Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  These rural workers, abandoning their agricultural pursuits and home-based manufacturing activities, flowed down the mountains and sometimes across the seas into the textile factories of the Black Forest, Switzerland, the Vosges, Catalonia, Saxony, and New England. There they met a population of essentially artisanal workers. Those workers, mostly male, took on the most skilled positions, often with experience from older artisanal workshops, not farm fields. When Neuhaus & Huber created a weaving mill in Biel, Switzerland, in 1830 next to their spinning enterprise, they drew on newly unemployed but highly skilled handloom weavers who had for decades prospered around the town. Skilled workers too migrated over great distances: The cotton cloth factory Schwarz, in the Russian town of Narva, employed in 1822 thirty-five Germans, a French dyer, and a person from Holland. Ludwig Knoop’s Kreenholm factory employed in 1857 many British skilled workers. Indeed, French, Mexican, American, and other manufacturers frequently recruited highly skilled workers from abroad.16

  The vast majority of workers, however, were not skilled and were not recruited; rather, they were driven into factories by changing conditions within the countryside, and especially by the decline of goods made at home that could no longer compete with those made in factories. Perhaps most dramatic was the moment when power looms replaced hand weaving beginning in the 1820s. As a huge wave of misery passed over large parts of Europe, unemployed home-based weavers were ready to move into factories. In response to such conditions, factory employment often became a family strategy to maintain a household’s ability to stay on the land, either by sending one member of the family to work at a mill full-time or by sending various members of the family for short stints. That was the case among the workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, where (unmarried) women’s factory wages often enabled their families to remain on the land. Migrating into factory labor could give marginal agricultural pursuits another lease on life.17

  The survival of detailed pay records allows us to take a closer look at one such early cotton mill, the Dover Manufacturing Company, mentioned above: In the sixty-three weeks following August 9, 1823, a total of 305 women, most of them young and unmarried, labored at one point or another in the factory, constituting 89 percent of the workforce. They worked on average for 25.93 weeks, or 41 percent of the total time possible. Indeed, many women entered the factory on a seasonal basis, working for a few months, then returning to other pursuits. To pick just one example, in mid-October forty-three women, or 32 percent of the workforce, took the week off from mill work, to return the following week.

  Work patterns at the Dover Manufacturing Company, August 9, 1823–October 16, 1824: sample of all workers whose surname begins with A or B (illustration credit 7.3)

  The rhythms of agricultural work thus persisted into the factory, and factory work could help families stay on the land. In New Hampshire it was common that one member of the family worked essentially full-time in the mill, while others did so only for a short time, such as the Badge family: While Mary worked full-time, Abigail and Sally only joined her for short stints.

  Work patterns of the Perkins family, Dover Manufacturing Company, 1823–1824 (illustration credit 7.4)

  But even at the Dover Manufacturing Company in the 1820s, there were already families who were fully proletarianized, whose many members stayed for long periods at the mill. The Perkins family exemplified this pattern; its members, including two men, worked essentially full-time, making it extremely unlikely that they still grew any crops or raised animals. Whatever the precise pattern, it was not the attractiveness of factory labor itself that drew millions of people into the vortex of the cotton mills.18

  Work patterns of the Badge family, Dover Manufacturing Company, 1823–1824

  One way manufacturers tried to circumvent the problem of attracting large numbers of people to work in factories was by recruiting the weakest members of society first, those with the fewest resources to resist. To do so, they built upon long-established relationships of power within households, especially a long history of paternalism that allowed the male head of household to deploy the labor of his wife and children as he saw fit. The emergence of industrial capitalism in fact built upon such older social hierarchies and relations of power and used these as a tool to revolutionize society more broadly. Employers understood that the “cheapness” of their labor rested on the persistence of noncapitalist ways of securing subsistence—a lesson that would eventually also inform the transition to world market production in the cotton-growing countryside in India and elsewhere. The capitalist revolution succeeded because it remained incomplete.

