Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  9. Muriel Joffe, “Autocracy, Capitalism and Empire: The Politics of Irrigation,” Russian Review 54, no. 3 (July 1995): 367; Rosen is quoted in Mariya Konstantinovna Rozhkova, Ekonomich eskaia politika tsarskogo pravitel’stva na Srednem Vostoke vo vtoroi chetverti XIX veka i russkaya burzhuaziya (Moscow: Izd. Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1949), 100; on earlier hopes for Central Asia as the cotton supplier to Russia see also Pavel Nebol’sin, Ocherki torgovli Rossii s Srednei Aziei (Saint Petersburg: Tipografia Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1855), 18, 22, 25, 27; textile manufacturer Aleksandr Shipov stressed as early as 1857 the importance of securing access to Central Asian cotton; see Aleksandr Shipov, Khlopchatobumazhnaia promyshlennost’ i vazhnost’ eco znacheniia v Rossii, otd I (Moscow: T.T. Volkov & Co., 1857), 49–50; see Charles William Maynes, “America Discovers Central Asia,” Foreign Affairs 82, no. 2 (March/April 2003): 120; Mariya Konstantinovna Rozhkova, Ekonomiceskie svyazi Rossii so Srednei Aziei, 40–60-e gody XIX veka (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1963), 54–55, tables 9–10.

  10. Quote in Rozhkova, Ekonomicheskiie, 64–65, 150–52; a pood (or 35.24 pounds) of Asian cotton was sold for 7.75 rubles in 1861, but by 1863 the price had increased to more than 22 rubles; P. A. Khromov, Ekonomicheskoe razvitie Rossii v XIX-XX vekakh: 1800–1917 (Moscow: Gos. Izd. Politicheskoi Literatury, 1950), 183; in some regions, such as in the Erivan gubernia (in the Caucasus), cotton production during the Civil War increased nearly tenfold, from 30,000 poods in 1861 to 273,000 poods in 1870; K. A. Pazhitnov, Ocherki istorii tesktil’ noi promyshlennosti dorrevolyutsionnoi Rossii: Khlopchato-Bumazhnaya l’no-pen’ kovaya i shelkovaya promyshlennost (Moscow: Izd. Akademii Nauk SSR, 1958), 98; Rozhkova, Ekonomiceskie, 55–61; see, for a discussion of the expansion of cotton agriculture in Russian Central Asia, Joffe, “Autocracy,” 365–88; Julia Obertreis, Imperial Desert Dreams: Irrigation and Cotton Growing in Southern Central Asia, 1860s to 1991 (unpublished manuscript, 2009), chapter 1, 23; Moskva, February 1, 1867; on January 8, 1866, Czar Alexander II received a memorandum written by the minister of finance in favor of the exertion of greater influence on Central Asia, which listed among the supporters of such a project the names of a group of Russian capitalists, including owners of such prominent cotton ventures as Ivan Khludov & Sons, Savva Morozov & Sons, Vl. Tertyakov, and D. I. Romanovskii; see N. A. Khalfin, Prisoedinenie Srednei Azii k Rossii: 60–90 gody XIX v (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), 211; on the general debate about Russian imperialism, see Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic Empire (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 175, 193; Dietrich Geyer, Der russische Imperialismus: Studien über den Zusammenhang von innerer und auswärtiger Politik, 1860–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977); Thomas C. Owen, “The Russian Industrial Society and Tsarist Economic Policy,” Journal of Economic History 45, no. 3 (September 1985): 598; Brigitte Loehr, Die Zukunft Russlands (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985), 73; Joffe, “Autocracy,” 372; Bruno Biedermann, “Die Versorgung der russischen Baumwollindustrie mit Baumwolle eigener Produktion” (PhD dissertation, University of Heidelberg, 1907), 106.

  11. Shtaba L. Kostenko, Sredni aia Aziia i Vodvorenie v nei Russkoi Grazgdanstvennosti (Saint Petersburg: Bezobrazova i kom, 1871), 221; Thomas Martin, Baumwollindustrie in Sankt Petersburg und Moskau und die russische Zolltarifpolitik, 1850–1891: Eine vergleichende Regionalstudie (Giessen: Fachverlag Koehler, 1998), 213, 215; Scott C. Levi, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and Its Trade, 1550–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 249; Jeff Sahadeo, “Cultures of Cotton and Colonialism: Politics, Society, and the Environment in Central Asia, 1865–1923” (presentation, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies Annual Convention, Toronto, November 2003), 5; George N. Curzon, Russia in Central Asia in 1889 and the Anglo-Russian Question (London: Cass, 1967), 405–7; Biedermann, “Die Versorgung,” 40–44; on irrigation see also Obertreis, Imperial Desert Dreams; John Whitman, “Turkestan Cotton in Imperial Russia,” American Slavic and East European Review 15, no. 2 (April 1956): 194–95, 199; Moritz Schanz, “Die Baumwolle in Russisch-Asien,” Beihefte zum Tropenpflanzer 15 (1914): 8.

