Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  51. Takamura, Nihon bōsekigyōshi josetsu, vol. 1, 239. On shipping see William Wray, Mitsubishi and the N.Y.K., 1870–1914: Business Strategy in the Japanese Shipping Industry (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984).

  52. For a general statistical overview see Nishi, Die Baumwollspinnerei in Japan, 78, 84; Farnie and Abe, “Japan, Lancashire and the Asian Market for Cotton Manufactures,” 136–37; Takeshi Abe, “The Chinese Market for Japanese Cotton Textile Goods,” in Kaoru Sugihara, ed., Japan, China, and the Growth of the Asian International Economy, 1850–1949, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005), 74, 77.

  53. Natsuko Kitani, “Cotton, Tariffs and Empire: The Indo-British Trade Relationship and the Significance of Japan in the First Half of the 1930s” (PhD dissertation, Osaka University of Foreign Studies, 2004), iii–v, 5, 49, 65; Department of Overseas Trade, Conditions and Prospects of United Kingdom Trade in India, 1937–38 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1939), 170. See also Toyo Menka Kaisha, The Indian Cotton Facts 1930 (Bombay: Toyo Menka Kaisha Ltd., 1930), 98.

  54. See the book collection of the Japanese Cotton Spinners Association, which contains numerous books on labor questions in the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, India, and elsewhere; Japanese Cotton Spinners Association Library, University of Osaka. On labor more generally see E. Tsurumi, Factory Girls; on the link between the countryside and urban wage labor see Johannes Hirschmeier, The Origins of Entrepreneurship in Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 80; Toshiaki Chokki, “Labor Management in the Cotton Spinning Industry,” in Smitka ed., The Textile Industry and the Rise of the Japanese Economy, 7; Janet Hunter, Women and the Labour Market in Japan’s Industrialising Economy: The Textile Industry Before the Pacific War (London: Routledge, 2003), 69–70, 123–24; Farnie and Abe, “Japan, Lancashire and the Asian Market for Cotton Manufactures,” 120; Janet Hunter and Helen Macnaughtan, “Japan,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 317; Gary Saxonhouse and Yukihiko Kiyokawa, “Supply and Demand for Quality Workers in Cotton Spinning in Japan and India,” in Smitka, ed., The Textile Industry and the Rise of the Japanese Economy, 185.

  55. Hunter, Women and the Labour Market, 4; Jun Sasaki, “Factory Girls in an Agrarian Setting circa 1910,” in Tanimoto, ed., The Role of Tradition in Japan’s Industrialization, 130; Tsurumi, Factory Girls, 10–19; Nishi, Die Baumwollspinnerei in Japan, 141.

  56. Hunter and Macnaughtan, “Japan,” 320–21. See also Gary Saxonhouse and Gavin Wright, “Two Forms of Cheap Labor in Textile History,” in Gary Saxonhouse and Gavin Wright, eds., Techniques, Spirit and Form in the Making of the Modern Economies: Essays in Honor of William N. Parker (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press 1984), 3–31; Nishi, Die Baumwollspinnerei in Japan, 143, 155; Farnie and Abe, “Japan, Lancashire and the Asian Market for Cotton Manufactures,” 135.

  57. Farnie and Abe, “Japan, Lancashire and the Asian Market for Cotton Manufactures,” 125; Takamura, Nihon bōsekigyōshi josetsu, vol. 1, 308; for the extent (and limits) of Japanese spinners’ collective action see W. Miles Fletcher III, “Economic Power and Political Influence: The Japan Spinners Association, 1900–1930,” Asia Pacific Business Review 7, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 39–62, especially 47.

  58. Saxonhouse and Kiyokawa, “Supply and Demand for Quality Workers,” 186; Chokki, “Labor Management in the Cotton Spinning Industry,” 15; Nishi, Die Baumwollspinnerei in Japan, 147.

