Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  Considering such conditions, it is not surprising that farmers and artisans often resisted being turned into factory workers. With living standards and live expectancy falling, it was entirely rational to fear the factory. Resistance was both individual and collective, and made proletarianization an even more drawn out, often violent process. During the French revolutionary upheavals of the 1780s and 1790s, workers destroyed machines that modernized the cotton manufacturing process, and threatened factory owners associated with the modernization of production. In 1789, for example, hundreds of workers attacked cotton factories in Normandy, the center of the French cotton industry, destroying seven hundred spinning jennies and other machinery. Troops and militias, there and elsewhere, fought such upheavals, but with mixed success. This resistance continued in the 1820s, when French workers opposed the introduction of power looms. So effective was this wave of resistance, and so relatively limited the inexperienced state’s ability and willingness to protect its modernizing entrepreneurs, that some capitalists concluded that the path of least resistance was to limit the employment of new machines and instead focus on the production, however labor-intensive, of high-quality goods. The fear of popular uprising became a guiding star in the universe of French entrepreneurs.31

  Such resistance also characterized the industrialization process in England. Already in the 1740s there had been riots against Kay’s flying shuttle, in 1753 there were attacks on “cotton reel” machines; in 1768–69 workers in Lancashire rioted against the introduction of the spinning jenny, and in 1779 Lancashire workers smashed various kinds of machinery. But machine breaking only became truly prevalent in the 1810s, a moment when the state was able and willing to use massive force to repress it. In 1811 and 1812, “steam looms [were] attacked in Stockport and elsewhere,” with another wave of machine attacks in 1826.32

  Workers in other parts of the world also rebelled. In Puebla, weavers’ guilds were “extremely hostile” to machine production of cotton yarn. Factory owners adamant about introducing new machines hid innovators and their machines in a “secret place” to be safe from guild hostility. That fear was also prevalent in Veracruz. In Switzerland, weavers revolted in the 1820s, demanding that power looms be outlawed, burning down a factory in Oberuster in 1832. In the Dutch city of Tilburg in 1827, workers objecting to the introduction of steam engines smashed the windows of factory owner Pieter van Dooren.33

  The expansion of the world’s mechanized cotton industry thus not only rested on the deployment of new technologies and access to capital and markets, but also on the ability of capitalists to turn thousands and eventually millions of people into proletarians—and, importantly, to break resistance to the imposition of a radically new way of living and working. As a contemporary observed in England in 1795, “The several modes of accelerating labour have been always stoutly resisted by the labouring class, when the different machinery was first introduced.”34 This was, as one historian has remarked in regard to the Black Forest’s Wiesental, a process of “inner colonializations”—the colonialization and domination by capital of ever more territories and social relations. Yet in the face of weakened feudal elites, such a transition was possible—and consolidating states played a key role enabling it.

  Indeed, the state became exceedingly important in the repression of working-class collective action, demonstrating once more how decisive state capacity was to industrial capitalism. States passed laws outlawing everything from trade unions, to strikes, to public assemblies, to labor-oriented political parties. States criminalized workers’ efforts to improve their working conditions. When machine breaking spread throughout the empire of cotton, as we have seen, states responded. As Luddites in Britain (and also in France) destroyed hundreds of spinning machines in 1811–12, Parliament passed a law in February 1812 that made machine breaking a capital crime. Thirty Luddites were hanged in 1812–13, and nineteen more in 1830. Others were exiled to Australia or imprisoned. And the British state cracked down on workers’ collective action in other ways as well: Pitt’s Two Acts of 1795 suspended habeas corpus and outlawed gatherings of over fifty people without prior authorization. The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 outlawed trade unions—leading, for example, to John Doherty’s sentencing to ten years of hard labor in 1818, his crime being membership in the (illegal) Manchester Cotton-Spinners’ Society. The British state, not quite trusting the mechanism it had devised to assure social peace, also prepared for battle with workers—between 1792 and 1815 alone, 155 military barracks were built in industrial areas. As one historian concludes, “The magnitude of government repression astonishes.” When workers rebelled, mill owners often came to depend on the state to suppress such upheaval, making mill owners’ ability to accumulate capital increasingly reliant on the power of nationalizing states—states whose own power rested more and more on successful industrialization.35

  The struggle to transform workers into proletarians had made industrialists even more dependent on the state, a remarkable testimony to the limits of their power. The territorialization of capital, its growing attachment to and dependence on nation-states, however, also enabled workers to organize collectively to improve their working conditions and wages; eventually it would turn capitalists’ dependence on the state into labor’s greatest strength. Trade unions and working-class political movements, despite multipronged efforts to repress them, created new pressures on capital across the nineteenth century, pressures that would many decades later radically reshape the world’s cotton industry.