  Consequently, children were often the first to enter factory employment, Ellen Hootton among them. Up to half of cotton workers were children, coerced by their parents, who in turn were coerced by the new economic reality. Children were cheap—their wages amounted to between one-third and one-fourth of those paid to adults—relatively obedient, and unlikely to object to extremely repetitive and dull tasks, and if they did, they could be more easily punished than adults. For parents with few resources, children were often the sole source of additional income. McConnel & Kennedy, for example, the Manchester manufacturers we encountered earlier as spinners of fine Sea Island cotton, employed large numbers of children. In 1816, among the 568 workers on their payroll, 257 were sixteen or younger, or 45 percent of the total.19

  At Quarry Bank Mill, Samuel Greg’s pioneering factory near Manchester, many pauper children labored as so-called apprentices. Drawing on parish poorhouses, Greg recruited children as more than half of all his workers between 1784 and 1840. He housed them in dormitories and had them labor for him for seven years. While Greg styled himself as a considerate and paternalist employer, he locked his child worker Esther Price into a specially constructed cell for “disobedience,” and made other children work overtime to penalize them for the “crime” of having taken an apple. Again, Greg was far from unusual. Samuel Oldknow, for example, also tapped a thriving market for “apprentices”; in 1796, the parish of Clerkenwell advertised thirty-five boys and thirty-five girls, inviting Oldknow to choose whatever number he would like to take. The Edinburgh Review asserted in 1835 that factories “have been [children’s] best and most important academies.” Turning them loose on the street would be much worse, they asserted, as spinning mills take “the children out of harm’s way.”20

  Children make an industrial revolution: McConnel & Kennedy, age of workers, 1816. Total number of workers = 568 (illustration credit 7.5)

  Amid social acceptance of child labor and urgent need, large numbers of children worked in all aspects of cotton manufacturing. In 1833, 36 percent of all workers in Lancashire cotton factories were younger than sixteen. In 1846 in Belgium, 27 percent of all cotton workers were under sixteen. At a Siegerland spinning factory, of its three hundred workers in 1800, half of them were children between eight and fourteen. And when in 1798 the Russian Treasury allowed Michael Ossovski to build the first mechanical cotton spinning factory, he “received” three hundred children from a Saint Petersburg orphanage. From Saxony to Puebla to the Habsburg Empire, the situation was similar. Catalonian manufacturers located their factories in the foothills of the Pyrenees, home to many struggling farmers, not least because that gave them access to child labor. In Puebla, where most cotton workers were former peasants, debt peons, and textile artisans, children constituted an important part of the workforce, beginning to work at age ten, and sometimes earlier. As late as 1837, a commission of the Société Industrielle de Mulhouse reported that children were engaged in “forced labor” and that they “contributed involuntarily.” To improve conditions, the commission recommended that children age eight to ten be limited to ten hours of work per day; twelve hours for children ten to fourteen; and thirteen hours per day for children fourteen to sixteen years of age. Night shifts should only be permitted for children older than fourteen. Once enforced, they hoped such halfhearted measures would improve children’s lives. Yet the Alsatian cotton indust
ry continued to rely to such an extent on child labor that its entrepreneurs vigorously opposed the passage of a law in 1841 limiting such practices. In fact, the invention of childhood that took place among the families of the Mulhousian bourgeoisie, like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe and the United States, rested on the extreme exploitation of child labor in the factories surrounding them. Children from English poorhouses, Danish Bornehus, Swedish Barnhus, and Russian priiut dlia sirot all ended up in textile factories.21

  Child workers’ dormitory, Quarry Bank Mill (illustration credit 7.6)

  Aside from children, women, especially the young and the unmarried, constituted the cotton workforce. Indeed, cotton manufacturing became the most female-dominated manufacturing industry to emerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In New Hampshire’s Dover mill in the mid-1820s, as mentioned, 89 percent of all workers were women. In Catalonia’s cotton industry, up to 70 percent of workers were female. Women dominated the cotton textile workforces throughout Europe and the United States, although male workers dominated in Mexico and Egypt. Such preponderance of women workers resulted all too often in the invisibility of the cotton industry, overshadowed by the male-dominated coal-mining, iron-making, and railroading industries.22