  59. The table on page 408 is based on information from Nishi, Die Baumwollspinnerei in Japan, 55, 84; Department of Finance, 1912: Annual Return of the Foreign Trade of the Empire of Japan (Tokyo: Insetsu Kyoku, n.d.), 554; for 1913–15, Department of Finance, 1915: Annual Return of the Foreign Trade of the Empire of Japan, part 1 (Tokyo: Insetsu Kyoku, n.d.), 448; Department of Finance, 1917: Annual Return of the Foreign Trade of the Empire of Japan, part 1 (Tokyo: Insetsu Kyoku, n.d.), 449. Department of Finance, 1895: Annual Return of the Foreign Trade of the Empire of Japan (Tokyo: Insetsu Kyoku, n.d.), 296; for 1902, Department of Finance, December 1902: Monthly Return of the Foreign Trade of the Empire of Japan (Tokyo: Insetsu Kyoku, n.d.), 65; Tōyō Keizai Shinpōsha, ed., Foreign Trade of Japan: A Statistical Survey (Tokyo: 1935; 1975), 229–30, 49.

  60. On the expansion of that industry see also the survey in Sung Jae Koh, Stages of Industrial Development in Asia: A Comparative History of the Cotton Industry in Japan, India, China, and Korea (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966); Takamura, Nihon bōsekigyōshi josetsu, vol. 2, 121; Nishi, Die Baumwollspinnerei in Japan, 1; Takeshi Abé and Osamu Saitu, “From Putting-Out to the Factory: A Cotton-Weaving District in Late Meiji Japan,” Textile History 19, no. 2 (1988): 143–58; Jun Sasaki, “Factory Girls in an Agrarian Setting circa 1910,” in Tanimoto, ed., The Role of Tradition in Japan’s Industrialization, 121; Takeshi Abe, “Organizational Changes in the Japanese Cotton Industry During the Inter-war Period,” in Douglas A. Farnie and David J. Jeremy, eds., The Fibre That Changed the World: The Cotton Industry in International Perspective, 1600–1990s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 462; Farnie and Abe, “Japan, Lancashire and the Asian Market for Cotton Manufactures,” 146; Johzen Takeuchi, “The Role of ‘Early Factories’ in Japanese Industrialization,” in Tanimoto, ed., The Role of Tradition in Japan’s Industrialization, 76.

  61. François Charles Roux, Le coton en Égypte (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1908), 296, 297; Robert L. Tignor, Egyptian Textiles and British Capital, 1930–1956 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1989), 9, 10; Owen, “Lord Cromer and the Development of Egyptian Industry,” 285, 288, 291, 292; Bent Hansen and Karim Nashashibi, Foreign Trade Regimes and Economic Development: Egypt (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1975), 4.

  62. Tignor, Egyptian Textiles and British Capital, 12–14; Joel Beinin, “Egyptian Textile Workers: From Craft Artisans Facing European Competition to Proletarians Contending with the State,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 185; Hansen and Nashashibi, Foreign Trade Regimes and Economic Development, 3–4; for the quote see Robert L. Tignor, “Economic Planning, and Development Projects in Interwar Egypt,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 10, no. 2 (1977): 187, 189.

  63. Statistical Tables Relating to Indian Cotton: Indian Spinning and Weaving Mills (Bombay: Times of India Steam Press, 1889), 95; Misra Bhubanes, The Cotton Mill Industry of Eastern India in the Late Nineteenth Century: Constraints on Foreign Investment and Expansion (Calcutta: Indian Institute of Management, 1985), 5; R. E. Enthoven, The Cotton Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: n.p., approx. 1897), 4; Pearse, The Cotton Industry of India, 22. On the growth of the Indian cotton industry see also Department of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics, Monthly Statistics of Cotton Spinning and Weaving in India Mills (Calcutta: n.p., 1929); Atma’ra’m Trimbuck to T. D. Mackenzie, Bombay, June 16, 1891, Revenue Department, 1891, No 160, Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai.

