Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  The most significant of these efforts occurred in the 1840s, when the East India Company supported the creation of experimental farms run by U.S.-born cotton planters as a step toward supplanting U.S.-grown cotton with that from India. Several Americans had offered their services “to go to Hindustan.” One W. W. Wood, who was “born and bred on Cotton plantations,” wrote from New Orleans in June 1842 that he had been “entertaining the Idea for some time of going to India to cultivate the Cotton plant on my own account but would much prefer patronage and support” of the East India Company. He received that support and went, along with nine other planters, to Bombay with seed, gins, and implements brought from the United States. The planters traveled to various parts of India, where they were given land, a house, and a cotton press to grow exotic cotton varieties, mostly from American seed. They hired workers and contracted for the growing of cotton with peasants working on their own account. At first things looked good and the Asiatic Journal reported on the “zeal and diligence” of the American planters.55

  However, despite their best efforts, the farms failed rapidly. Rainfall patterns frustrated plans to use American farming practices. Limitations of infrastructure made transport difficult. There was a growing realization that American practices were too capital-intensive for the conditions in which Indian cotton cultivators found themselves. Indians also opposed the use of so-called waste lands for experimental farms because traditionally “they have been able to feed their cattle without expense upon the wastelands.” Moreover, farms failed because peasants paid less attention to the fields on which they worked for hire than their own fields. And then there was outright resistance. One of the American farmers, “Mr. Mercer, a few weeks ago, had his bungalow burnt down, and the estate and works, together with his whole property, destroyed, except the suit of clothes he had on him.” At such moments, it certainly did not help that the Americans were “perfect strangers to the habits and Language of the country.” As a result, Mercer reported in 1845 that the “the experimental farms were only a useless expense to Government; that the American system of cultivation was not adapted to India, that the Natives of India were, from their knowledge of the climate and capabilities of the soil, able to cultivate better and much more economically than any European, and requested that the farms be abolished…”56

  Indian cultivators, in effect, resisted giving up so-called waste lands, and they did not easily come to be persuaded to work for wages on farms, making a “plantation revolution” along the lines of the one occurring in the Americas unlikely. Indeed, they actively opposed the impositions of colonial officials. The American cotton farmers in India complained that they were “obliged to give way to [their workers’] prejudices.” They complained of the “laziness” of Indian cotton pickers, of cotton stolen from their farms, that workers went on strike, forcing them to give in to demands for higher wages, and that capital was lacking, soils were poor, and they “did not succeed in obtaining labor.” Eventually they decided that wage labor did not work, with one of the planters stating categorically that “cultivation by paid labor could, under no circumstances, be profitably applied to Cotton in that part of the country.”57

  The experiences in India indeed seemed to confirm cotton’s dependence on coercion. Yet slavery, manufacturers began to understand, could not be completely trusted. And since manufacturers’ own capital and their own institutions were insufficient to create alternative systems, they turned to the state: They demanded new laws regarding land tenure to secure investments in cotton. They demanded even more investment in experimental farms and the accumulation of agricultural knowledge, more state investment in infrastructure, and a tax on the cultivators that would not discourage cotton growers from investing and improving the quantity and quality of their crops. Cotton capitalists in Britain and India understood that capital had to be infused in the countryside, but they found the conditions there too risky. As the Bombay Chamber of Commerce argued, “An Extension of production, so great as to reach many million of pounds annually, and an improvement in processes so radical as to involve a change in the customs and habits of a whole people, cannot be produced by measures of petty detail, but can only be looked for from the operation of causes and principles of commensurate extent and force.”58

  The British East India Company defended itself vigorously against charges by cotton manufacturers and merchants that it did not sufficiently encourage cotton cultivation in India. By 1836, the East India Company had already published a book in its defense, Reports and Documents Connected with the Proceedings of the East-India Company in Regard to the Culture and Manufacture of Cotton-Wool, Raw Silk, and Indigo in India, in which it listed in great detail the myriad of activities it had undertaken. The company accused the merchants instead, demanding from them more vigilance when acquiring cotton in India and a willingness to purchase only clean, well-ginned cotton. As it happened, European cotton merchants and colonial officials would spend the next fifteen years accusing one another of being responsible for the inferior state and insufficient quantities of Indian export cotton.59

  Yet despite all the bickering and all of these efforts, Indian cotton continued to play only a very minor role on world markets and posed no threat whatsoever to the supremacy of American-grown cotton. To be sure, more Indian cotton came to the United Kingdom, not least because former exports to China were redirected toward Europe. But despite that redirecting of Indian cotton, its market share in the U.K. remained low—ranging from 7.2 percent during the 1830s to 9.9 percent during the 1850s. “The success which has attended the cultivation of this article has not been so great as could be wished,” admitted the Revenue Department in 1839. More categorically, for the Bombay Chamber of Commerce, the efforts to improve and expand cotton exports “resulted in signal failure.”60

