Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  War capitalism may have brought cotton industries to Egypt by herculean determination, but the progeny did not last for long. By the 1850s, Egypt’s cotton industry had essentially disappeared, its countryside littered with factory ruins. Egypt was never able to build the institutional framework that would have enabled a full transition to industrial capitalism; even something so basic as wage labor did not take hold. Its reliance on war capitalism, both in the cotton fields and in the cotton factories, ultimately limited the growth of domestic markets. Egypt was, moreover, in the end unable to protect its domestic market. British merchants worked hard to open Egyptian markets for their goods, as Egypt weakened vis-à-vis European powers. The value of British cotton goods exports to Egypt increased by an estimated factor of ten between the second half of the 1820s and the second half of the 1830s. When in 1838 the Anglo-Ottoman Tariff Treaty went into force, setting import duties at only 8 percent ad valorem (that is, a percentage on the value of the product), and in effect forcing free trade upon Egypt, it “destroyed its first mechanized textile industry.” Combined with the state’s difficulties running cotton mills and the problem of securing sufficient fuel for steam-powered production, a system of “free trade” dominated by Britain made it practically impossible for Egypt to industrialize. Egypt’s cotton industry was devastated from two sides: its domestic embrace of war capitalism and its ultimate subjugation to British imperialism. The Egyptian state was powerful domestically, but weak when it came to defining Egypt’s position within the global economy, no match for British interests and designs.64

  The negative impact of war capitalism on industrialization can be seen in one other example: Brazil. At first glance, Brazil was a lot like Egypt. It had a long history of cotton production, and Brazil grew ample quantities of high-quality cotton. An oscillating colonial policy in the eighteenth century had at times encouraged manufacturing in the country’s new workshops, yet a 1785 royal decree had disallowed all manufacturing, except for coarse cotton goods, because colonial authorities were concerned that cotton factories competed with the labor requirements of mining. But despite such laws, cotton manufacturing emerged. And when the Portuguese royal family moved to Rio in 1808, these decrees were revoked and a few cotton mills built. These mills remained small and marginal; the São Paulo mill closed in the 1820s because of its lack of access to skilled labor and inability to compete with British textiles. When in 1844 the Alves Branco tariff raised duties to 30 percent on most foreign manufactures, it encouraged the development of a few new mills, but that tariff, and along with it the industry, were short-lived. As a result, as late as 1865 there were just nine cotton factories in Brazil with just 13,977 spindles—about one-twentieth of those found in Egypt at the height of its cotton industrialization, or one-tenth the number in Mexico.65

  Brazil, unlike Mexico and, for a while, Egypt, thus failed to develop its own mechanized cotton industry, despite its access to cotton, capital, and technology. Indeed, Brazilian cotton industrialization had to wait until the 1880s.66 This failure to industrialize was the direct result of the peculiar political economy forged by politically influential slaveholders. These powerful sugar and cotton planters envisioned Brazil’s place in the global economy as the provider of agricultural commodities produced by slave labor, a vision that ran counter to a project of domestic industrialization.

  In the important sugar-growing state of Bahia, merchants dealing in agricultural commodities, for example, explicitly “opposed industrial development and attempted to thwart it by denying it essential government support”—despite Bahia’s access to coal, capital, transportation infrastructure, and raw cotton, all of which made it ripe for industrialization. Instead, the Bahian elite wanted the government to invest in infrastructure to better move goods in and out of the world market and favored allocating labor to agriculture. Most important to them, however, slavery demanded low tariffs to facilitate the flow of sugar and coffee from Brazil into global markets and thus precluded the kind of protectionism that had enabled European, North American, and for a time Egyptian industrialization: The Bahian Commercial Association, a group of merchants, resisted tariffs as vocally and successfully as the planters, as they remained firmly in thrall to the planters’ domination.67

  Brazil’s budding cotton entrepreneurs faced other problems as well. As capital was bound up in the production and trade in agricultural commodities produced by slave labor and in the slave trade itself, industrial enterprises often lacked access to credit. Moreover, labor recruitment remained a problem. Because of the prevalence of slavery, little wage labor was available for industrial employment, since Europeans, unwilling to compete with slave labor, preferred to migrate to other parts of the continent, such as Argentina. As a result, mills drew on a mixture of wage and slave labor. But generally, labor was concentrated in agriculture, and merchants saw “industry and agriculture…as rivals for available labor.”68

  Plantation slavery’s imperatives, the case of Brazil shows, could be detrimental to industrialization. Not that slave labor as such was incompatible with manufacturing—to the contrary, slaves could be employed in cotton factories. However, a society dominated by slavery was not conducive to cotton industrialization. Early industrialization depended, globally, on war capitalism, but in regions of the globe in which war capitalism took on its most violent edge cotton industrialization never resulted. Cuba, for example, relied on a massive number of enslaved workers, and yet did not have a single cotton mill during the entire nineteenth century.69 The state of war between private parties at the heart of war capitalism contradicted the emerging imperatives of industrial capitalism. It was thus not just the capacity of states that explains the spread of cotton manufacturing, but also the distribution of power within them. Slave states were notoriously late and feeble in supporting the political and economic interests of domestic industrializers.

