Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  13. Ebeling et al.,“The German Wool and Cotton Industry,” 228; R. M. R. Dehn, The German Cotton Industry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1913), 71–72.

  14. M.V. Konotopov et al., Istoriia otechestvennoi tekstil’noi promyshlennosti (Moscow: Legprombytizdat, 1992), 179; Dave Pretty, “The Cotton Textile Industry in Russia and the Soviet Union,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 435–37, 439; Dave Pretty, “The Cotton Textile Industry in Russia and the Soviet Union” (presentation, Textile Conference, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, November 2004), 17, 33.

  15. Andreas Balthasar, Erich Gruner, and Hans Hirter, “Gewerkschaften und Arbeitgeber auf dem Arbeitsmarkt: Streiks, Kampf ums Recht und Verhältnis zu anderen Interessengruppen,” in Erich Gruner, ed., Arbeiterschaft und Wirtschaft in der Schweiz 1880–1914: Soziale Lage, Organisation und Kämpfe von Arbeitern und Unternehmern, politische Organisation und Sozialpolitik, vol. 2, part 1 (Zürich: Chronos, 1988), 456ff., 464; Angel Smith et al., “Spain,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 465–67; Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Lex Heerman van Voss, and Els Hiemstra-Kuperus, “The Netherlands,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 388.

  16. T. J. Hatton, G. R. Boyer, and R. E. Bailey, “The Union Wage Effect in Late Nineteenth Century Britain,” Economica 61, no. 244 (November 1994): 436, 449; Farnie and Abe, “Japan, Lancashire and the Asian Market for Cotton Manufactures,” 134, 136; William Lazonick, Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 115, 136.

  17. Charles Tilly, “Social Change in Modern Europe: The Big Picture,” in Lenard R. Berlanstein, ed., The Industrial Revolution and Work in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: Routledge, 1992), 54–55; Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Lex Heerma van Voss, and Els Hiemstra-Kuperus, “Covering the World: Some Conclusions to the Project,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 773–92.

  18. Dehn, The German Cotton Industry, 94; Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 261; Günter Kirchhain, “Das Wachstum der deutschen Baumwollindustrie im 19. Jahrhundert: Eine historische Modellstudie zur empirischen Wachstumsforschung” (PhD dissertation, University of Münster, 1973), 86; Patricia Penn Hilden, “Class and Gender: Conflicting Components of Women’s Behaviour in the Textile Mills of Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing, 1880–1914,” Historical Journal 27, no. 2 (June 1984): 378; Smith et al., “Spain,” 468.

  19. Dehn, The German Cotton Industry, 82; Kirchhain, “Das Wachstum der deutschen Baumwollindustrie,” 159–60. The annual wages rose in real terms (expressed in 1913 marks) from 563.58 marks per year to 860 marks per year. See implicit deflator of net national product in Table A.5, Cost of Living Indices in Germany, 1850–1985 (1913 = 100), Appendix, in P. Scholliers and Z. Zamagni, eds., Labour’s Reward: Real Wages and Economic Change in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe (Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1995), 226; if we assume twelve days of labor in a two-week span, daily wages in Alsace in 1870 amounted to between 2.51–3.00 francs per day in 1910 francs, and 5.42–6.25 francs per day for 1910. To calculate real wages, see Table H1, Wholesale Price Indices, in B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750–2005 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 955–56. Smith et al., “Spain,” 469; Smith, “The Cotton Textile Industry of Fall River,” 88. In the 1890s, doffers made (in 2011 dollars) $35.92 per day, and in 1920 $53.72 per day. Loom-fixers went up from $42.39 per day in 1890 to $81.92 per day in 1920. See Table III. Classified Rates of Wages per Hour in Each State, by Years, 1907 to 1912, in Fred Cleveland Croxton, Wages and Hours of Labor in the Cotton, Woolen, and Silk Industries (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913).

  20. Harvey, Constructing Class and Nationality in Alsace, 82; Dehn, The German Cotton Industry, 94; Georg Meerwein, “Die Entwicklung der Chemnitzer bezw. sächsischen Baumwollspinnerei von 1789–1879” (PhD dissertation, University of Heidelberg, 1914), 94; Beth English, “Beginnings of the Global Economy: Capital Mobility and the 1890s U.S. Textile Industry,” in Delfino and Gillespie, eds., Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South, 177; Walter Bodmer, Die Entwicklung der schweizerischen Textilwirtschaft im Rahmen der übrigen Industrien und Wirtschafts-zweige (Zürich: Verlag Berichthaus, 1960), 397.