  As the failed experimental farms had suggested, one important reason was the problematic transportation infrastructure. Cotton was usually brought to market on bullocks and carts, an extremely slow and expensive way to transport the raw material. As late as 1854, there were only thirty-four miles of railroad in India. One expert indeed argued that American cotton was so much more competitive than Indian cotton because of the vastly better system of railroads, and, one should add, a vastly superior system of rivers. There was a disjuncture between the industrial rhythm of Lancashire and the rhythms of economic life in India’s cotton-growing countryside. War capitalism had succeeded in bridging this gap by resorting to bodily coercion elsewhere, but not in India.61

  Perhaps more important than the lack of adequate infrastructure was that the pattern of production of Indian cultivators did not articulate well with the needs of production for export. Indian peasants were still deeply embedded in a cotton economy separate from the cotton upstarts in Europe. They produced cotton for domestic consumption, and more often than not produced their own clothing. What Britain saw as a “failure” is more usefully viewed as evidence for the vast differences in the possibilities and the priorities of cotton production. The monocultural production of cotton, so prevalent in the American South, was unknown. Indian cultivators gave preference to subsistence crops, because they feared they would starve if their market crop did not succeed—one observer described “the cultivators growing Cotton & Grains in their respective fields together, and indiscriminately as their inclinations or interests dictate.” Local peasants grew cotton only “as a secondary crop,” lamented a British collector.62

  Moreover, Indians were reluctant to embrace new methods of cultivation and new ways of preparing cotton for market. They resisted the use of exotic seeds. They continued to gin their cotton by footroller or churka. This resistance to different ways of growing and processing cotton, so maddening to the British colonialists, was entirely rational from the standpoint of Indian cultivators. After all, the technologies they employed were well adapted to local social and environmental conditions, and so were the indigenous seeds. Moreover, the peasants’ biggest customers were indigenous sp
inners, so they grew cotton that they knew would appeal to the local markets. Under conditions of extreme capital scarcity, it made sense to focus on subsistence crops, proven technology, and established markets. And since capital was not forthcoming, neither from European merchants nor from Indian traders, the revolutionizing of production was difficult if not impossible. Creating a rural proletariat, potentially another strategy to gain control over production, proved just as impossible without clear-cut private property in land, which could be fashioned only with massive expropriations and a powerful presence of the state.63

  Just as peasants retained control over land, their labor, and the way they produced cotton, indigenous merchants remained powerful in the circuits of exchange, effectively limiting Western encroachment and, with it, the revolutionizing of the countryside. Trade in cotton was until the 1860s still largely dominated by Indian agents, brokers, middlemen, merchants, and even exporters. Despite “strenuous efforts…made by British interests to adapt the marketing of cotton to the needs of the export economy,” they largely failed. In 1842 the Bombay Chamber of Commerce took up a perpetual question: “Why is British capital, so powerful everywhere else, and from which so much was expected to be done for India, here so wholly inoperative?” They listed numerous disadvantages to European capitalists: They were few in number, with only forty European merchants in Bombay dealing in cotton. They had to adapt “to a pre-existing state of commerce.” They lamented “the opposition and imposition that must inevitably be encountered.” And they had to compete with local spinners.64

  Even when Western merchants operated in the cotton-growing districts, they met opposition at every point: “The cultivators were taught to distrust them, in consequence of their being Europeans, to demand for their Cotton a price far beyond what they accepted from Native dealers. A similar imposition was attempted in every thing—the price of labour, the hire of carts, the rent of warehouses, and the rates of churka men.” As a result, the idea of “the maintenance of Establishments in the interior” for European merchants was quite unthinkable and English merchants limited themselves “to the purchase of Cotton when brought here [Bombay] to market.” Even though they knew of the need for “Mercantile Agency in the interior of the country” as a precondition for the recasting of cotton production, they were not likely “to risk in a place so remote from their control the large amount of capital requisite to erect the buildings, and furnish the advances to the cultivators, which would be necessary to keep up permanent establishments in Guzerat.” In Berar as late as 1848, “the Cotton is usually purchased in small quantities by itinerant Dealers at the Villages where it is produced,” with much of the cotton spun by the farmers themselves, and “with no Capitalist in the Country who could make advances to any great extent worth mentioning.” Unlike in the United States, they were not yet capable of what a British parliamentary committee in 1847–48 deemed might be necessary: “for European capitalists to place themselves in direct communication with the cultivators of the soil.”65

  In short, Europeans had only very superficially penetrated India’s cotton growing. Western merchants had no impact whatsoever on how cotton was produced in the Indian countryside. They had just as little impact on the ways cotton moved from its producers to the traders on the coast. British efforts to grow cotton on large farms with wage labor failed spectacularly, not least because labor could not be mobilized. One superintendent of such a cotton farm wrote that “these people all refuse to come to the Farm when the villagers require their services, and some who have been paid by Government by the month went away saying they were sick and unable to work in the Morning, and in the evening I found them working for the villagers.”66