  12. Obertreis, Imperial Desert Dreams, Chapter 1, 74ff.; these conflicts are best described in regard to the question of irrigation; see Joffe, “Autocracy,” 369, 387; Whitman, “Turkestan Cotton,” 194, 198, 201; the territory devoted to cotton agriculture increased by a factor of five between 1887 and 1899 in Russian Turkestan, Bukhara, and Khiva; Anlage zum Bericht des Kaiserlichen Generalkonsulats in St. Petersburg, December 26, 1913, R 150F, FA 1, 360, Bundesarchiv, Berlin; the “cotton colony” quote can be found in I. Liashchenko, Istoriia Narodnogo Khoziaistva SSSR, vol. 2 (Moscow: Gos. Izd. Polit. Literatury, 1956), 542; “Handelsbericht des Kaiserlichen Konsulats für das Jahr 1909,” in Deutsches Handels-Archiv, Zweiter Teil: Berichte über das Ausland, 1911 (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1911), 168; Schanz, “Die Baumwolle,” 11; Annette M. B. Meakin, In Russian Turkestan: A Garden of Asia and Its People (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), v; Ella R. Christie, Through Kiva to Golden Samarkand (London: Seeley, Service & Co., 1925), 204; Karl Supf, “Zur Baumwollfrage,” in Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee, Baumwoll-Expedition nach Togo (no date, but probably 1900), 4–6, file 332, record group R 150F, Fonds Allemand 1, Papers of the Administration of the German Protectorate Togo (L’Administration du Protectorat Allemand du Togo), Archives Nationales du Togo, Lomé, microfilm copy in Bundesarchiv, Berlin; Michael Owen Gately, “The Development of the Russian Cotton Textile Industry in the Pre-revolutionary Years, 1861–1913” (PhD dissertation, University of Kansas, 1968), 169.

  13. August Etienne, Die Baumwollzucht im Wirtschaftsprogramm der deutschen Übersee-Politik (Berlin: H. Paetal, 1902), 35, 36, 37, 41; Harper’s Weekly reported that “Uzbekistan can thank the American Civil War” for its strong dependence on cotton; see Harper’s Weekly, April 2002, 42.

  14. Etienne, Die Baumwollzucht, 28.

  15. Ibid., 13.

  16. Biedermann, “Die Versorgung,” 12; “Cotton in British East Africa,” Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, Third Series, 24 (July–October 1907): 84; Robert Ed. Buehler, “Die Unabhängigkeitsbestrebungen Englands, Frankreichs und Deutschlands in ihrer Baumwollversorgung” (PhD dissertation, University of Zürich, 1929), 57.

  17. Oldham Master Cotton Spinners’ Association, Report of the Committee, for Year Ending December 31, 1901 (Oldham: Dornan, 1902), 4, in Record group 6/2/1–61m, Papers of the Oldham Master Cotton Spinners’ Association, John Rylands Library, Manchester; Buehler, “Die Unabhängigkeitsbestrebungen,” 68; British Cotton Growing Association, Second Annual Report, for the Year Ending August 31st, 1906 (Manchester: Head Office, 1906), 8, 10; Correspondence, File 1, Files Relating to the Cotton Industry, British Cotton Growing Association, 2/5, OLD, Papers of the Oldham Textile Employers’ Association, 1870–1960, John Rylands Library, Manchester; Morel, Affairs; for an excellent review of the activities of the British Cotton Growing Association, see Jonathan Robins, “ ‘The Black Man’s Crop’: Cotton, Imperialism and Public-Private Development in Britain’s African Colonies, 1900–1918,” Commodities of Empire Working Paper 11, The Open University and London Metropolitan University, September 2009; Oldham Master Cotton Spinners’ Association, Report of the Committee, for the Year Ending December 31, 1901 (Oldham: Thomas Dornan, 1902), 4, John Rylands Library, Manchester; File Empire Cotton Growing Association, 2/6, OLD, Papers of the Oldham Textile Employers’ Association, 1870–1960, John Rylands Library, Manchester; N. M. Penzer, Federation of British Industries, Intelligence Department, Cotton in British West Africa (London: Federation of British Industries, 1920); John Harris, Parliamentary Secretary of the Society, to E. Sedgwick, Boston, November 10, 1924, Papers of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, MSS. British Empire S22, G143, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth & African Studies, University of Oxford; John Harris to Maxwell Garnett, January 20, 1925, MSS. British Empire 522, G446, Papers of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society
, Rhodes House Library, Oxford; D. Edwards-Radclyffe, “Ramie, The Textile of the Future,” Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, Third Series, 20 (July–October 1905): 47.