  64. Enthoven, The Cotton Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency, 6; Statistical Tables Relating to Indian Cotton, 116; Report of the Bombay Millowners’ Association for the Year 1897 (Bombay: Times of India Steam Press, 1898), 3; Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Private Investment in India, 1900–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 9; Helm, “An International Survey of the Cotton Industry,” 432.

  65. “Statement Exhibiting the Moral and Material Progress and Condition of India, 1895–96,” 172, in 1895, SW 241, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London. A slightly higher number is cited in Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review and Oriental and Colonial Record, Third Series, 58 (July–October 1904): 49. On the general points see 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, 266–67. Toyo Menka Kaisha, The Indian Cotton Facts 1930 (Bombay: Toyo Menka Kaisha Ltd., 1930), 162, Appendix A, Progress of the Cotton Mill Industry; Enthoven, The Cotton Fa
brics of the Bombay Presidency, 7; Eckehard Kulke, The Parsees in India: A Minority as Agent of Social Change (Munich: Weltforum Verlag, 1974), 120–25.

  66. Morris D. Morris, The Emergence of an Industrial Labor Force in India: A Study of the Bombay Cotton Mills, 1854–1947 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 101, 103, 114; Manmohandas Ramji, Chairman of the Bombay Millowners’ Association, at Its Annual General Meeting held on April 28, 1910, in Report of the Bombay Mill-owners’ Association for the Year 1909 (Bombay: Times of India Steam Press, 1910), v; Letter from the Officiating Secretary of the Government of India, Home, Revenue and Agricultural Department (Judicial), no 12–711, dated May 2, 1881, in Revenue Department, 1881, No. 776, Acts and Regulations, Factory Act of 1881, in Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai; Shashi Bushan Upadhyay, Dissension and Unity: The Origins of Workers’ Solidarity in the Cotton Mills of Bombay, 1875–1918 (Surat: Center for Social Studies, July 1990), 1; Dietmar Rothermund, An Economic History of India: From Pre-colonial Times to 1991 (London: Routledge, 1993), 51; M. P. Gandhi, The Indian Cotton Textile Industry: Its Past, Present and Future (Calcutta: Mitra, 1930), 67; Report of the Bombay Millowners’ Association for the Year 1906 (Bombay: Times of India Steam Press, 1907), ii; “Memorandum on the Cotton Import and Excise Duties,” 5–6, in L/E/9/153, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London.

  67. Rothermund, An Economic History of India, 37.

  68. Tripathi, Historical Roots of Industrial Entrepreneurship in India and Japan, 14, 139.

  69. Albert Feuerwerker, “Handicraft and Manufactured Cotton Textiles in China, 1871–1910,” Journal of Economic History 30, no. 2 (June 1970): 338.

  70. Ramon H. Myers, “Cotton Textile Handicraft and the Development of the Cotton Textile Industry in Modern China,” Economic History Review, New Series, 18, no. 3 (1965): 615; Katy Le Mons Walker, “Economic Growth, Peasant Marginalization, and the Sexual Division of Labor in Early Twentieth-Century China: Women’s Work in Nantong County,” Modern China 19, no. 3 (July 1993): 360; R. S. Gundry, ed., A Retrospect of Political and Commercial Affairs in China & Japan, During the Five Years 1873 to 1877 (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1878), Commercial, 1877, 98; Feuerwerker, “Handicraft and Manufactured Cotton Textiles in China,” 342; H. D. Fong, “Cotton Industry and Trade in China,” Chinese Social and Political Science Review 16 (October 1932): 400, 402; United States Department of Commerce and Ralph M. Odell, Cotton Goods in China (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916), 33, 43; M. V. Brandt, Stand und Aufgabe der deutschen Industrie in Ostasien (Hildesheim: August Lax, 1905), 11. In 1902, 55 percent of the value of cotton imports into China originated from Britain, 26.8 percent from the United States, and just 2.7 percent from Japan. By 1930, Japan had captured 72.2 percent, with Britain now reduced to 13.2 percent and the United States to a minuscule 0.1 percent. See for these statistics Kang Chao, with Jessica C. Y. Chao, The Development of Cotton Textile Production in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 97.

