission, 1876); Report of the Committee on the Riots in Poona and Ahmednagar, 1875 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1876); Roderick J. Barman, “The Brazilian Peasantry Reexamined: The Implications of the Quebra-Quilo Revolt, 1874–1875,” Hispanic American Historical Review 57, no. 3 (1977): 401–24; Armando Souto Maior, Quebra-Quilos: Lutas sociais no outono do império (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1978). The pressure of raising taxes was also felt by Egyptian peasants who lost in the process most of the profits that they had accumulated during the Civil War. See Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 144; W. H. Wyllie, Agent of the Governor General in Central India, to the Revenue and Agriculture Department, September 9, 1899, in Proceedings, Part B, Nos. 14–54, November 1899, Famine Branch, Department of Revenue and Agriculture, National Archives of India, New Delhi; Wady E. Medawar, Études sur la question cotonnière et l’organisation agricole en Égypte (Cairo: A. Gherson, 1900), 16, 20–21; William K. Meyers, “Seasons of Rebellion: Nature, Organisation of Cotton Production and the Dynamics of Revolution in La Laguna, Mexico, 1910–1816,” Journal of Latin American Studies 30, no. 1 (February 1998): 63; Meyers, Forge of Progress, 132–34.
45. The importance of the discourse on cotton to anticolonial politics can also be traced in File 4, Correspondence, G. K. Gokhale, 1890–1911, in Servants of India Society Papers, Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi; Correspondence, Sir Pherozeshah Mehta Papers, Nehru Memorial Library.
CHAPTER TWELVE: THE NEW COTTON IMPERIALISM
1. Department of Finance, 1895, Annual Return of the Foreign Trade of the Empire of Japan (Tokyo: Koide, n.d.), 310; Department of Finance, 1902, Annual Return of the Foreign Trade of the Empire of Japan (Tokyo: Koide, n.d.), 397; Department of Finance, 1920, Annual Return of the Foreign Trade of the Empire of Japan, Part I (Tokyo: n.p., n.d.), 397; Tohei Sawamura, Kindai chosen no mensaku mengyo (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1985), 112; Chosen ni okeru menka saibai no genzai to shorai, n.d., mimeograph, Asian Reading Room, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; a slightly different account of the beginnings of Japanese efforts to increase cotton growing in colonial Korea can be found in Carter J. Eckert, Offspring of Empire: The Koch and Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, 1876–1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 134.
2. Dai-Nihon boseki rengokai geppo 173 (January 25, 1906): 1–2; Annual Report for 1907 on Reforms and Progress in Korea (Seoul: H.I.J.M.’s Residency General, 1908), 84; Eckert, Offspring of Empire, 134–5.
3. Eckert, Offspring of Empire, 134; Annual Report for 1912–13 on Reforms and Progress in Chosen (Keijo: Government General of Chosen, 1914), 153; Department of Finance, 1909, Annual Return of the Foreign Trade of the Empire of Japan (Tokyo: Koide, n.d.), 629; Cotton Department, Toyo Menka Kaisha Lts., The Indian Cotton Facts (Bombay: n.p., n.d.), Japanese Cotton Spinners Association Library, University of Osaka.
4. 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), 1; Eckert, Offspring of Empire, 134; No-Shomu Sho Nomu Kyoku [Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, Department of Agriculture], Menka ni Kansuru Chosa [The Research on Cotton] (Tokyo: No-shomu sho noji shikenjyo, 1905), 1–3, 76–83, chapter 2; Chosen sotokufu norinkyoku, Chosen no nogyo (Keijyo: Chosen sotokufu norinkyoku, 1934), 66–73.
5. Nihon mengyo kurabu, Naigai mengyo nenkan (Osaka: Nihon mengyo kurabu, 1931), 231, 233; Annual Report for 1912–13, 145, 153; Annual Report for 1915–16, 107; Annual Report for 1921–22, 263; Department of Finance of Japan, Monthly Trade Return of Japan Proper and Karafuto (Sagalien) with Chosen (Korea) (Tokyo: n.p., 1915), 24–25.
6. For this shift of conceptions of sovereignty see Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1864); for a very interesting discussion on these issues see also Doreen Lustig, “Tracing the Origins of the Responsibility Gap of Businesses in International Law, 1870–1919” (unpublished paper, Tel Aviv University Law School, May 2012, in author’s possession). Resolution passed by the Manchester Cotton Supply Association, reprinted in Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 44, no. 6 (June 1861): 678; Arthur Redford, Manchester Merchants and Foreign Trade, 1794–1858 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1934), 217, 227; Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee, Baumwoll-Expedition; New England Cotton Manufacturers’ Association, Transactions of the New England Cotton Manufacturers’ Association, vol. 73 (Waltham, MA: n.p., 1902), 182.
7. For the
price increase and a very good exploration of these events and their import see Jonathan Robbins, “The Cotton Crisis: Globalization and Empire in the Atlantic World, 1901–1920” (PhD dissertation, University of Rochester, 2010), 41–54; see also Edmund D. Morel, Affairs of West Africa (London: William Heinemann, 1902), 191; Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee, “Unsere Kolonialwirtschaft in ihrer Bedeutung für Industrie, Handel und Landwirtschaft,” Manuscript, R 8024/37, Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee, Various Letters, 1914, Bundesarchiv, Berlin; for the notion of a “second cotton famine” see Christian Brannstrom, “Forest for Cotton: Institutions and Organizations in Brazil’s Mid-Twentieth-Century Cotton Boom,” Journal of Historical Geography 36, no. 2 (April 2010): 169.
8. Morel, Affairs, 191; Edward B. Barbier, Scarcity and Frontiers: How Economies Have Developed Through Natural Resource Exploitation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1850–1900 (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2003).