by Sven Beckert
Amid these seismic geographic shifts, the most significant in the long run was cotton manufacturing’s arrival in England. By 1600, Flemish religious refugees began weaving cotton cloth in English towns. The earliest reference to cotton dates to 1601, “when the name of George Arnould, fustian weaver of Bolton, appears in the records of quarter sessions.” The industry grew, and by 1620 British cotton manufacturers exported their wares to France, Spain, Holland, and Germany. Cotton manufacturing thrived especially in the northern English county of Lancashire, where both the lack of guild control and the proximity to Liverpool, an important slaving port, became key to producers who supplied the African trade in slaves and plantations in the Americas.17
This slowly emerging English cotton industry drew on earlier experiences with the production of linen and woolens. As on the continent, cottons were at first manufactured in the countryside. Merchants, many of them Puritans and other dissenters, advanced raw cotton to peasants, who employed family labor seasonally to spin and weave, before returning the cloth to the merchants who sold it. As cotton cloth demand exploded, spinning and weaving became ever more important to smallholding peasants, and some of them eventually gave up their traditional crops and became entirely dependent on the industry. Some of the merchants who organized domestic cotton production turned into substantial businessmen. As they accumulated capital, they expanded production by providing ever more credit to ever more spinners and weavers, encouraging an “extensification” of production—its geographic dispersal throughout ever larger areas of the countryside. This was the classic putting-out system, quite similar to its incarnations across Asia centuries earlier, or to the British woolens industry. The countryside became ever more industrial and its inhabitants ever more dependent on putting-out work for distant merchants.18
Unlike Indian cotton spinners and weavers, the growing class of English cotton workers had no independent access to raw materials or to markets. They were entirely subordinated to the merchants—indeed, they enjoyed less independence and power than their Indian counterparts.19 British putting-out merchants, as a result, had far more power than Indian banias. The British cotton men were part of a rising global power whose navy increasingly dominated the world’s oceans, whose territorial possessions in the Americas and in Asia—India foremost among them—grew rapidly, and whose slavers created a plantation complex that rested in various ways on the manufacturing capacity of spinners and weavers thousands of miles away in the remote uplands of Lancashire and the plains of Bengal.
Despite these beginnings, their significance emerged only in retrospect. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europe’s cotton industry was not particularly prominent. In England, but also elsewhere in Europe, the “manufacture of cotton remained almost stationary.” Even after 1697, it grew only slowly; for example, it took sixty-seven years for the amount of raw cotton worked up into thread and cloth to approximately double, to 3.87 million pounds. That was the amount of cotton used in an entire year. By 1858, in contrast, the United States would export this amount of cotton on average on a single day. France was similar, and, outside Britain and France, European cotton demand was even less significant.20
One reason for the relatively slow growth of European cotton manufacturing was the difficulty of accessing raw cotton. As cotton was not grown in Europe itself, the industry’s essential raw material had to be brought from distant locations. The modest demand for raw cotton among European manufacturers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the heyday of the new machines that would by 1780 revolutionize cotton manufacturing, was largely met through established and diversified trade channels, in which cotton remained one commodity among many. In 1753, twenty-six ships arrived in the port of Liverpool from Jamaica with cotton, of which twenty-four had less than fifty bags of the fiber on board.21 There were neither merchants nor ports nor regions of the world that specialized in cotton production for export.
Since the twelfth century the most important source of cotton imports to Europe, as we have seen, was the Ottoman Empire, especially western Anatolia and Macedonia. Throughout the seventeenth century, cotton from Izmir and Thessaloniki (Ottoman Salonica) continued to dominate local markets, arriving in London and Marseille alongside other products of the East, such as silk and mohair yarn. As European demand for raw cotton slowly expanded in the eighteenth century, Ottoman cotton still filled a significant share: one-quarter of all British imports between 1700 and 1745, and a similar quantity shipped to Marseille.22
Small quantities of raw cotton also arrived from other regions of the world, such as the Indian cotton that found its way to London in the 1690s, courtesy of the East India Company. Similarly, in the 1720s, the Royal African Company reported selling “At Their House in Leaden-Hall-Street by the Candle, on Thursday the 12th Day of September 1723, at Ten of the Clock in the Forenoon…. Cotton from Gambia.” A year later, they offered “Casks of Fine Silk Cotton…from Whyday,” and the subsequent year “Bags of Guinea Cotton.” But such minor sales paled in comparison to these merchants’ more important trade items like elephant tusks.23
More important, however, was a new source of cotton: the West Indies. Though cotton remained a marginal crop compared to sugar on these islands, a number of small farmers, with fewer resources to invest than the sugar lords, did grow the “white gold.” The production of these petits blancs, as they were called on the French islands, remained rather static until 1760. Yet for the British and French cotton industries, even this small amount of West Indian cotton supplied a significant share of their needs. And more important, as we will see, its way of production pointed to the future.24