  71. Köll, From Cotton Mill to Business Empire, 36–37; James R. Morrell, “Origins of the Cotton Textile Industry in China” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1977), 1, 147–75.

  72. Myers, “Cotton Textile Handicraft and the Development of the Cotton Textile Industry,” 626–27; Feuerwerker, “Handicraft and Manufactured Cotton Textiles in China,” 346; Fong, “Cotton Industry and Trade in China,” 348, 370–71, 411, 416; Shigeru Akita, “The British Empire and International Order of Asia, 1930s–1950s” (presentation, 20th International Congress of Historical Sciences, Sydney, 2005), 16; Shigeru Akita, “The East Asian International Economic Order in the 1850s,” in Antony Best, ed., The International History of East Asia, 1900–1908 (London: Routledge, 2010), 153–67; Abe, “The Chinese Market for Japanese Cotton Textile Goods,” 83; Robert Cliver, “China,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 116; Ralph M. Odell et al., Cotton Goods in China, 158.

  73. Feuerwerker, “Handicraft and Manufactured Cotton Textiles in China,” 346; Loren Brandt, Commercialization and Agricultural Development: Central and Eastern China, 1870–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 6; Robert Cliver, “China,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 116; Bruce L. Reynolds, “The Impact of Trade and Foreign Investment on Industrialization: Chinese Textiles, 1875–1931” (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1975), 64; Chong Su, The Foreign Trade of China (New York: Columbia University, 1919), 304; Department of Overseas Trade and H. H. Fox, Economic Conditions in China to September 1, 1929 (London, 1929), 7, as quoted in Akita, “The British Empire and International Order of Asia,” 17.

  74. Odell et al., Cotton Goods in China, 161, 162ff., 168, 178, 179; Fong, “Cotton Industry and Trade in China,” 376; Report of the Bombay Millowners’ Association for the Year 1907 (Bombay: Times of India Steam Press, 1908), ii.

  75. Fong, “Cotton Industry and Trade in China,” 376; Jack Goldstone, “Gender, Work and Culture: Why the Industrial Revolution Came Early to England but Late to China,” Sociological Perspectives 39, no. 1 (1996): 1; Robert Cliver, “China,” in Van Voss et al., eds., The Ashgate Companion to the History of Textile Workers, 123–24.

  76. Chu, Reformer in Modern China, 19, 22, 24, 28; Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 51–60; Cliver, “China,” 126, 194; Albert Feuerwerker, China’s Early Industrialization, 20, 28, 44; see Ching-Chun Wang, “How China Recovered Tariff Autonomy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 152, no. 1 (1930): 266–77; Frank Kai-Ming Su and Alvin Barber, “China’s Tariff Autonomy, Fact or Myth,” Far Eastern Survey 5, no. 12 (June 3, 1936): 115–22; Kang Chao et al., The Development of Cotton Textile Production in China, 102; Abe, “The Chinese Market for Japanese Cotton Textile Goods,” 96; Feuerwerker, “Handicraft and Manufactured Cotton Textiles in China,” 343; Akita, “The British Empire and International Order of Asia,” 20.

  77. Farnie and Abe, “Japan, Lancashire and the Asian Market for Cotton Manufactures,” 138, 139. Japanese mills in China were among the most efficient in the world; Hunter et al., “Japan,” 316–17; United States Tariff Commission, Cotton Cloth, Report no. 112 (Washington: n.p., 1936), 157. For wage increases see also Takamura, Nihon bōsekigyōshi josetsu, vol. 2, 209; Abe, “The Chinese Market for Japanese Cotton Textile Goods,” 95; Charles K. Moser, The Cotton Textile Industry of Far Eastern Countries (Boston: Pepperell Manufacturing Company, 1930), 87; Fong, “Cotton Industry and Trade in China,” 350.

