Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  Indeed, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, entrepreneurs, rulers, bureaucrats, and scientists from many parts of the world carefully studied the progress of the British cotton industry. They traveled to Britain to acquire blueprints, models, and machines. If machines could not be had openly, entrepreneurs and spies committed the secrets of this new technology to memory, or persuaded skilled British artisans to travel despite the restrictive emigration laws in place up to 1825. Industrial espionage was the order of the day. Between 1798 and 1799, Lieven Bauwens, for example, who brought mechanized cotton spinning to Belgium, traveled to England thirty-two times to study the new ways to spin cotton, sometimes bringing skilled workers along with him. Thomas Somers, who had been sent to Britain by a group of Baltimore manufacturers in 1785, returned with small-scale models of spinning machines. Because knowledge of the early machines remained mostly in the heads of artisans, their movements made this diffusion possible. It has been estimated that more than two thousand British artisans worked in continental Europe, taking with them the beating heart of the English textile industry’s know-how.30

  Everywhere, British entrepreneurs, British expertise, and British artisans played a crucial role. In Normandy, one of the centers of the French cotton industry, brothers Thomas and Frederic Waddington were instrumental in establishing mechanized spinning factories in Saint-Rémy-sur-Avre and Rouen. In 1818, Mulhousian cotton entrepreneur Nicholas Schlumberger hired engineer Job Dixon from England to build spinning machines for him. In 1831, Camille Koechlin traveled to England to investigate cotton techniques there and returned with a number of “Cahier des notes faites en Angleterre,” providing a detailed survey of manufacturing techniques, especially as they related to the dyeing of fabrics.31

  From France, the new machines migrated to adjacent Switzerland. As the Swiss cotton industry suffered mightily from machine-made yarn from Britain, in 1800 the Swiss consul in Bordeaux, Marc Antoine Pellis, approached the government of the Swiss Confederation to import French-made copies of English spinning mules. They were eventually put up in a nationalized monastery in 1801 and their 204 spindles put to work. A year later, some Winterthur merchants brought forty-four of Arkwright’s spinning machines to a factory in Wülflingen.32

  Locations much farther from Lancashire also benefited from the spread of ideas, machines, and people. Mexico drew on British and eventually also American experts, technology, and machines. The U.S. cotton industry itself relied on British technology and on industrial espionage, easily camouflaged by ceaseless trade and immigration. In 1787, Alexander Hamilton (two years before he became secretary of the Treasury) and Tench Coxe sent Andrew Mitchell to Britain to acquire models and drawings of Arkwright’s machinery, a project that failed only when Mitchell was caught. Most famously, Francis Cabot Lowell ventured to Britain in 1810, allegedly for “health reasons,” and came back with blueprints for his factory at Watertown. The combination of migration and espionage meant knowledge traveled fast: Arkwright’s carding engine found its way across the Atlantic in eight short years, Hargreaves’s spinning jenny took ten; Arkwright’s water frame took twenty-two years, and Crompton’s mule only eleven. After 1843, when the export of textile machines from Great Britain was finally made legal, “market seeking by British engineering firms” became an important additional factor in the further spread of textile manufacturing technology.33

  Once these technologies spread, indigenous machine makers quickly mastered them and adapted them to new purposes and conditions. Saxon entrepreneurs started building simplified versions of British machines as early as 1801, and Swiss artisans followed in 1806. France developed a strong machine-building industry alongside its cotton industry, and that technology in turn was exported all over Europe. German skilled artisans in turn played an important role in the early history of the Russian cotton industry. Barcelona artisans manufactured spinning jennies as early as 1789, Arkwright’s water frame in 1793, and Crompton’s mule in 1806. Alsatian manufacturers were about fifteen years ahead of their British counterparts in developing dyes and chemicals to fix color to cloth, technology that eventually allowed for the emergence of the huge chemical and pharmaceutical industry around Basel. And in 1831 the American John Thorp invented ring spinning, which proved to be easier to operate and faster, creating more thread per worker. It soon spread to Mexico, Great Britain, and, most significantly, by the end of the century, Japan. The idea of relentless technical innovation, a core characteristic of industrial capitalism, spread beyond the borders of Great Britain—a sign that industrial capitalism had grown wings.34