  Workers not only rebelled against machine production, as we have seen, but also tried to improve their living and working conditions within a system of mechanized production. These efforts were at first feeble, but they eventually gained strength and indeed won higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions. In the first half of the nineteenth century, successes were still few and far between, but the struggle abounded. Some working-class associations had already emerged before 1800 among British weavers. In 1792, Stockport and Manchester mule spinners formed unions. In 1807, handloom weavers collected 130,000 signatures to advocate for what they termed a “legal wage.” In 1826, riots of cotton workers spread from Manchester, as weavers assembled and threatened to damage power loom factories. A Fred Foster from Manchester reported “with much pleasure” to Secretary of State Robert Peel on April 28, 1826, that once workers assembled in the streets, “the riot act was proclaimed & the principal streets were cleared by detachments of troops.” In 1844, weavers famously rebelled in Silesia. In New England, women cotton mill workers walked off their job in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1824, making it the first strike by factory workers in the United States. English mule spinners also brought collective action strategies with them to the United States, especially to New England, and in 1858 the Mule Spinners’ Union of Fall River was born. Spanish cotton workers forged a labor movement during the 1840s and 1850s, and the year 1854 saw the first general strike among spinners. In France, textile workers participated in 35 percent of all strikes recorded between 1830 and 1847. Women sometimes took the lead in such collective action: In Lowell, Massachusetts, for example, women workers organized in 1844 the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, fighting for better working conditions and a shorter workday. Already by midcentury, cotton manufacturers responded to the militancy of their workers by moving their capital elsewhere, with Catalonian entrepreneurs perhaps the vanguard when they increasingly relocated production to isolated factory villages along the Llobregat and the Ter Rivers outside Barcelona to escape their troublesome workers. As in the case of cotton growing, workers’ collective action and the spatial arrangements of the world’s cotton industry intersected.36

  Yet these incipient efforts at unionization, strikes, and other forms of collective action directed toward improving wages and the working conditions of cotton workers demonstrate that once the control and mobilization of labor were “nationalized” within powerful states, and indeed became matters of state, wor
kers also gained new opportunities to improve their situation by appealing to the state itself and mobilizing within national political spaces. The nonpecuniary penalties for violation of employment contracts, for example, became increasingly untenable as a result of workers’ collective action. When in England large segments of the working class gained the vote in 1867, trade unions pressured the state to limit allowable remedies for workers’ breach of contract, and succeeded in 1875. In Germany it took until the revolution of 1918 to end criminal penalties for breach of contract.37 Indeed, “employment at will”—allowing workers to leave their jobs whenever they decide to do so—was the result of decades of struggle by workers, not a “natural” outgrowth of the emergence of industrial capitalism and even less so the precondition for its emergence. From the factory to the plantation, the expansion of freedom rested on the organization and collective action of workers. The labor market as idealized in modern-day economics textbooks as often as not came about as a result of strikes, unions, and riots.

  The empire of cotton from its 1780s beginnings to 1861 in effect rested on two very different forms of labor, and two very different forms of the organization of production. On the western shores of the Atlantic were the vibrant, expanding, and enormously profitable slave plantations, the latest outgrowth of the dynamic war capitalism that Europeans had been building since the sixteenth century. In Europe itself, but also in New England and a few other areas of the world, a much more novel and more dynamic organization of production had emerged: industrial capitalism, with its spectacularly productive spinning and weaving mills based on wage labor. Connected by the mediation of a group of merchants, these two systems grew side by side, the one feeding the power of the other. Capital, personified by merchants, facilitated the rapid expansion of both slave cotton plantations and wage labor cotton factories, connecting the seemingly opposing legacies of the one to the other—until the day one of them collapsed. Once that happened, once slavery within the empire of cotton expired like some distant supernova, its crucial contribution to the construction of industrial capitalism could be written out of our collective memory.

  Chapter Eight

  Making Cotton Global

  The ship Glad Tidings, loaded with American cotton, enters the port of Liverpool, 1865. (illustration credit 8.1)

  Among the most outstanding phenomena of modern times is undoubtedly the annually progressing expansion of this gigantic business sector whose impact on the material and social conditions of both hemispheres emerges so evidently.…

  While on the far side of the ocean significant and until recently undeveloped tracts of land are transformed into fertile plains, enabling an increasing population and expanding cultivation, they provide our native land an inexhaustible source of national welfare, wages and employment, utilize large capitals, and become the leverage of a magnificent trade whose products will supply the markets of all the zones, combining the most diverse activities transforming raw materials into finished goods.

  —Neue Bremer Zeitung, JANUARY 6, 18501

  For Walter Benjamin, Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century. For once and future cotton lords, however, the true center of the world was Liverpool. Situated in England’s rainy northwest, the city rose from the banks of the river Mersey and the Irish Sea. There, at one of global commerce’s most significant crossroads, Liverpool’s merchants had accumulated unprecedented wealth and influence by connecting a nascent European manufacturing complex with an ever more martial and expansive cotton hinterland. It was in Liverpool that industrial capitalism and war capitalism met, its merchants applying the logic of the former to the latter, and transforming both in the process. The genius of Liverpool’s merchants lay in their ability to combine ingredients often considered antagonistic: wage labor and slavery, industrialization and deindustrialization, free trade and empire, violence and contract.