  Given such troubles, coerced labor seemed an attractive option. Indeed, the example of the great slave-based American system of cotton growing led one commercial resident to ask in 1831 if it might not be better if the company would engage in “a little gentle coercion.” Another writer similarly suggested that Europeans should employ “apprentices from the Orphan Schools,” while others favored the use of prison and convict labor. All these came to naught—and with them European-run cotton plantations. Instead, the East India Company had to engage constantly with local rulers, local power structures, local property ownership patterns, and local ways of producing things. British difficulties in India clarify the decisive difference from the United States. Though settler conflicts with Native Americans were costly, both in lives and treasure, the result left settlers in full control of the land and its resources. Indigenous ways of doing things were no longer. The local was simply obliterated.67

  Indian peasants, like their counterparts in Anatolia, western Africa, and elsewhere, had shaped a world in which they could resist the onslaught of European merchant capital. Since Europeans were unable to transfer bodily coercion and all-encompassing expropriation of land to these regions of the world, and since they lacked the power to force some other alternative system of raw material production, much to their lament, their dependence on the United States deepened. As Mr. Dunbar, commissioner of Dhaka, concluded in 1848, “In this ancient and populous Country where land is valuable and rents high, where agricultural Service is almost unknown and the want of skill, energy and enterprise of the agricultural population is proverbial, where the produce is so inferior and the Cost of transportation necessarily so high, competition with America seems a hopeless task.”68

  In contrast to India, Egypt contained the possibility for coercion, expropriation, and even slavery. Cotton as a major export staple came late to Egypt, during the reign of Muhammad Ali Pasha in the 1820s. As part of Ali’s effort to create a vibrant domestic cotton industry, in the late 1810s he brought Louis Alexis Jumel, a French textile engineer long since removed to New York City. Jumel chanced across a cotton bush in a Cairo garden with unusually long and strong fiber. With the support of Ali, he developed the strain further, and by 1821 was already harvesting substantial amounts of what came to be called Jumel cotton, finding ready markets in Europe.69

  Ali understood the potential of this new export crop and ordered it grown throughout the country. Coercion was integral to this project from the beginning. Peasants were forced to cultivate cotton on state-owned lands for their yearly corvée duty, a forced-labor tax. On their own lands they were also forced to plant cotton in specific ways, to sell their crop to the state, and to work without pay. The government set prices for the cotton and controlled all aspects of its transport and sale to foreign merchants in Alexandria, who were explicitly disallowed to directly purchase cotton from Egyptian growers. Workers were also forced to dig canals to water the crop and to build roads that crisscrossed Lower Egypt to move it to market. As Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review observed in New York in 1843, “Cotton is not willingly cultivated by the fellah, and would probably be scarcely produced at all but through the despotic interference of the pasha.” In Egypt, unlike the United States where force was exerted by private individuals, violent coercion descended upon rural cultivators from a premodern state.70

  The Egyptian state also dominated the cotton trade itself. Until the 1850s, in contrast to indebted American planters, Egyptian rulers succeeded in limiting the influence of foreign merchants on the domestic trade in cotton, despite their centrality in organizing the export trade from the Mediteranean port city of Alexandria. The government purchased the cotton at fixed prices, collected it at central warehouses, and then shipped it to Alexandria, where Ali was the only seller of the raw material to foreign merchants. In the 1820s and 1830s, between 10 and 25 percent of the revenues of the Egyptian state derived from this sale of cotton.71

  Egyptian cotton came to play a significant role in supplying European manufacturers.72 British factory owners noted in 1825 that such exports had “materially checked the advances which lately occurred in the prices of all other Cottons.” But the prime value of Egyptian cotton, they argued, was that it could substitute for American long-staple Sea Island cotton, which they
considered important “in the event of any political event depriving us altogether of the Cotton of the United States.”73

  Cotton exports from Egypt, in millions of pounds, 1821–1859 (illustration credit 5.10)

  The cataclysmic event did not materialize. Not yet. Instead, cotton flowed ever more cheaply out of the American South. Slavery and the expropriation of native lands, fueled by European capital, combined to feed raw materials relentlessly into Europe’s core industry. The massive infusion of European capital transformed the American countryside; land became wealth, and linked across great distances slaves and wage workers, planters and manufacturers, plantations and factories. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, slavery had become central to the Western world’s new political economy. But this capitalism, based on territorial expansion and violent domination of labor, was also inherently unstable: As the Bremer Handelsblatt put it in 1853, “the material prosperity of Europe hangs on a thread of cotton. Would slavery suddenly be abolished, cotton production would fall at one stroke by ⅚th, and all cotton industries would be ruined.”74