  18. Frédéric Engel-Dollfus, Production du coton (Paris: Paul Dupont, 1867); as General Faidherbe argued in 1889, “La culture du cotonnier comme l’élément le plus puissant du succès de la colonisation”; see General Faidherbe, Le Sénégal: La France dans l’Afrique occidentale (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1889), 102; Association Cotonnière Coloniale, Annexe au Bulletin No 3: Les coton indigènes du Dahomey et du Soudan à la filature et au tisage (Paris: Jean Ganiche, 1904); Charles Brunel, Le coton en Algérie (Alger: Imprimierie Agricole, 1910); for French interest in colonial cotton see also Ed. C. Achard, “Le coton en Cilivie et en Syrie,” in L’Asie Française (June 1922), Supplement; Documents Économiques, Politiques & Scientifiques, 19–64; Bulletin de l’Union des Agriculteurs d’Égypte 159 (March 1925): 73–85; Catalogue of the Library of the Société Industrielle de Mulhouse, Mulhouse, France; Zeitfragen: Wochenschrift für deutsches Leben, May 1, 1911, 1.

  19. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 87–89; J. De Cordova, The Cultivation of Cotton in Texas (London: J. King & Co., 1858), 3, 9, 24; National Association of Cotton Manufacturers and Planters, Proceedings of a Convention Held in the City of New York, Wednesday, April 29, 1868, for the Purpose of Organizing the National Association of Cotton Manufacturers and Planters (Boston: Prentiss & Deland, 1868); New England Cotton Manufacturers’ Association, Transactions of the New England Cotton Manufacturers’ Association, vol. 73 (Waltham, MA: n.p., 1902), 187; New England Cotton Manufacturers’ Association, Transactions of the New England Cotton Manufacturers’ Association, vol. 75 (1903), 191; New England Cotton Manufacturers’ Association, Transactions of the New England Cotton Manufacturers’ Association, vol. 79 (1905), 159.

  20. See also Henry L. Abbott, “The Lowlands of the Mississippi,” The Galaxy 5 (April 1868): 452; National Association of Cotton Manufacturers and Planters, Articles of Association and By-Laws Adopted by the National Association of Cotton Manufacturers and Planters, April 29, 1868 (Boston: Prentiss & Deland, 1968); National Association of Cotton Manufacturers and Planters, Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the National Association of Cotton Manufacturers and Planters, Held in the City of New York, Wednesday, June 30, 1869 (Boston: W. L. Deland & Co., 1869), 17; F. W. Loring and C. F. Atkinson, Cotton Culture and the South Considered with Reference to Emigration (Boston: A. Williams & Co., 1869), 3; New England Cotton Manufacturers’ Association, Transactions of the New England Cotton Manufacturers’ Association, vol. 76 (1904), 104. On Africa see 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), 1; Records of the Togo Baumwollgesellschaft mbh, Record Group 7, 2016, Staatsarchiv Bremen, Bremen, Germany; Laxman D. Satya, Cotton and Famine in Berar (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997), 55; Thaddeus Raymond Sunseri, Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002); Sven Beckert, “From Tuskegee to Togo: The Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton,” Journal of American History 92, no. 2 (September 2005): 498–526; Edward Mead Earle, “Egyptian Cotton and the American Civil War,” Political Science Quarterly 41, no. 4 (1926): 520; Westminster Review 84, American Edition (1865): 228; Zeitfragen: Wochenschrift für deutsches Leben, May 1, 1911, 1; Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee, Deutsch-Koloniale Baumwoll-Unternehmungen 1902/1903 (Berlin: Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee, 1903), 5.

  21. Moulvi Syed Mahdi Ali, ed., Hyderabad Affairs, vol. 3 (Bombay: n.p., 1883), 112, 404, 451; Manchester Guardian, June 30, 1882, 4; Earle, “Egyptian Cotton,” 544; Edward Roger John Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 1820–1914: A Study in Trade and Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 89, 130, 141, 213ff., 247.

  22. Meltem Toksöz, “The Çukurova: From Nomadic Life to Commercial Agriculture, 1800–1908” (PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 2000), 204, 206, 228; Anthony Hall, Drought and Irrigation in North-East Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 4; Roger L. Cunniff, “The Great Drought: Northeast Brazil, 1877–1880” (PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1970), 79, 83, 87, 88, 89, 91–95; International Institute of Agriculture, Statistical Bureau, The Cotton-Growing Countries: Production and Trade (Rome: International Institute of Agriculture, 1922), 125.

  23. Michael J. Gonzales, “The Rise of Cotton Tenant Farming in Peru, 1890–1920: The Condor Valley,” Agricultural History 65, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 53, 55; Oficina Nacional de Agricultura, El algodón, instrucciones agricolas (Buenos Aires: Penitenciaria Nacional, 1897), 1; Alejandro E. Bunge, Las industrias del Norte: Contribución al estudio de una nueva política económia Argentina (Buenos Aires: n.p., 1922), 212ff.; Heinz E. Platte, “Baumwollanbau in Argentinien,” Argentinisches Tagblatt 20, no. 1 (January 1924): 19.