  Having access to spinning and weaving technology indeed was just as necessary as access to capital, a prior history of putting-out networks, the pressures of British competition, and a history of some kind with textile manufacturing more generally. Regions such as Papua New Guinea, the Congo Basin, or the interior of the North American continent lacked these conditions, and were thus unlikely to follow the British road. But vast areas of the world saw no industrialization in cottons even though they fulfilled these conditions, Kano in present-day Nigeria, Osaka in Japan, and Ahmedabad in India among them. To be sure, most of Asia’s and Africa’s cotton industry was still outside the realm of British competition and thus under considerably less pressure to embrace the new manufacturing techniques. Yet some parts of Asia—including India, China, and the Ottoman Empire—did not mechanize despite devastating pressures from British yarn imports. When so many regions did industrialize, what explains their seeming twins that did not? We need to search for an answer elsewhere.

  One easy explanation for the uneven development is the salutary effect of war capitalism on European economies. The British case, after all, reveals how important colonial expropriation and slavery and the violent insertion into global networks had been for the radical recasting of the local cotton industry. If industrial capitalism was built on the wages of war capitalism, then perhaps it was the ability to embrace war capitalism that was the fundamental precondition for cotton industrialization. Not only British, but also French, Dutch, and Spanish capitalists could and did draw on colonial raw materials and colonial markets. Still, this is too facile a link. After all, one of war capitalism’s most significant contributions to the unfolding of industrial capitalism had been the provision of huge quantities of raw cotton at falling prices. But in many ways that benefit was easily generalized—anyone could travel to Liverpool or, for that matter, New Orleans to purchase cotton and thus benefit from the enormous pressure placed upon the slaves and indigenous peoples of North America. And what about the spread of cotton industrialization in the German lands? Or Switzerland? To be sure, some of their merchants gained riches in the slave trade, and they benefited from the accessibility of slave-grown cotton, but still, these important areas of European industrialization were bereft of colonies.

  Moreover, while the prevailing economic model—war capitalism—provided the resources needed, especially raw cotton, for industrialization and many important institutional legacies, the example of Great Britain had shown that war capitalism itself was ill-suited for the next step: the mass production of cotton textiles. Another way of organizing economic activity had to be forged—and transferring that model turned out to be much more challenging than moving machines or mobilizing capital.

  What the British example also shows is the importance of the state’s capacity to forge conditions conducive to industrialization. Without a powerful state capable of legally, bureaucratically, infrastructurally, and militarily penetrating its own territory, industrialization was all but impossible. Forging markets, protecting domestic industry, creating tools to raise revenues, policing borders, and fostering changes that allowed for the mobilization of wage workers were crucial. Indeed, the capacity of states to foster a domestic cotton industry turns out to be the key division between places that industrialized and those that did not. The map of modern states corresponds almost perfectly to the map of regions that saw early cotton indu
strialization.

  On the most superficial level, states mattered because they made the project of cotton industrialization explicitly their own by engaging in a range of measures to secure the construction of spinning mills. The French revolutionary government, for example, provided loans to Belgian cotton pioneer Bauwens. When Johannn Gottfried Brügelmann started the first cotton mill in the German-speaking lands, he received an exclusive privilege and monopoly from the Duchy of Berg. In Saxony, when Karl Friedrich Bernhard and Conrad Wöhler opened the first cotton factories in 1799 with the help of English engineers, they successfully appealed to the local government for direct subsidies and a temporary monopoly. In Russia cotton entrepreneur Michael Ossovski received government loans and a five-year monopoly to start Russia’s first mechanized spinning mill in 1798. In Denmark the government heavily subsidized the emerging textile industry and brought skilled workers from abroad. In 1779 it even created the Royal Privileged Cotton Manufacture, known as the “Manchester Factory.” Similarly, in the United States, Alexander Hamilton in his “Report on the Subject of Manufactures” in 1791 had strongly advocated a policy of government support for industrial development. And the state proved important, as when in 1786 the Massachusetts legislature sponsored two Scots—Robert and Alexander Barr—to emigrate to East Bridgewater to build a cotton spinning factory. In a similar vein, in 1789 a group of Boston merchants, aided by a $500 grant by the state of Massachusetts, incorporated the Beverly Cotton Manufactory. In Mexico the federal government created the Banco de Avío para Fomento de la Industria Nacional in 1830, to make loans for the building of factories and organized the acquisition of foreign machines and the hiring of foreign technical experts, and in 1826, the government of the state of Puebla supported the travel of mechanics to the United States and Europe to study the techniques of cotton production and to buy machines.35