  21. English, “Beginnings of the Global Economy,” 176; W. F. Bruck, Die Geschichte des Kriegsausschusses der deutschen Baumwoll-Industrie (Berlin: Kriegsausschuss der Deutschen Baumwoll-Industrie, 1920), 11; John Steven Toms, “Financial Constraints on Economic Growth: Profits, Capital Accumulation and the Development of the Lancashire Cotton-Spinning Industry, 1885–1914,” Accounting Business and Financial History 4, no. 3 (1994): 367; J. H. Bamberg, “The Rationalization of the British Cotton Industry in the Interwar Years,” Textile History 19, no. 1 (1988): 85; M. W. Kirby, “The Lancashire Cotton Industry in the Inter-War Years: A Study in Organizational Change” Business History 16, no. 2 (1974): 151.

  22. Kirchhain, “Das Wachstum der deutschen Baumwollindustrie,” 95, 166; Gregory Clark, “Why Isn’t the Whole World Developed? Lessons from the Cotton Mills,” Journal of Economic History 47, no. 1 (March 1987): 145, 148; Hermann Kellenbenz, Deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte, vol. 2 (München: Beck, 1981), 406; Meerkerk et al., “Covering the World,” 785.

  23. Gisela Müller, “Die Entstehung und Entwicklung der Wiesentäler Textilindustrie bis zum Jahre 1945” (PhD dissertation, University of Basel, 1965), 49; Deutsche Volks-wirtschaftlichen Correspondenz 42 (Ulm: Gebrüder Rübling, 1879), 8; Brian A’Hearn, “Institutions, Externalities, and Economic Growth in Southern Italy: Evidence from the Cotton Textile Industry, 1861–1914,” Economic History Review 51, no. 4 (1998): 742; Jörg Fisch, Europa zwischen Wachstum und Gleichheit, 1850–1914 (Stuttgart: Ulmer, 2002), 65; Tom Kemp, Economic Forces in French History (London: Dennis Dobson, 1971), 184; Auguste Lalance, La crise de l’industrie cotonnière (Mulhouse: Veuve Bader & Cie., 1879), 6.

  24. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Manufactures, and W. A. Graham Clark, Cotton Goods in Latin America: Part 1, Cuba, Mexico, and Central America (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), 6–7, 14; Jordi Nadal, “The Failure of the Industrial Revolution in Spain, 1830–1914,” in Carlo M. Cipolla, ed., The Fontana Economic History of Europe, vol. 4, part 2, The Emergence of Industrial Societies (Great Britain: Fontana, 1973), 612–13; M. V. Konotopov et al., Istoriia otechestvennoi tekstil’noi promyshlennosti (Moscow: Legprombytizdat, 1992), 268–69; For Atkinson see Edward Atkinson, Cotton: Articles from the New York Herald (Boston: Albert J. Wright, 1877), 31.

  25. As reflected, for example, in the Proceedings of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce; in M8/2/1/16, Proceedings of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, 1919–1925, Manchester Library and Local Studies, Manchester.

  26. Times, October 3, 1923, 9; see also James Watt Jr. to Richard Bond, Esq., July 7, 1934, in DDX1115/6/26, Liverpool Records Office, Liverpool; as quoted in Spector-Marks, “Mr. Ghandi Visits Lancashire,” 44.

  27. “Textile Shutdown Visioned by Curley: New England Industry Will Die in Six Months Unless Washington Helps, He Says,” New York Times, April 15, 1935. The importance of wage costs to the geographic location of textile production is also one of the (three) core findings of a multiyear research project at the Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. See Meerkerk et al., “Covering the World,” 774.

  28. For this conflict between Europe and the United States see Sven Beckert, “Space Matters: Eurafrica, the American Empire and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1940” (article in progress).

  29. Carlton and Coclanis, “Southern Textiles in Global Context,” 160, 167ff.; Alice Carol Galenson, The Migration of the Cotton Textile Industry from New England to the South, 1880–1930 (New York: Garland,
1985), 2; Timothy J. Minchin, Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 9; Robert M. Brown, “Cotton Manufacturing: North and South,” Economic Geography 4, no. 1 (January 1, 1928): 74–87.

  30. Mildred Gwin Andrews, The Men and the Mills: A History of the Southern Textile Industry (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), 1; Galenson, The Migration of the Cotton Textile Industry, 189–90; Carlton and Coclanis, “Southern Textiles in Global Context,” 155, 156, 158; for the “labor agitation” quote see Commercial Bulletin, September 28, 1894, as quoted in Beth English, A Common Thread: Labor, Politics, and Capital Mobility in the Textile Industry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 39; Lynchburg News, January 18, 1895, as cited in English, “Beginnings of the Global Economy,” 176; Hartford, Where Is Our Responsibility? 54.