  This was also the case in the slave territories within the United States, the only country in the world divided between war and industrial capitalism, a unique characteristic that would eventually spark an unprecedentedly destructive civil war. In the southern United States, one of the world’s most dynamic slave economies, there was little cotton industrialization before the 1880s. To be sure, during and after the Revolutionary War some mechanized cotton manufacturing emerged in the southern states, and during the 1830s and thereafter a few textile mills opened their doors. But as late as 1850, southern cotton mills only consumed seventy-eight thousand bales of cotton, or one-sixth of the cotton consumption of New England. Further expansion of manufacturing, just as in Brazil, was hampered by the thriving slave economy that concentrated capital, labor, and entrepreneurial talent on plantations, limited the size of markets, made the region unattractive to European immigrants, and did not force white yeoman farmers into wage work (unlike, say, in New England and the Black Forest).70

  War capitalism, in different ways, also limited opportunities for industrialization elsewhere. The great premodern cotton power of India did not just fail to leap forward via mechanization, but experienced the world’s most rapid and cataclysmic deindustrialization ever. Faced with huge imports of ever cheaper cotton yarns and fabrics from its colonial ruler, and denied the services of its own government, India’s cotton industry was decimated—first its production for export, and then its domestic spinning. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, as we have seen, India lost its once central position in the global cotton industry and, in a great historical irony, eventually became the world’s largest market for British cotton exports.

  Colonialism, by undermining the state capacity of colonized territories and making them subservient to the interests of the colonizers, was decisive. Huge domestic demand in India, unlike in continental Europe, did not lead to state investment or protection—despite access to cotton, capital, and abundant skill. To be sure, there were some early efforts under French colonial auspices, and indeed, the first mechanized spinning mill on the Indian subcontinent was built
in the French colony of Pondicherry in the 1830s, producing guinée cloth for French West African markets. This Indian cotton mill was, as it were, an infertile offspring of European capital, intercolonial trade, and European states. Indian cotton industrialization did not reappear until 1856 when the Parsi merchant Cowasji Nanabhoy Davar opened the first modern cotton mill in Bombay. The true takeoff of India’s cotton manufacturing, however, had to wait until the 1870s, when the profits accumulated in the cotton trade during the U.S. Civil War were reinvested into manufacturing.71

  In the first half of the nineteenth century, many other parts of the world with a vibrant cotton sector did not evolve to mechanized production; all of these cases show that a whole range of factors had to come together to jolt bureaucrats and capitalists into this new world of industrial wealth creation. Even in the Yucatecan city of Valladolid, the promising cotton venture of the Aurora Yucateca came to an end during the late 1840s. Despite Don Pedro Baranda’s enormous entrepreneurial energies, his mill eventually faltered. Constant competition from British yarn smuggled in via the weakly guarded border with British Honduras, yarn that was about 40 percent cheaper than the goods produced in his factory, coupled with his inability to access the highly protected Mexican markets thanks to Yucatecan efforts to be independent of Mexico, brought an end to the venture. In 1847, Mayan insurgents captured the city of Valladolid in the War of the Castes, destroying the factory. The local state was too weak to protect its borders, to subdue rebellion, or to create a unified market, showing once again how important the state was to the lasting success of cotton industrialization.72

  Colonialism, the embrace of slavery, the expropriation of lands—war capitalism, in short—had enabled the rise of industrial capitalism in some parts of the world, while at the same time making its emergence much less likely everywhere else. Industrial capitalism rested, as we have seen, on a combination of capital and state power—creating markets and mobilizing capital and labor in novel ways. The emergence of industrial capitalism in the first half of the nineteenth century in turn created the conditions for ever greater territorialization—including the greater territorialization of capital, that is, its attachment to particular nation-states.73

  Crucial to this phase in the history of capitalism was the very diversity of its forms. Capitalism rested on the coexistence of war capitalism, with its violent expropriation of land and labor, its peculiar state, and the uncoordinated and unrestrained initiatives of its leading capitalists, with industrial capitalism, with its administratively, infrastructurally, legally and militarily powerful states channeling private initiative. The simultaneity of such different but mutually dependent forms of capitalism might have been the true innovation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was not global integration by itself but the diversity of forms within that global integration that explained the dramatic but also the wildly different rates of cotton industrialization during these decades.

  Capitalism, however, was not static. Enabled by war capitalism, industrial capitalism created powerful new institutions and structures. After the 1780s, a growing number of states built industrial capitalism, eventually allowing for the emergence of new forms of integration of labor, territory, markets, and capital in parts of the world that were, in the mid-nineteenth century, still subject to some of the harshest regimes of war capitalism ever invented. New ways of raising capital, new ways of inserting capital into production, new forms of labor mobilization, new forms of market making, and, last but not least, new forms of the incorporation of land and people into the global capitalist economy would emerge from this fertile yet often violent, even barbaric intersection of war and industrial capitalism. From the 1860s on, capital backed by state power rather than masters backed by expropriation and private physical coercion, would colonize territories and people.