  Yet monopolies, subsidies, and the provision of expertise all proved to be fairly minor interventions, sufficient to allow the building of one factory or another, but not enough to embark upon the creation of a significant domestic cotton industry. Indeed, without the novel and powerful state in the heart of industrial capitalism, as we will see later, these efforts could easily fizzle. Much more important was a state’s ability to isolate its domestic manufacturing efforts from competition, especially from Britain. But only a few states in the early nineteenth century enjoyed the capacity to police their external borders. Tellingly, the first wave of mechanized cotton spinning came to continental Europe as a direct result of the ability of the expanding French revolutionary republic to keep British manufactured goods from the continent. The blockade of British trade, from November 1806 to April 1814, provided the single most important impetus for continental European cotton industrialization, protecting feeble beginnings so that they could become a full-fledged industry. Just at the moment when the continental cotton industry struggled to emerge, Napoleon’s policy isolated it from the devastating competition of English manufacturers; French spinning and weaving operations soon took off. Saxony was similarly affected: In 1806, the cotton industry of Saxony, with Chemnitz at its center, counted 13,200 mechanical spindles, but by 1813, toward the blockade’s end, that number had multiplied an extraordinary seventeen times.36

  The effects of the blockade rippled through other parts of Europe as well. While the first Swiss mechanized cotton mill opened its gates in 1801, the real expansion of the Swiss cotton industry occurred only after 1806, during the continental blockade, when the industry was now able to serve markets formerly served by the British. With the end of the blockade, the Swiss industry experienced a grave crisis, as the continent was again swamped with British wares. The Swiss were compelled to look elsewhere for markets, which they found increasingly in the Americas and the Far East. In Belgium as well, before the continental blockade, many of Ghent’s printing workshops still worked with Indian cloths. An 1806 report observed that “in this Department two manufacturers only make the cloths known as calicoes, suitable for printing. Were there an embargo placed on textile imports from India, the Department would soon be able to produce sufficient to satisfy the needs of the numerous printing works of this and other Departments because of the abundance of weavers in the area and because the spinning mills could produce all that is needed.” Napoleon unintentionally fulfilled this wish, and huge new opportunities emerged for local manufacturers. Just a year later, Prefect Faipoult was able to report that “no industrial progress has ever taken place more rapidly.” In Holland, the Habsburg Empire, and Denmark the stories were quite similar.37

  A similar impetus was at play in the United States during its periodic conflicts with England. There, the wars of the early nineteenth century proved beneficial to cotton manufacturing enterprises. With Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807, which blocked the shipment of goods between the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, British textile imports largely disappeared from the market, providing new opportunities to American spinners and weavers: The number of mechanical spindles in the United States increased from 8,000 in 1807 to 130,000 in 1815. There were fifteen cotton mills in 1806, and sixty-two in 1809, with another twenty-five under construction. This astonishing and highly profitable increase encouraged merchants, including Francis Cabot Lowell in Boston, to shift ever more capital into cotton manufacturing.38

  Napoleon’s continental blockade gave a boost to the cotton industry of Europe and the Americas at a crucial moment in its development. By 1815, however, the protective effects of war and revolutionary upheaval in Europe had ended. When peace came to Europe after Napoleon’s defeat, British cotton manufacturer Wright Armitage remarked with relief that “a sudden transition from War to Peace has had a great effect on Commerce…. I think we are now beginning to feel something of our own superiority over other Nations, in driving them out of the market as Manufacturers.”39

