Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  Alonzo T. Mial now discarded signed wage contracts with his liberated former slaves and subdivided his plantation into plots for sharecropping. As elsewhere in the South, the precise character of these arrangements varied—sometimes Mial agreed to a division of the crop, sometimes he rented land for fixed quantities of certain crops or even for outright money payments. In a typical sharecropping contract, Mial gave access to thirty to thirty-five acres of land to a sharecropper, along with farming implements. In turn, he received half of the harvest. Mial’s tenants were contractually obliged to build fences, repair bridges, clean stables, dig ditches—all of which was “to be done to my satisfaction, and must be done over until I am satisfied that it is done as it should be.” In short, he concluded, “All must work under my direction.” For Mial, sharecropping reduced supervision costs, while still giving him the power to direct tenants and to decide which crops to grow.22

  The spread of sharecropping as the dominant system of labor in the cotton-growing regions of the United States testified to the collective strength of freedpeople, allowing them to escape a far worse system of gang labor for wages on plantations. Sharecropping gave freedmen and -women a modicum of control over their own labor, allowed them to evade day-to-day supervision so reminiscent of slavery, and permitted families—instead of individuals—to contract with landowners and to decide on the allocation of the labor of men, women, and children.

  Yet in many ways, theirs was a hollow victory. The emerging patterns of land ownership, systems of labor, and the mechanism of credit supply made all but certain that farmers in the American South would have to grow cotton, and that growing cotton would create poverty. When planters and merchants provided croppers with the supplies they needed, they charged exorbitant interest. Consequently, the crop was barely sufficient to pay creditors at the end of the harvest season. On the Runnymede Plantation in Leflore County in the Mississippi Delta, for example, croppers paid 25 percent interest to purchase food and 35 percent to purchase clothing. High debts to merchants and landlords in turn forced sharecroppers to grow ever more cotton, the only crop that could always be made into money, even though its proceeds per bale diminished. Operating in an environment of expensive credit, a marginal position in the nation’s political economy, and falling prices, rural cultivators watched their incomes deteriorate, a fate they shared with most farmers across the globe who now produced for world markets.23

  The measure of their defeat became especially clear after 1873, as the economic and political environment shifted drastically. That year marked the onset of the greatest international economic crisis of the nineteenth century to date. The rate of growth of demand for cotton plunged below its antebellum averages, just when many new producers turned out ever more cotton. With world market prices for cotton declining, profits for growers diminished. At the same time, the structure of tenancy, debt, and the marketing of the crop in the postbellum South continued to create enormous pressure on farmers to produce ever more cotton, despite—or even because of—falling prices. While it was perfectly rational for each farmer to embrace cotton, such a concentration was self-defeating for the region as a whole.24

  As the economic situation of cotton growers deteriorated, and as northern willingness to intervene on behalf of the freedpeople waned, their political strength diminished as well. Landowners violently repressed black collective action, increasingly reasserting their own political power. They captured control of state legislatures, and these newly constituted “redeemer” legislatures proceeded to disenfranchise black cotton growers, ensured that their children would be crippled by poor-quality schooling, and refused them access to legal protection. Landowners backed up their return to political dominance over the governmental institutions of the South with an unprecedented campaign of violence expressly designed to curtail cotton growers’ political activities: Lynchings in the Mississippi Delta alone numbered a hundred between 1888 and 1930. For cotton merchants in Europe the planters’ return to political power was welcome news, Baring Brothers London receiving a telegram on September 16, 1874, from the New Orleans firm Forstall and Sons, “State government overturned by people conservative officers in power.”

  As landowners secured more political power, they moved quickly to control African-American labor. When post-Reconstruction redeemer legislatures altered lien laws to give landlords a primary claim on the cotton crop, indebted freedpeople sank to a state of dependency without even the little bargaining power their sharehold had once provided. Another blow came when legislators modified “criminal law to make plantation workers susceptible to arrest, conviction, and prison sentence [for indebtedness], stripping sharecroppers of rights to growing crops, thereby reducing them to the legal equivalent of wage workers, and curtailing customary rights to the bounty of nature.” In 1872, the Georgia state supreme court went so far as “den[ying] croppers decision-making prerogatives and legal rights to their growing crops.” Indeed, increasingly the courts defined sharecroppers not so much as tenants but as wage workers. Simultaneously, landowners used the machinery of the state to limit the mobility of labor. In 1904, for example, the Mississippi state legislature enacted a new vagrancy law aimed at driving “negro loafers to the field.” The relationship between landlords and rural cultivators might have been fundamentally different from what it had been during slavery, but by the turn of the century, cotton growers still lived in grinding poverty with few rights and no political voice.25

