Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  Pressured by manufacturers and concerned about the suffering and mobilization of cotton workers, government bureaucrats expressed concerns as well. Cotton, after all, was central to their national economies and ultimately to the maintenance of social peace. Some European officials advocated recognition of the Confederacy and breaking the Union blockade to secure that urgently needed cotton. Others hoped for new sources of cotton from places outside the United States—especially the two European powers that had both substantial cotton industries and large colonial holdings, Britain and France. Even before the outbreak of the war, British foreign secretary Lord John Russell had hastened to assure the cotton manufacturers of Manchester that his government would do all in its power to secure cotton from sources outside the United States. Yet in July 1862 the American consul to the Egyptian city of Alexandria, William Thayer, reported that “statesmen are almost paralyzed with terror at the hopelessness of relief for the evils in prospect.” The Prussian minister to Washington, Freiherr von Gerolt, along with his British and French counterparts, repeated many times in his meetings with U.S. secretary of state William Seward how important cotton was to their countries’ economic well-being. On numerous occasions, the House of Commons, the House of Lords, and the French Senate debated the “cotton question.”22

  This intense public concern with securing access to cheaply priced raw materials essential to national industries was a clear departure from the past. Since the 1780s, raw cotton markets had been decisively dominated by merchants, but now cotton had become a matter of state, a state empowered not least by decades of merchant political mobilization. Heavy investments in industrial production, a novelty in human history, demanded a constant supply of land, labor, and money. As political leaders grappled with the cotton famine, they saw that the emergence of industrial capitalism had made them just as dependent on a predictable supply of cheap raw materials as the manufacturers themselves. Lord Palmerston warned in October 1861 that England must have cotton because “we cannot allow millions of our People to perish.” The French Ministry of Colonies commissioned reports on cotton growing prospects in such diverse places as Guyana, Siam, Algeria, Egypt, and Senegal. The outlines of a new kind of imperialism began to emerge.23

  Responding to the urgent demand for cotton, forty-six hundred miles to the east of Liverpool and ninety-two hundred miles from Antietam, Indian merchants and cultivators, British colonial bureaucrats, and Manchester manufacturers embarked on a frantic race to grow cotton for world markets. As we have seen, Britain had tried to cultivate India as a reliable source of cotton since the 1820s, yet the effort had been, according to the Bombay Chamber of Commerce, “a signal failure.” Indeed, as The Economist noted before the outbreak of the Civil War, “As long as there were negroes in the Southern States, and those negroes could be kept to work, it would have been venturesome, not enterprising” to grow cotton for world markets in India.24

  The bombardment of Fort Sumter, however, announced that India’s hour had come. For cotton merchants, manufacturers, and statesmen, no place seemed more promising a source of cotton than India. Indeed, it was “the only remedy for the misery that appeared to be hanging over us,” according to Edmund Potter of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce. During the American Civil War, British cotton capitalists and colonial bureaucrats worked feverishly to increase India’s cotton output and move it to market. “Cotton,” as one observer wrote from Nagpore in July 1861, “appears to me to be the leading topic of the day,” and the English-language press of India was filled with hundreds if not thousands of stories about cotton. Manchester manufacturers shipped cottonseed to Bombay to be distributed to growers; they moved cotton gins and cotton presses into the countryside; and they talked about investing in railroads to remove cotton to the coast. They ran afoul, however, of India’s well-known obstacles. In 1862, when the Manchester Cotton Supply Association sent cotton gins and presses to India, they planned to unload them in the newly constructed port of Sedashegur, close to areas in which cotton was grown. Yet when the ships arrived, they found that the port had not been finished. Eventually they moved the gins and presses to another port, which did have facilities for unloading, but the road linking this port to the cotton-growing areas was not complete and the machinery could not be moved.25