  In some parts of the world, however, the cotton industry had grown so substantially during the years of upheaval that manufacturers had gained sufficient political clout to pressure their governments to protect the emerging industry from being “driven out” and provided states with an interest in and an ability to further develop industries. Wright Armitage was partly wrong. In the United States, a new tariff provided the cotton industry with some protection as early as 1816. Other parts of the world followed suit. In France, “prohibitive tariffs” followed the end of the continental blockade. Prussia and Austria imposed import duties on cotton goods in 1818, Russia in 1820, France in 1822, Italy in 1824, and Bavaria and Württemberg in 1826. France went so far that in 1842 it prohibited the importation of all cotton goods onto its national territory. Protectionism, once seen as a wartime cataclysm, now became a permanent feature of newly industrializing states—who in this respect followed the British example, as Britain had protected its home market from Indian competition just as furiously.40

  Cotton manufacturers themselves were at the forefront of demanding such protection. Even as late as 1846, far beyond the industry’s infancy, Alsatian entrepreneurs created the Comité Mulhousien de l’Association pour la Défense du Travail National, with cotton manufacturers Emile Dollfus and J. A. Schlumberger at the helm, advocating strong protectionist policies. Across the Rhine in Baden, cotton spinners had pressured for tariffs since 1820. Spinners in Saxony also agitated for protective tariffs. When Saxony became part of the Zollverein customs union on January 1, 1834, these spinners gained a much greater domestic market, and additional tariff protection. In negotiating these tariffs among the very states that constituted the Zollverein, Friedrich List, who attended the meetings for Württemberg in 1846, believed, like Alexander Hamilton across the Atlantic, that the “value of manufactures [must] be estimated from a political point of view.” Industry, among other things, he argued, mattered for the ability of nations to mobilize for war. This “political point of view,” was shared by Catalonian, Habsburg, Russian, Italian, and French rulers who protected their emerging cotton industry by various tar
iffs and prohibitions, and whose cotton industrialists all clamored for higher import duties.41

  Even in places farther away from England, domestic cotton industrialization rested on the ability of governments to protect their domestic industries in times of peace as well as war. In the United States, Massachusetts elites, and especially Waltham mill founder Francis Cabot Lowell, influenced the federal government’s decision in 1816 to put a protective tariff on low-grade cotton goods, in effect continuing to allow the import of high-quality British textiles, while cornering the market for cheap cottons. Coarse Indian goods, the kind Lowell and his colleagues competed with (and which they indeed had spent much of their previous career importing from India), were effectively subject to duty payments of between 60 and 84 percent of their value until 1846, when the industry had developed to such an extent that it could withstand such competition with lower tariffs.42

  Mexico’s industry, like that of the United States, was a child of protectionism. Since their independence from Spain in 1821, political elites had pursued industrialization. Mexico had had a long-established and thriving nonmechanized textile industry but that industry had come under pressure from cheaply manufactured yarn and cloth imports from Britain and the United States. The newly independent Mexican state tried to address this problem by raising tariffs, or even prohibiting the import of cotton textiles and yarn. Independence meant that Mexico escaped the massive wave of deindustrialization sweeping other parts of the world. The first mechanized cotton mill in Mexico that would last (unlike the Aurora Yucateca) opened in 1835 in Puebla, founded and managed by Esteban de Antuñano, and indeed it was Antuñano himself who most forcefully demanded that the country protect itself from cotton imports. Like Tench Coxe in the United States and Friedrich List in Germany, Antuñano advocated import-substituting industrialization as a path toward wealth and political stability. Responding to pressure from industrialists, as well as to the fear of social unrest, such as the riots in the textile-manufacturing city of Puebla in 1828, the Mexican government passed new tariffs by May 1829 that prohibited the import of coarse cotton clothing, exactly the kind that could be manufactured in Mexico itself. The new tariffs proved successful, and by 1831 new spinning workshops had opened their doors. Antuñano continued to be an eloquent supporter of tariffs, and he warned that lowering tariffs would destroy “in one stroke” all that had been achieved. His own factory, he indeed argued, only existed because of the prohibition to import yarn of grades below Number 21, relatively coarse yarns. Protectionism continued unabated: the new tariff of 1837 again banning the import of cheap cotton yarn and cloth. By 1843, the prohibition of cotton textile imports was written into the Mexican constitution. As a result, the number of cotton mills in Mexico increased from four in 1837 to more than fifty in 1847.43