  31. Elijah Helm, “An International of the Cotton Industry,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 17, no. 3 (May 1903): 428; Galenson, The Migration of the Cotton Textile Industry, 186; Melvin Thomas Copeland, The Cotton Manufacturing Industry of the United States (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1966), 40, 46. See also Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Gavin Wright, “The Economic Revolution in the American South,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 1, no. 1 (Summer 1987): 169. The story of how the transformation of southern countryside is related to the emergence of wage workers in the American South is told by Barbara Fields, “The Nineteenth-Century American South: History and Theory,” Plantation Society in the Americas 2, no. 1 (April 1983): 7–27; Steven Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 95, no. 1 (1990): 75–88; Southern and Western Textile Excelsior, December 11, 1897, as cited in English, “Beginnings of the Global Economy,” 188; English, A Common Thread, 116.

  32. Galenson, The Migration of the Cotton Textile Industry, 141; Copeland, The Cotton Manufacturing Industry, 42; Katherine Rye Jewell, “Region and Sub-Region: Mapping Southern Economic Identity” (unpublished paper, 36th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association, Boston, 2011).

  33. Geoffrey Jones and Judith Vale, “Merchants as Business Groups: British Trading Companies in Asia before 1945,” Business History Review 72, no. 3 (1998): 372; on Portugal see Board Minutes, vol. 1, 1888–1905, Boa Vista Spinning & Weaving Company, Guildhall Library, London. On the Ottoman Empire see Necla Geyikdagi, Foreign Investment in the Ottoman Empire: International Trade and Relations, 1854–1914 (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 131; E. R. J. Owen, “Lord Cromer and the Development of Egyptian Industry, 1883–1907,” Middle Eastern Studies 2, no. 4 (July 1966): 283, 289; Arno S. Pearse, Brazilian Cotton (Manchester: Printed by Taylor, Garnett, Evans & Co., 1921), 29; Speech at Konferenz der mitteleuropäischen Wirtschaftsvereine in Dresden, am 17. und 18. Januar 1916, Protokolle der Verhandlungen, Auswärtiges Amt, 1916–1918, Akten betreffend den mitteleurpäischen Wirtschaftsverein, Auswärtiges Amt, R 901, 2502, Bundesarchiv, Berlin; Michael Owen Gately, “Development of the Russian Cotton Textile Industry in the Pre-revolutionary Years, 1861–1913” (PhD dissertation, University of Kansas, 1968), 156; Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, “Wirtschaftsbürger und Bürgerlichkeit im Königreich Polen: Das Beispiel von Lodz, dem Manchester des Ostens,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 31 (2005): 175, 177, 178.

  34. The importance of institutions to economic development, and thus politics, as well as the damaging effects of colonialism, are also emphasized by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, “Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117, no. 4 (November 2002): 1231–94. However, the kinds of institutions that I emphasize here are different.

  35. Samuel C. Chu, Reformer in Modern China: Chang Chien, 1853–1926 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 17, 45–46; Albert Feuerwerker, China’s Early Industrialization: Sheng Hsuan-Huai (1844–1916) and Mandarin Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 15; on Zhang see also Elizabeth Köll, From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 56–62.

  36. Yen-P’ing Hao and Erh-min Wang, “Changing Chinese Views of Western Relations, 1840–95,” in John K. Fairbank and Kwang-Ching Liu, The Cambridge History of China, vol. 11, Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 142–201; Feuerwerker, China’s Early Industrialization, 36–37; Associação Industrial, Representação dirigida ao exmo. Snr. Ministro da Fazenda (Rio de Janiero, 1881), 5, 11, as quoted in Stanley J. Stein, The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture: Textile Enterprise in an Underdeveloped Area, 1850–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 82; Manifesto da Associação Industrial, O Industrial (Orgão da Associação Industrial), May 21, 1881, as quoted in Stein, The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture, 82; Stein, The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture, 83–84.

  37. Byron Marshall, Capitalism and Nationalism in Pre-war Japan (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1967), 15–16.

  38. Carter J. Eckert, Offspring of Empire: The Koch’ang Kins and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, 1876–1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 30, 40; Pearse, The Cotton Industry of India, 3.

  39. Pearse, Brazilian Cotton, 27–28; Stein, The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture, 114.

  40. Stein, The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture, 66–67, 77, 82, 84–85, 98 100–1; Pearse, Brazilian Cotton, 40; the Englishman is quoted in Stein, The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture, 101.