  Confronted with such problems, British cotton manufacturers, especially through the channels of two organizations they dominated, the Manchester Chamber of Commerce and the Manchester Cotton Supply Association, redoubled their efforts to transform the Indian countryside. After all, asked Manchester Chamber of Commerce member Henry Ashworth, “what is the value of our possessions if we do not use them?” Ashworth and others pressed a newly receptive British government for massive infrastructure investments, changes in criminal codes to make the adulteration of cotton a crime, and new property laws to create clearly defined and easily marketable property in land.26

  Such pressures by manufacturers and merchants to bring the state in did not fall on deaf ears. Already in September 1861, the finance minister of India, Samuel Laing, met with representatives of cotton interests in Manchester to discuss ways to improve Indian cotton production, meetings that would continue in Manchester, London, and Bombay throughout the war. Charles Wood, the British foreign secretary for India, saw the urgency as well, recommending “to get as much as possible from India.” British colonial officials wrote dozens of reports to investigate the cotton-growing potential of this or that area of India.27

  The British government and manufacturers agreed that the administrative, legal, and infrastructural capacity of the imperial state needed to be pushed into the Indian countryside. Perhaps most important was manufacturers’ pressure to create a new kind of legal environment in order to facilitate European investment in and domination of cotton production. Cotton capitalists wanted to change Indian contract law to make “penal the breach of contract where advances have been made,” giving “the advancer an absolute lien upon the crop he advances upon to the extent of his advances,” allowing for penalties including prison at hard labor. If merchants could secure such an absolute claim on cotton grown with the support of their capital, investment would be encouraged, and it would help overcome “the difficulty of enforcing the observance of legal Contracts with the agricultural Population of India.” Such a system would permit cultivators to devote their efforts entirely to cash crops, since advances would allow them to purchase food grains before their own cotton crop ripened. Eventually this pressure succeeded; new contract laws were imposed. In 1863, moreover, criminal laws were enacted that made the adulteration of cotton a crime punishable by imprisonment at hard labor.28

  Such market making went hand in hand with physical infrastructure projects serving both the interests of the “Manchester people” and the colonial state, especially the construction of railroads, which, as Charles Wood remarked, would not only move cotton to ports but also allow for the quick movement of troops to subdue rebellions. During the first year of the war alone, government expenditures on infrastructure projects in India nearly doubled. When in 1864 the British government for India allocated £7 million to “Public Works,” the Times of India commented that the “budget…may be considered as devoted to the express object of opening up readier access from the field to the market.” Wood himself, concerned about the pressures from Manchester, wrote in March 1863 to Sir Charles Trevelyan, India’s finance minister, to urge him to spend more aggressively on infrastructure improvements, as not to do so would be a “suicidal act.” “These roads,” warned Wood, “we must make.” Moreover, the colonial government reduced the cotton-goods import duty from 10 to 5 percent, a reduction that British manufacturers strongly favored since they believed the duties gave “a fictitious encouragement to…mechanically produced manufactures,” thereby “diverting the capital and labour of India from the cultivation of the varied productions which the soil would yield in great abundance.” India’s future, they agreed, was not in manufacturing, but in the provis
ion of raw cotton to European industry.29

  Yet despite such far-reaching interventions, manufacturers remained dissatisfied with the British government. Their decades-old calls for more state intervention now took on nearly hysterical tones, hastening the emergence of an even tighter relationship between merchants, manufacturers, and the imperial state, a relationship that became the hallmark of the empire of cotton during the last third of the nineteenth century and beyond.

  The Manchester Chamber of Commerce consistently complained about the government’s lack of commitment to cotton. Frustrated manufacturers tried to increase pressure by taking their cause to Parliament. In June 1862 members of Parliament from cotton-consuming districts demanded greater government commitment to infrastructure improvements in India to facilitate the movement of cotton to world markets. “The supply of cotton,” argued Stockport MP John Benjamin Smith on the occasion of this debate, “is not a mere Lancashire question—it is a question of great national importance.” These sentiments became so strong that Lancashire manufacturers eventually complained publicly about Charles Wood, and members of the Cotton Supply Association demanded nothing less than “the impeachment of the incompetent Minister.” The British government replied in kind, with Wood regularly expressing his annoyance with “the Manchester people.” The manufacturers’ and the government’s interests never entirely converged, because Charles Wood and other British government officials were acutely aware of the dangers of upsetting India’s fragile social order in the wake of the Rebellion of 1857, which had severely challenged British rule in India. They understood, unlike many manufacturers, that the transformation of the Indian countryside was a gigantic project that entailed great risks.30