  78. Richu Ding, “Shanghai Capitalists Before the 1911 Revolution,” Chinese Studies in History 18, no. 3–4 (1985): 33–82.

  79. R. L. N. Vijayanagar, Bombay Millowners’ Association, Centenary Souvenir, 1875–1975 (Bombay: The Association, 1979), 29, in Asiatic Society of Mumbai; Report of the Bombay Millowners’ Association…1909, vi; Report of the Bombay Millowners’ Association…1897, 80; Report of the Bombay Millowners’ Association for the Year 1900 (Bombay: Times of India Steam Press, 1901), 52. See also Report of the Bombay Mill-owners’ Association for the Year 1904 (Bombay: Times of India Steam Press, 1905), 156; Report of the Bombay Millowners’ Association…1907, xiii; Resolution of the First Indian Industrial Conference held at Benares on December 30, 1905, in Part C, No. 2, March 1906, Industries Branch, Department of Commerce and Industry, National Archives of India, New Delhi; Morris, The Emergence of an Industrial Labor Force in India, 38; Report of the Bombay Millowners’ Association…1907, xiii.

  80. Mehta, The Ahmedabad Cotton Textile Industry, 114; The Mahratta, January 19, 1896, February 2, 1896, February 9, 1896; “Memorandum on the Cotton Import and Excise Duties,” 6, L/E/9/153, in Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London; Gandhi, The Indian Cotton Textile Industry, 66; G. V. Josji to G. K. Gokhale, File 4, Joshi Correspondence with Gokhale, Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi.

  81. Report of the Bombay Millowners’ Associ
ation for the Year 1901 (Bombay: Times of India Steam Press, 1902), 17–18.

  82. The Mahratta, March 15, 1896; Mehta, The Ahmedabad Cotton Textile Industry, 117–19, 131; Tripathi, Historical Roots of Industrial Entrepreneurship in India and Japan, 115; A. P. Kannangara, “Indian Millowners and Indian Nationalism Before 1914,” Past and Present 40, no. 1 (July 1968): 151. Bomanji Dinshaw Petit, a Bombay mill owner, argued that “the Japanese are fired with the spirit of Swadeshi and are equipped with the power to utilize the spirit to the uttermost extent and advantage.” Report of the Bombay Millowners’ Association…1907, xii. For a different argument see Kannangara, “Indian Millowners and Indian Nationalism before 1914,” 147–64. In contrast, see Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1855–1947 (New Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), 132; Report of the Bombay Millowners’ Association…1906, iii.

  83. Sydenham College Magazine 1, no. 1 (August 1919); The Mahratta, October 11, 1896, May 3, 1896; Draft of the Minutes of a Meeting of the Cotton Merchants held at Surat on April 13, 1919, in File No. 11, Sir Purshotamdas Thakurdas Papers, Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi; Letter of Purshotamdas Thakurdas to the Ahmedabad Millowners’ Association, March 22, 1919, in ibid.; Report of the Bombay Millowners’ Association…1904, 158. See also Report of the Bombay Millowners’ Association…1907, iv; Report of the Bombay Millowners’ Association…1909, iv; Report of the Bombay Millowners’ Association…1907, viii.

  84. Gandhi, The Indian Cotton Textile Industry; Lisa N. Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 105. The link between the Indian mill owners and the nationalist movement can also be traced in Sir Purshotamdas Thakurdas Papers, Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi: for example, Letter of Sir Purshotamdas Tharkurdas to Ahmedabad Millowners Association, March 22, 1919, in Sir Purshotamdas Thakurdas Papers, File No. 11, Nehru Memorial Library; see also Draft of the Minutes of a Meeting of the Cotton Merchants held at Surat on April 13, 1919, in ibid.; “The Cotton Association,” in Sydenham College Magazine 1, no. 1 (August 1919), in ibid.; Sir Purshotamdas Tharkurdas to Amedabad Millowners’ Association, March 22, 1919, in ibid.