  Not surprisingly, most of these women came from the countryside. Partly this was the result of families’ strategies to retain access to the land by supplementing dwindling agricultural incomes through wage work. Women in much of Europe and North America had been in charge of spinning and weaving for centuries; that trend continued, even as the work itself moved from home to factory, from hand to machine. In 1841, when the young William Rathbone traveled to the United States, he was struck by this prevalence of women workers: At a Paterson, New Jersey, mill, which he found “the most romantically situated mill in the world,” he found the “women employed in them are rather sickly looking but very pretty.” A few days later, when he looked at the Lowell mills, he observed that the “factory girls are neat and many pretty. They are generally I believe well educated being the daughters of farmers and sometimes even clergymen who go there for a few years without their families to get something as a marriage position.” Rathbone, like some of his contemporaries, had a hopelessly romanticized view of women’s cotton work.23

  Thanks to long-standing biases, women’s labor was much cheaper. Historians found that “women often earned as little as 45 to 50 percent of males’ wages under fixed wage structures.” Yet women were not just cheaper workers, they also were less rooted in older work cultures that often regulated the work of male artisan textile workers, work cultures that could and did become the basis of resistance against factory owners. Women’s work patterns, along with those of their children, were more easily molded to fit the ceaseless rhythm of machine production.24

  The availability of women was crucial to the early cotton manufacturers. And it was also what distinguished large parts of Europe (and eventually also Japan) from many other areas of the world. Not that women elsewhere did not work in textile production—they did—but in Europe and North America, unlike in Africa and Asia, women could eventually move out of households and into factories, a critical condition for textile industrialization. In China, for example, the situation was quite different. As historian Kenneth Pomeranz notes, “The Chinese family system did not allow much migration by single women, either to cities or to peripheries, until twentieth-century factories with tightly supervised dormitories made this seem possible within the bounds of respectability.” Sociologist Jack Goldstone even argues that the different roles of women explain why Europe industrialized and China did not. In Europe and the United States, women married relatively later and were therefore able to join the factory proletariat before marriage.25

  Yet favorable legacies of patriarchy and the transformation of the countryside had almost always to be supplemented with more overt forms of coercion. Though the coercion employed by the “lords of the loom” was quite different from that of the “lords of the lash,” using force to mobilize labor, to discipline it within factories, and to keep workers from leaving once they had entered factory employment was nearly universal. With their investments in factories at stake, manufacturers embraced coercion and even physical violence, sometimes privately, but more and more often also sanctioned by the state. Orphaned children, as we have seen, frequently had no choice but to work under oppressive conditions in cotton mills. Belgian entrepreneur Lieven Bauwens used “the inmates of the prison of which he was warden” as weavers. In Russia, efforts to staff textile factories with wage workers failed at first, and instead entrepreneurs resorted to coercing people to work, drawing upon “prostitutes, criminals, beggars, and others—some of whom were sentenced to work for life in industry.” In the United States, prisoners in Maryland, Louisiana, and Rhode Island spent their days weaving cotton. Even cotton workers who agreed to a wage labor contract often were tied to factories through “some manner of bondage.” The management in Knoop’s huge Krenholm factory was described by a local Estonian paper as taking “no more care of the people than does a slave-owner of his Negro slaves.” The factory not only had its own police force, but also regularly brutalized workers by corporal punishment. In Puebla, Mexico, workers were just as much subject to severe supervision: If they lived in factory compounds, they were sometimes not allowed to have friends or relatives visit, and sometimes even the reading of newspapers was outlawed. And in the Habsburg Empire, cotton mills were akin to military barracks; workers were locked into factories and only allowed to leave on Sundays.26