Before 1770, therefore, European merchants secured the valuable fiber through well-established trade networks from a wide variety of locations. With the exception of the West Indies, their influence did not go much beyond the port cities themselves, as they had neither the power to tinker with how cotton was cultivated in the hinterland nor the inclination to advance capital for additional cotton growing. Cotton came to them thanks to the prices they were willing to pay, but they had no influence on how the cotton came into being. Local growers and merchants remained powerful actors within this global raw cotton nexus, not least because they neither specialized in cotton production for export nor in northern European markets.25
Cotton imports into the UK, 1702–1780, by source, in millions of pounds, five-year trailing averages (illustration credit 2.2)
As small quantities of raw cotton came to Europe to feed the expanding but in global terms still puny European cotton industry, demand for cotton cloth grew in Europe, as well as in Africa and on the slave plantations of the Americas. Yet European production was insufficient to meet it. In response, English, French, Dutch, Danish, and Portuguese traders, all with a similar feverish energy, tried to secure greater quantities of cotton textiles in India under ever more favorable conditions. While in 1614 British merchants had exported 12,500 untailored pieces of cotton cloth, between 1699 and 1701 that number spiked to 877,789 pieces annually. Exports of cloth by the British had increased by a factor of seventy in less than a hundred years.26
To obtain these fabulous quantities of textiles from India at favorable prices, representatives for the European East India companies began to insert themselves even more into the production process within India itself. For decades, representatives of the chartered European East India companies had complained about the ability of Indian weavers to sell their goods to competing European companies, competing Indian banias, traders from other regions of the world, or even to private European merchants who operated independently of the companies, creating competition that raised prices. Profitability could be increased only if Europeans could force weavers to work for their respective company alone. Monopolizing the market became the way to drive down weavers’ incomes and drive up the selling price of particular goods.27
European traders were helped in securing cotton cloth in the quantity and quality
they needed, and at the price they desired, because their business practices were reinforced with political control of increasingly extensive Indian territories. They came not just as traders, but increasingly as rulers. By the 1730s, the Dhaka factory, for example, hosted a contingent of military personnel and arms to protect the company’s interests. Most dramatically, by 1765 the British East India Company—a group of merchants—ruled Bengal, and in the decades thereafter expanded its control over other South Asian territories. Such territorial dreams were furthered by British merchants’ increasing investment in the raw cotton trade between India and China by the late eighteenth century, which made them hope for the integration of western Indian cotton tracts into East India Company territories as well. This assertion of private political power by a state-chartered company over distant territories was a revolutionary reconceptualization of economic might. States shared sovereignty over territory and people with private entrepreneurs.28
Among many other things, this new combination of economic and political power enabled European merchants to gain greater control over textile manufacturing, especially by increasing control over weavers.29 Along the Coromandel coast the influential Indian merchants who acted as brokers between Indian weavers and European exporters increasingly were replaced by agents who were under much greater control of the European companies already in the seventeenth century. In Surat, which, like Bengal, would fall under company rule in 1765, the Board of Trade of the governor-general expressed in 1795 its dissatisfaction with
the system in practice hitherto of having a Contractor who has not himself any immediate connection with the manufacturers or weavers, but engages in subordinate contracts with a large number of the Native Merchants of little property or probity and though bound in responsibility, are not competent to pay a penalty if forfeited, and that in fact the goods never came into their possession, and apprehend that the difficulties now existing, will not be removed but with its abolition or very material alteration.30
Removing the Indian middlemen promised the foreign merchants better control over production and the ability to secure a greater quantity of piece goods. To that end, the East India Company tried to bypass the independent Indian banias who had historically connected them to the weavers by giving that responsibility to Indian “agents” whom they put on their own payroll. The Board of Trade in London instructed the governor-general in great detail how to recast the system of purchasing cotton cloth, hoping thereby to “recover to the Company that genuine knowledge of the business,” and thus acquire more cloth at cheaper prices by implementing the “grand Fundamental principle of the Agency System.” Through its Indian agents the company now made direct advances to weavers, something the British had not done in earlier years, which was greatly aided by territorial control and the attendant political authority. While weavers had always depended on credit, the novel insertion of Europeans into these credit networks along with the efforts of European merchants to monopolize economic control of particular parts of India made them ever more dependent on the company. Already by the middle of the eighteenth century, European companies sent these agents deep into the manufacturing centers in the countryside near Dhaka, agents who increasingly set the terms of production and thus succeeded in lowering prices. In the 1790s the East India Company even encouraged weavers to relocate to Bombay and produce cloth there—all with the goal of being able to supervise them better “without being extorted by the Servants of the Rajah of Travancore.”31