  The spread of cotton industrialization in the first half of the nineteenth century, to continental Europe and a few places beyond, showed that slavery and colonial exploitation were not essential to capitalism.74 Capitalism reinvented itself ongoingly, and the lessons and capabilities of one moment were subsumed in the next. The connections between the global and the local, and among different places, changed constantly. To be sure, the demise of war capitalism stretched out for a century—from the Haitian revolution to the slow decline of slavery in the Americas. But industrial capitalism’s institutional innovations facilitated war capitalism’s death due to its own contradictions, as strong states, which would spread to more regions of the world, would enable labor mobilization in the global countryside after the end of slavery. The modern world, indeed, has been shaped just as much by war capitalism’s death as by its birth.

  One of the greatest institutional innovations brought about by capitalists’ and statesmen’s embrace of industrial capitalism, however, was the invention of new forms of labor mobilization. While capitalism’s vast labor in the Americas had been accomplished by enslaved Africans, the huge labor needs of manufacturing industries were met by creating a powerful new system of wage labor. Though wage labor was not free of extralegal coercion, it was a new way to mobilize massive amounts of labor. It put laborers and labor on an entirely different legal, social, and institutional basis—and the ability to do so was the next factor that set some parts of the world apart from others.

  Chapter Seven

  Mobilizing Industrial Labor

  Cotton workers in England (illustration credit 7.1)

  In 1935, while living in Danish exile, a young German writer sat down to consider how the modern world had come into being. Bertolt Brecht channeled his thoughts through the voice of an imaginary “Worker Who Reads.” That worker asked many questions, including:

  Who built Thebes of the seven gates?

  In the books you will find the name of kings.

  Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?

  And Babylon, many times demolished.

  Who raised it up so many times? In what houses

  Of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?1

  Brecht might as well have been talking about a very different empire, that of cotton. By his time, the legend of cotton was well documented; history books were filled with the stories of those who harnessed the plant’s unique gifts, Richard Arkwright and John Rylands, Francis Cabot Lowell and Eli Whitney. But as with any industry, the empire itself was sustained by millions of unnamed workers, who labored on cotton plantations and farms, and in spinning and weaving mills throughout the world, including in Brecht’s hometown of Augsburg. Indeed, it was in Augsburg, as we have seen, that Hans Fugger had accumulated his riches in the nonmechanized production of cottons more than half a millennium earlier.

  Like Brecht’s haulers and builders, few cotton workers have entered our history books. Most left not even a trace; too often they were illiterate, and almost always their waking hours were occupied with holding body and soul together, leaving little time to write letters or diaries, as their social betters did, and thus few ways for us to piece their lives together. One of the saddest sights to this day is St. Michael’s Flags in Manchester, a small park where allegedly forty thousand people, most of them cotton workers, lie buried in unmarked graves, one on top of the other, “an almost industrial process of burying the dead.” Ellen Hootton was one of these rare exceptions. Unlike millions of others, she entered the historical record when in June 1833 she was called before His Majesty’s Factory Inquiry Commission, which was charged with investigating child labor in British textile mills. Though only ten when she appeared before the committee and frightened, she was already a seasoned worker, a two-year veteran of the cotton mill. Ellen had drawn public attention because a group of middle-class Manchester activists concerned with labor conditions in the factories sprouting in and around their city had sought to use her case to highlight the abuse of children. They asserted that she was a child slave, forced to work not just in metaphorical chains, but in real ones, penalized by a brutal overseer.2

&nb
sp; The commission, determined to show that the girl was a “notorious liar” who could not be trusted, questioned Ellen, her mother, Mary, and her overseer William Swanton, as well as factory manager John Finch. Yet despite their efforts to whitewash the case, the accusations proved to be essentially true: Ellen was the only child of Mary Hootton, a single mother, who was herself a handloom weaver barely able to make a living. Until she turned seven, Ellen had received some child support from her father, also a weaver, but once that expired her mother brought her down to a nearby factory to add to the family’s meager income. After as many as five months of unpaid labor (it was said that she had to learn the trade first), she became one of the many children working at Eccles’ Spinning Mill. When asked about her workday, Ellen said it began at five-thirty in the morning and ended at eight in the evening, with two breaks, one for breakfast and one for lunch. The overseer, Mr. Swanton, explained that Ellen worked in a room with twenty-five others, three adults, the rest children. She was, in her own words, a “piecer at throstles”—a tedious job that entailed repairing and reknotting broken threads as they were pulled onto the bobbin of the mule. With constant breakage, often several times a minute, she only had a few seconds to finish her task.