  Liverpool may have been one of the wonders of the world, but not the kind appreciated by tourists. Indeed, “hideousness” was the summation of one early-twentieth-century chronicler. “The chief objects of attraction in Liverpool are, decidedly, the spacious Docks,” observed a contemporary dryly. As early as 1832 the docks and harbor walls stretched for two and a half miles, dotted by quays, warehouses, and a “forest of masts.” Beyond the Mersey lay the Irish Sea and beyond that the Atlantic Ocean, and it was on that ocean’s western shores that most of the world’s cotton was grown. Thousands of ships arrived each year, burdened by tightly pressed cotton bales. Thousands of workers, many of them Irish immigrants, unloaded the ships and brought the bales to warehouses. From there most were shipped by canal boats and, after 1830, train to the spinning mills in nearby Lancashire, twenty to fifty miles distant, but some bales also went back on ships to various European ports where first wagons and later trains fed the increasing number of spinning mills dotting the European countryside. No technical marvel, the port was first and foremost a site of perilous, backbreaking labor. Thousands of workers assembled on the rainy streets of Liverpool each morning before dawn, hoping to be hired for a day of handling huge bales of cotton, dangerous work over long hours at low pay.2

  Liverpool’s port was the epicenter of a globe-spanning empire. Its merchants sent ships all over the world, mostly wind-powered, but by the 1850s and 1860s increasingly by steam as well. The captains of those ships navigated perilous seas, rebellious crews, virulent diseases, and economic volatility. Every time James Brown, captain of a Liverpool cotton ship, arrived in the port of New Orleans in the early 1840s, he wasted weeks in the struggle to find bales of cotton to fill his boat. Shipping rates changed constantly, as idle boats in the port meant stiff competition. Market news from Liverpool, as often as not, led to abrupt changes in the price of cotton, delaying his departure. “Parts of the crew have run away,” Brown wrote in one of many laments; “hurricanes” and “reports of privateers” further frayed his nerves.3

  While Liverpool’s port was a scene of stupendous muscular labor, the nervous system of the city was its cotton exchange, whose caretakers lived and worked in close proximity to one another. Every morning the city’s merchants would meet to trade “on the flags,” an outdoor space in the center of town. Cotton broker Samuel Smith remembered that “in all weathers, cold and wet, winter and summer, we stood outside, sometimes sheltering under the arches when the rain and cold were unendurable.” Only after 1809, when a handsome exchange building was erected in the center of town did the cotton merchants move inside. The sales room where buyers met sellers in a noisy and seemingly chaotic dance was striking, as “no place in the world affords so elegant and commodious a situation as this is for the purposes of a public exchange,” with “sales to a very considerable amount…effected in a few minutes.”4

  Thanks to their all-embracing dispositions, the merchants of the city became the ringmasters of a globe-spanning network of cotton growing, crafting, and selling. On Bombay’s Apollo wharf, merchants nervously awaited news “from Liverpool.” On plantations throughout the American South, “Liverpool prices” were the single most significant piece of news, bordering on obsession for many slave masters.5 The southern agricultural journal De Bow’s Review constantly reported on Liverpool prices and how U.S. cotton farmers could pocket a greater share of them. New York’s Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review similarly agonized over Liverpool prices. For Ellen Hootton and hundreds of thousands of cotton mill workers like her, Liverpool prices would determine if she would be employed or not. The global preoccupation with Liverpool reflected the tremendous influence the city’s merchants enjoyed over large swaths of the earth. When prices rose in Liverpool, planters in Louisiana might decide to purchase fresh cotton lands, and slave traders might find it profitable to move young slaves by the thousands into these new territories. News from Liverpool might on one day help dislodge Native Americans from their land, on another day encourage investment in Indian railroads, and on another make a family in Switzerland, Gujarat, or Michoacán give up spinning and
weaving altogether.6

  The financial pulse of the empire of cotton: “Liverpool prices” on an Alabama cotton plantation, 1842 (illustration credit 8.2)

  Liverpool, like no other city, concentrated simultaneously on all the core functions of the global cotton trade. Its merchants traded raw cotton, shipped cotton goods, and financed both cotton agriculture and cotton manufacturing. Other cotton cities were more specialized in their activities. Merchants in New Orleans, Alexandria, and Bombay, for example, mastered the export of raw cotton, while Bremen and Le Havre merchants received their shipments. New York and London merchants focused on financing the trade. And widely dispersed merchants in cities from Buenos Aires to Recife, Hamburg to Calcutta received shipments of yarn and cloth and distributed them through their hinterlands.