The encroachment of British power on the subcontinent meant that weavers increasingly lost their ability to set prices for cloth. According to the historian Sinnappah Arasaratnam “they could not produce for any customer they chose; they had to accept part of their payment in cotton yarn; they were subject to a strict supervision of the process of manufacture by the Company’s servants who were located in the village.” Weavers were now often compelled to take advances from particular merchants. The ultimate aim, never fully realized, was to make weavers into wage workers—along the lines of what contemporary merchants succeeded in implementing in the English countryside itself.32
To further their goal, the company now also employed its coercive powers toward the weavers directly. The company hired large numbers of Indians to supervise and implement new rules and regulations, in effect bureaucratizing the cloth market. Extensive new regulations attached weavers legally to the company, making them unable to sell their cloth on the open market. Company agents now inspected cloth on the loom, and endeavored to ensure that the cloth was, as promised, sold to the company. A new system of taxation penalized those weavers who produced for others.33
The company also increasingly resorted to violence, including corporal punishment. When a company agent complained that a weaver was working illegally for a private merchant, “the Company’s Gumashta seized him and his son, flogged him severely, painted his face black and white, tied his hands behind his back and marched him through the town escorted by seapoys [sic] [Indian soldiers in the employ of the English], announcing ‘any weaver found working for private merchants should receive similar punishment.’ ” Such policies produced their intended results: Indian weavers’ income fell. In the late seventeenth century, up to one-third of the price of cloth might have gone to a weaver. By the late eighteenth century, according to historian Om Prakash, the producer’s share had fallen to about 6 percent. As income and living standards declined, a lullaby sung by Saliya weavers spoke longingly of a mystical time when their looms contained a silver plank. By 1795, the company itself observed an “unprecedented mortality among the Weavers.”34
Unsurprisingly, weavers resisted the coercive encroachment of European capital in the production process. Some packed up and moved away from territories controlled by Europeans. Others secretly produced for competitors, but the need to avoid detection made them vulnerable to pressures for lower prices. At times, groups of weavers collectively approached the East India Company to complain about the company’s interference with free trade.35
Such resistance sometimes reduced the power of European capitalists. Thus despite its wish to eliminate Indian middlemen, the East India Company understood that “it is impossible to do without the subordinate Contractors,” whose much denser social networks into weaving villages could never be completely replaced by company agents. The interests of independent European merchants also often worked against the company, as they offered weavers more money for cloth, thus giving weavers an incentive to undermine company policies.36
Despite such constraints, aggressive policies succeeded in getting ever more cotton cloth into the stores of European traders. European cloth exports from India amounted to an estimated 30 million yards in 1727, but increased to some 80 million yards annually by the 1790s. British merchants in particular, but also their French counterparts, controlled the acquisition and export of huge quantities of cottons woven for export: In 1776, the district of Dhaka alone counted roughly eighty thousand spinners and twenty-five thousand weavers, while in 1795 the East India Company estimated that the city of Surat alone contained over fifteen thousand looms. And there was pressure for more. A 1765 dispatch from the East India Company office in London to its counterparts in Bombay, reflecting on the possibilities of the peace following the Seven Years War, beautifully summarizes what was at the core of the revolutionary reconceptualization of the global economy.37
Since the Peace the Slaving Trade to the Coast of Africa has greatly encreased, in course the Demand for Goods proper for that Market is very large; & as We are very desirous of contributing so far as lyes in Our Powers to the Encouragement of a Trade on which the well-being of the British plantations in the West Indies so much depends, & considering the same therefore in a National View, We expect & positively direct that you conform as near as possible can, not only to the Provision in general of the several Articles ordered in the abovementioned List of Investment [i.e., cloth], but those marked A which are more immediately for that Trade.38
European merchants’ increasing control over the production process in India would seem to threaten Europe’s own not particularly important or dynamic infant cotton industry. How could the English, French, Dutch, and other producers possibly compete against India’s fabrics, which were both superior in quality and cheaper? And yet it appears that the European industry expanded even as India exported more cloth. Ironically, imports from India helped the European cotton textile industry by creating new markets for cotton fabrics and by continuing Europe’s appropriation of relevant technologies from Asia. In the long run, moreover, imports from India influenced Europe’s political priorities. As we will see, Great Britain, France, and others emerged as newly powerful states, with a vocal group of capitalists; for states and individuals alike, replacing Indian cotton cloth imports with domestically manufactured cloth became an important, albeit difficult-to-realize priority.
Protectionism played a key role in this process, testifying again to the enormous importance of the state to the “great divergence.” By the late seventeenth century, with both cotton imports and domestic cotton manufacturing expanding, Europe’s woolen and linen manufacturers pressured their respective governments to protect them from upstart cotton manufacturers in general and Indian imports in particular. Textiles were Europe’s most important manufacturing industry: Dislocation of the sector by cotton imports and manufacturing seemed to endanger profits and threaten social stability.40