  In areas of the world in which slavery prevailed, bodily coercion played an even more important role. In the Americas in particular, the world’s center of plantation slavery, significant coerced labor went into cotton manufacturing. In Brazil, native peoples and slaves were forced to work in textile factories. In the southern United States as well, slaves worked in cotton textile production—a system that one historian has aptly termed “coerced proto-industrialization.” Thus in the slave zones of the world, slavery fueled industrial production as well.27

  Compared to cotton growing, the global cotton manufacturing industry as a whole, however, used physical coercion to a much lesser extent in the mobilization of labor. Even in Russia, where before the 1861 emancipation serfs were at times forced to work in textile factories, such coerced workers never constituted more than 3.3 percent of the cotton workforce. New yet sophisticated methods of labor control had emerged instead that did not rest on the enslavement of workers.

  Yet lessons learned on large slave plantations still inspired industrialists. Cotton manufacturer Samuel Oldknow, for example, in the mid-1790s tried to gain greater authority over his workers. Unlike the putting-out system that Oldknow knew so well, the factory was unchartered territory to him, and thus he struggled mightily to control his workers. In a first step, he created an attendance book to take systematic note of his workers’ presence in the factory. He divided this small book by the rooms in his mill and listed each of the workers in each of the rooms. He divided the day into four quarters and listed during which quarters workers were actually present. In March 1796, for example, the book lists “Mary Lewis 1,2,3,4; Thomas Lewis 1,2,3,4; Peggy Woodale 1; Martha Woodale 1; Samuel Ardern 3,4,” and so on. In our perpetually monitored world, such recordkeeping seems quaint, but just like the switch from seasonal work to machine work, so too this notion of keeping track of time was new, and while it was most fully elaborated on slave plantations, it slowly migrated into the world of the factory as well. Mobilizing huge numbers of workers by paying them wages and then supervising their work and assuring that they applied their skills and energy was a work in progress, and new dilemmas continually emerged. Outside the factory—in workers’ homes and neighborhoods—employers’ authority was even more distant. Instilling discipline proved difficult, with tracking attendance in account books often not sufficient, and so employers frequently also resorted to beating, fining, and firing workers. The rhythm of w
ork and its tight supervision reminded many contemporary observers of the only other large work setting they knew—the slave plantation—even though that made them miss the truly revolutionary nature of what was unfolding in front of their eyes.28

  Discipline was difficult to enforce and workers difficult to recruit not least because working conditions were often appalling—so much so that slave owners the world over compared the conditions of slave labor in favorable terms to those of industrial workers. In the German cotton industry, for example fourteen- to sixteen-hour workdays, six days a week, were the rule. In Puebla in 1841, hours per day averaged 14.8, including a one-hour lunch break. In France during the Second Empire, workdays averaged twelve hours, though employers could make their workers work as long as they chose to, and until 1873, working hours in textile mills in Barcelona were just as long. Production everywhere was dangerous and the machines deafeningly noisy.29

  Such conditions had a dramatic impact on workers’ health: When the Saxon government sought to recruit soldiers in the 1850s, only 16 percent of spinners and 18 percent of weavers were deemed healthy enough to serve. For many decades, the standard of living of these new cotton factory workers symbolized to contemporaries everything that was wrong with industrialization. “I regret to have to add that the distress of the Laboring poor but most particularly the weaver is great beyond almost description,” reported J. Norris to the British secretary of state Robert Peel in 1826. Indeed, a recent analysis of the life expectancy and heights of workers determined that “no increase in food consumption, no increase in longevity or nutritional status, and no improvement in housing” resulted from the Industrial Revolution. The author concluded that “the infant mortality results presented here for the sample parishes in the heartland of the Industrial Revolution provide support for the view that clear evidence of significant improvement in the daily lives of English workers and their families is lacking before the middle of the century” and might have actually had to wait until the 1870s. “I calculate that consumption per capita, adjusted for changes in leisure, remained essentially unchanged between 1760 and 1830.” As American labor activist Seth Luther reported in 1833, “The consequence of this excess of toil is, that the growth of the body is checked, and the limbs become weak, and sometimes horribly distorted.”30