  24. Toksöz, “Çukurova,” 99; Weaver, Great Land Rush, 4.

  25. See in general, Jürgen Osterhammel, Kolonialismus: Geschichte, Formen, Folgen, 6th ed. (Munich: Beck, 2009), 10–11; on the specifics see Secretary of the Interior, Agriculture of the United States in 1860: Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1864), 185, accessed May 25, 2009, http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/Historical_Publications/1860/1860b-08.pdf; United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, accessed April 28, 2009, http://quickstats.nass.usda.gov; since there are no numbers available on the precise extent of the territory on which cotton was grown in 1860, I assumed constant productivity to estimate the additional land needed to grow the additional cotton. The area of the state of South Carolina is 20,484,000 acres.

  26. Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 34ff., 57; Secretary of the Interior, Agriculture of the United States in 1860: Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1864), 185, accessed May 25, 2009, http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/Historical_Publications/1860/1860b-08.pdf; United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, accessed April 28, 2009, http://quickstats.nass.usda.gov; Charles S. Aiken, The Cotton Plantation South Since the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 59; James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), viii, 95, 99, 100; Gavin Wright, “Agriculture in the South,” in Glenn Porter, ed., Encyclopedia of American Economic History: Studies of the Principal Movements and Ideas, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1980), 382; Devra Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 17–21.

  27. U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstracts of the United States, 1921 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1922), 375; Randolph B. Campbell, Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 306, 308, 311.

  28. Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 659, 666.

  29. Howard Wayne Morgan, Oklahoma: A Bicentennial History (New York: Norton, 1977), 42, 81, 91, 48, 49, 58, 147; United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service, accessed April 28, 2009, http://quickstats.nass.usda.gov; U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Census Bureau, “Agriculture, 1909 and 1910, Reports by States, with Statistics for Counties, Nebraska-Wyoming,” Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910, vol. 7 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), 381; Eric V. Meeks, “The Tohono O’Odham, Wage Labor, and Resistant A
daptation,” Western Historical Quarterly 34, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 480; Daniel H. Usner, Indian Work: Language and Livelihood in Native American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 55.

  30. For an exploration of this issue see Sven Beckert, “Space Matters: Eurafrica, the American Empire, and the Territorialization of European Capitalism, 1870–1940” (article in progress).

  31. Günter Kirchhain, “Das Wachstum der deutschen Baumwollindustrie im 19. Jahr-hundert: Eine historische Modellstudie zur empirischen Wachstumsforschung” (PhD dissertation, University of Münster, 1973), 29–30, 73; Wilhelm Rieger, Verzeichnis der im Deutschen Reiche auf Baumwolle laufenden Spindeln und Webstühle (Stuttgart: Wilhelm Rieger, 1909), 72; for different and slightly lower numbers, see Wolfram Fischer, Statistik der Bergbauproduktion Deutschland 1850–1914 (St. Kathatinen: Scripta Mercaturae Verlag, 1989), 403; Handbuch der Wirtschaftskunde Deutschlands, vol. 3 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1904), 602; it is indeed fascinating that in many ways the more important cotton industry plays much less of a role in our historical memory of late-nineteenth-century Germany. See also Karl Supf, “Zur Baumwollfrage,” in Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee, Baumwoll-Expedition nach Togo (no date, but probably 1900), 4–6, file 332, record group R 150F, Fonds Allemand 1, Papers of the Administration of the German Protectorate Togo (L’Administration du Protectorat Allemand du Togo), Archives Nationales du Togo, Lomé, microfilm copy in Bundesarchiv, Berlin; Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich, vol. 23 (Berlin: Puttkammer & Mühlbrecht, 1902), 24; in 1903 the Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee reported that 1 million workers in Germany were dependent on the cotton industry; see Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee, Deutsch-Koloniale, 5; the value of the cotton industry’s production amounted by 1913 to 2.2 billion marks, making it one of Germany’s most significant industries. See Andor Kertész, Die Textilindustrie Deutschlands im Welthandel (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg, 1915), 13. See also Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich, vol. 22 (Berlin: n.p., 1901), 135; Thaddeus Sunseri, “The Baumwollfrage: Cotton Colonialism in German East Africa,” Central European History 34, no. 1 (March 2001): 35; for import statistics see Reichs-Enquete für die Baumwollen-und Leinen-Industrie, Statistische Ermittelungen I, Heft 1, 56–58; Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich, vol. 1 (Berlin: n.p., 1880), 87; Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich, vol. 20 (Berlin: n.p., 1899), 91.