  Yet like no other crisis before it, the cotton famine opened new vistas on colonial raw material production. Even The Economist, the world’s leading publicist for the benefits of laissez-faire capitalism, eventually endorsed state involvement in securing cotton, especially from India. It was hard to justify these steps in terms of the “laws of supply and demand,” but eventually The Economist—and with it many others—found a way: “The answer, at least a great part of the answer is, that there appears to exist in many important parts of Indian society very peculiar difficulties, which to some extent impede and counteract the action of the primary motives upon which political economy depends for its efficacy.” In India, it continued, “The primitive prerequisites of common political economy…are not satisfied. You have a good-demanding Englishman, but, in plain English, not a good-supplying Indian.” For that reason, “There is no relaxation of the rules of political economy in the interference of Government in a state of facts like this. Government does not interfere to prevent the effect and operation of ‘supply and demand,’ but to create that operation to ensure that effect…. There is no greater anomaly in recommending an unusual policy for a State destitute of the ordinary economical capacities, than in recommending an unusual method of education for a child both blind and deaf.”31

  Unlikely champions joined in this clamor for state intervention in the global cotton-growing countryside. Cotton manufacturer, member of Parliament, and free trade advocate Richard Cobden, for example, agreed that Adam Smith’s ideas were not applicable when it came to India. Along the same lines, the Manchester Chamber of Commerce called a special meeting in July 1862 regarding the supply of cotton from India, demanding “that public aid be given for this object by forwarding such public works as will facilitate the production and transport of cotton to the port of shipment, such as works of irrigation, roads, or railways, and by amending and perfecting the Laws of Contract and Land Tenure.” Manufacturers and colonial bureaucrats, faced with the cotton famine, became increasingly impatient with the workings of the market. As the superintendent of the Cotton Gin Factory in the Dharwar Collectorate reported in May 1862, while “we are strongly impressed with the belief, that, as a general rule, it is not judicious to interfere by legislative enactments in matters connected with trade, but looking to the circumstances of the present case,…to the immense importance of the questions at the present time affecting not only local, but national, interests, and to the apparent inefficiency of the present law, we are forced to the conviction that exceptional and more stringent legislation is necessary.” Wood, too, had come to believe that the operation of the “laws of supply and demand” would not suffice to bring more cotton from India to Britain, despite his fractious relations with the louder elements of the cotton interests. Indian cultivators, so he believed, preferred leisure to accumulation, resulting in lower production when prices were high. India needed state reform and coercion if it hoped to replace the American South in the cotton economy. The crisis of slavery forced the imperial states to insert themselves in new ways into the global cotton-growing countryside.32

  The effectiveness of government interventions was furthered by rapidly rising prices that lubricated the often balky transition to world market production. The value of Indian cotton more than quadrupled during the first two years of the war. As a result, Indian cultivators began planting cotton on newly cleared land as well as on land once devoted to food crops. This unprecedented dedication to export agriculture, according to the U.S. consul in Calcutta, created “supplies of unanticipated magnitude.” It paid handsomely during the war years and helped European cotton manufacturers secure some of the raw material they needed to keep their factories running. Whereas India had only contributed 16 percent of Britain’s supply of raw cotton in 1860, and 1.1 percent of France’s in 1857, it contributed 75 percent in 1862 in Britain and as much as 70 percent in France. Some of this cotton had been diverted from domestic use and competing foreign markets (especially China), while the rest was the result of a 50 percent increase in production.33