  41. Stein, The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture, 53, 54, 57, 62; Pearse, Brazilian Cotton, 32; Companhia Brazil Industrial, The Industry of Brazil, 17.

  42. Stein, The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture, 99; Rafael Dobado Gonzalez, Aurora Gomez Galvarriato, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “Globalization, De-industrialization and Mexican Exceptionalism, 1750–1879,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 12316, June 2006, 40; Stephen Haber, Armando Razo, and Noel Maurer, The Politics of Property Rights: Political Instability, Credible Commitments, and Economic Growth in Mexico, 1876–1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 128; Clark et al., Cotton Goods in Latin America, 20, 38; Wolfgang Müller, “Die Textilindustrie des Raumes Puebla (Mexiko) im 19. Jahrhundert” (PhD dissertation, University of Bonn, 1977), 63; Stephen H. Haber, “Assessing the Obstacles to Industrialisation: The Mexican Economy, 1830–1940,” Journal of Latin American Studies 24, no. 1 (February 1992), 18–21; Stephen Haber, Crony Capitalism and Economic Growth in Latin America: Theory and Evidence (Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2002), 66, Table 2.3; Mirta Zaida Lobato, “A Global History of Textile Production, 1650–2000 (Argentina), Textile Conference IISH, November 11–13, 2004; Lockwood, Greene & Co. to Carlos Tornquist, Boston, August 13, 1924, in Industrias 144–8271, Biblioteca Tornquist del Banco Central de la República Argentina, Buenos Aires; Producción, elaboración y consumo del algodón en la República Argentina, 1924, in Industrias 144–8271, Biblioteca Tornquist del Banco Central de la República Argentina, Buenos Aires; Carlos D. Girola, El Algodonero: Su cultivo en las varias partes del mundo, con referencias especiales a la República Argentinia (Buenos Aires: Compania Sud-Americana, 1910).

  43. A. J. Robertson, “Lancashire and the Rise of Japan, 1910–1937,” in S. D. Chapman, ed., The Textile Industries, vol. 2 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), 490.

  44. W. Miles Fletcher III, “The Japan Spinners Association: Creating Industrial Policy in Mejii Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 22, no. 1 (1996): 67; E. Patricia Tsurumi, Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 35; Thomas C., Smith, Political Change and Industrial Development in Japan: Government Enterprise, 1868–1880 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1955), 27, 58.

  45. On imports see Motoshige Itoh and Masayuki Tanimoto, “Rural Entrepreneurs in the Cotton Weaving Industry in Japa
n,” (unpublished paper, in author’s possession, May 1995), 6; Ebara Soroku, as cited in Fletcher III, “The Japan Spinners Association,” Journal of Japanese Studies, 67.

  46. Fletcher III, “The Japan Spinners Association,” 68; Yukio Okamoto, Meijiki bōseki rōdō kankeishi: Nihonteki koyō, rōshi kankei keisei e no sekkin (Fukuoka: Kyōshu¯ Daigaku Shuppankai, 1993), 157–58, 213–14; Tsurumi, Factory Girls, 42.

  47. Takeshi Abe, “The Development of Japanese Cotton Weaving Industry in Edo Period” (unpublished and undated paper, in author’s possession), 1; Masayuki Tanimoto, “The Role of Tradition in Japan’s Industrialization,” in Masayuki Tanimoto, ed., The Role of Tradition in Japan’s Industrialization: Another Path to Industrialization, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 9.

  48. Naosuke Takamura, Nihon bōsekigyōshi josetsu, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Hanawa Shobō, 1971), 63; Naosuke Takamura, Nihon bōsekigyōshi josetsu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Hanawa Shobō, 1971), 119; Tanimoto, “The Role of Tradition in Japan’s Industrialization,” 4, 12; Farnie and Abe, “Japan, Lancashire and the Asian Market for Cotton Manufactures,” 119.

  49. Fletcher III, “The Japan Spinners Association,” Journal of Japanese Studies, 49–75; Fletcher III, “The Japan Spinners Association,” in The Textile Industry, 66; Farnie and Abe, “Japan, Lancashire and the Asian Market for Cotton Manufactures,” 118, 126.

  50. Farnie and Abe, “Japan, Lancashire and the Asian Market for Cotton Manufactures,” 121, 128; Takeshi Abe, “The Development of the Producing-Center Cotton Textile Industry in Japan between the Two World Wars,” Japanese Yearbook on Business History 9 (1992): 17, 19; see also Hikotaro Nishi, Die Baumwollspinnerei in Japan (Tübingen: Laupp’schen Buchhandlung, 1911), 71, 88.