  Rural producers in western India in general and the province of Berar—which the British had only acquired in 1853—in particular were most responsible for this increase in output. The explosive growth of Bombay can indeed be traced to the Civil War years, as Indian cotton left its old channels of trade into Bengal and moved toward the great European entrepôt. By 1863, ships burdened with cotton even sailed out of Bombay harbor to New York. European merchants and manufacturers complained about the poor quality of Indian cotton—it was less clean, of shorter staple, and required the adjustment of machines—but Indian cotton prevented the total collapse of the European cotton industries. “The American slaveholders have done more to promote the development of the resources of India by British capital,” observed the Cotton Supply Reporter, “than British capitalists would ever have done without their interference.” The crisis of American slavery in effect forced and enabled the reconfiguration of the cotton-growing countryside elsewhere.34

  The wave of activity that transformed parts of India also rippled through Egypt’s lower Nile Delta. In response to the desperate search by cotton manufacturers for new sources of raw cotton, the Ottoman viceroy Muhammad Sa’id Pasha quickly set about converting his own large landholdings into vast cotton farms. According to Massachusetts cotton manufacturer Edward Atkinson, Muhammad Sa’id became at a stroke “the largest and best cultivator of cotton in the world,” but unbeknownst to Atkinson, he did so in the context of an enormous wave of coercion and violence descending on the Egyptian countryside, including the importation of additional slaves from the Sudan.35

  From the viceroy’s vantage point, his long-term project of modernizing Egypt through the sale of cotton on world markets, a project, as we have seen, begun about four decades earlier under Pasha Muhammad Ali, now seemed closer than ever to fruition. New railroads, new canals, new cotton gins, and new cotton presses were built. By 1864, 40 percent of all fertile land in Lower Egypt had been converted to cotton farms. Egyptian rural cultivators, the fellaheen, quintupled their cotton production between 1860 and 1865 from 50.1 million to 250.7 million pounds, marking a permanent economic change of such significance that historians of Egypt rank the American Civil War among the most crucial events in that
country’s nineteenth-century history. The fourteenfold increase in the value of cotton exports was “an economic revolution.” And it was not surprising that when the viceroy traveled to Manchester in 1862 in the midst of the American Civil War, he was given a hero’s welcome.36

  The effects of the Civil War also reached the northeastern coast of Brazil. Decades earlier, subsistence farmers had occupied land belonging to large estate owners in and around Pernambuco. Over time these peasants began to cultivate small amounts of cotton to obtain cash for necessities and taxes. When prices for cotton surged during the war and British credit flooded the countryside, farmers abandoned their subsistence crops to plant cotton for the world market. Collectively, these cultivators more than doubled Brazilian cotton exports between 1860 and 1865.37

  Cotton exports, 1860–66, in million pounds (illustration credit 9.2)

  Rural cultivators in other regions of the world also responded to the cotton famine. Western Anatolia, for example, saw its exports more than triple to 31.5 million pounds by 1863, thanks to a coordinated effort by private British cotton capitalists and the Imperial Command in Istanbul, which created special privileges for cotton growers, distributed American cottonseed, and extended railroads into the hinterland to facilitate the transport of cotton to the coast. French colonial officials in Algeria labored to increase cotton production during the Civil War, pressured by manufacturers and the Société Industrielle de Mulhouse, and supported by a number of private companies that raised capital and set up operations there. In Argentina “the experiments to spread the cultivation of cotton were started several times, especially during the period of 1862–1865…when the export of cotton from the United States declined as a result of the Civil War.” In Mexico, a future cotton power, cotton planting increased to serve the Union market, and the value of cotton exports skyrocketed by a factor of eight between 1861 and 1865. The Peruvian cotton industry’s exports quadrupled. Similarly, one of the world’s largest crops, Chinese cotton, broke over the steep banks of its broad domestic market and poured into world markets. Transcaucasian and Central Asian cotton made its presence felt in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. West African cotton, thanks to the joint efforts of African merchants and French colonialists, found eager buyers in Alsace and Normandy. And along the Atlantic coast of Africa, in the future German colony of Togo, African merchants employed their slaves in the production of cotton for shipment to Liverpool.38