  Sharecroppers in a cotton field, Louisiana, 1920 (illustration credit 10.3)

  Ironically, at the same time that landlords consolidated their regional power, they themselves experienced what historian Steven Hahn describes as a “rather dramatic and irreversible decline in power” within the national economy. Bound to worsening cotton prices, faced with protectionist tariffs for products they consumed, and plagued by the scarcity and high cost of capital, they became junior partners in the political economy of domestic industrialization that had emerged during the Civil War. Globally, this group of cotton growers was never as powerful as the merchants, but prior to the Civil War they had enjoyed regional political control and very significant national political influence. But now power decisively moved away from raw material providers such as them. Though they did not know it at the time, the Civil War had disempowered the world’s last politically powerful group of cotton growers. From the vantage point of cotton manufacturers, this marginalization stabilized the empire of cotton, making the recurrence of the kind of upheaval that had emerged in defense of slavery quite unlikely.26

  If slaves-turned-sharecroppers produced ever more cotton for world markets, so did the white yeoman farmers of the upcountry South. During slavery, little cotton had been produced by white yeoman farmers, who typically grew subsistence crops. Yet after the war the situation changed: In areas where cotton production had once been marginal, and in which households relied on subsistence crops and household manufacturing for their livelihood, growing cotton became the order of the day. In the majority white farms of the Georgia upcountry, for example, the amount of cotton produced per thousand bushels of corn—a subsistence crop—tripled between 1860 and 1880.27

  What explains this expansion of cotton production by yeoman farmers? In the wake of the war, transportation, communications, and selling facilities spread rapidly into formerly isolated areas of the South. Railroad mileage in Georgia had, for instance, tripled during the 1870s. The infrastructural penetration of new cotton-growing territories transformed the countryside. With the railroads came stores and merchants, as well as ginning and pressing facilities. Yeoman farmers, devastated by the war, now raised cotton to gain access to cash. As merchants moved into even the smallest hinterland towns, yeoman farmers could easily sell that cotton, while at the same time enjoying broader access to manufactured goods, fertilizers, and, importantly, credit. “Such credit was important to recover from the effects of the war,” observed a German social scientist in 1906, “but once enmeshed in the credit s
ystem, farmers were also forced to grow ever more cotton, because merchants would only place liens against a crop that could be easily sold.” Many white farmers lost their farms as a result, and by 1880 one-third of them rented the land they worked on. In effect, the capitalist transformation of yeoman farmers made them more like their black sharecropping brethren: Increasingly these whites lost control of the only things they owned—their land and their subsistence crops. Yet their shift in crops was exceedingly important to the global cotton economy. White yeoman farmers had produced at most 17 percent of all U.S. cotton before the Civil War; by 1880 their share had increased to 44 percent.28

  Cotton production by white farmers increased dramatically: “Six-year-old Warren Frakes. Mother said he picked 41 pounds yesterday ‘An I don’t make him pick; he picked some last year.’ Has about 20 pounds in his bag. Comanche County, Oklahoma.” (illustration credit 10.4)

  While white yeoman farmers and former slaves grew the vast majority of southern cotton, they were not alone. A scattered group of planters appealed “to see German and Chinese Immigrants” brought to the South and in the early twentieth century, efforts were made to bring Italian immigrants to the Mississippi Delta. A few immigrant workers did end up working for wages on Louisiana cotton plantations, but they never became a major part of the workforce, as much more lucrative opportunities beckoned immigrants in other parts of the Americas. More important as a source of labor were leased convicts. James Monroe Smith’s twenty-thousand-acre plantation in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, for example, which produced annually three thousand bales of cotton by 1904, counted many convicts among its more than one thousand workers. Previously, Smith’s constant problem had been labor recruitment and in 1879 he had found a solution by investing in the Penitentiary Company Three, set up to rent convicts throughout the state. As a one-quarter owner of that company, Smith had access to one-quarter of its convicts. In addition, Smith employed convicts from local jails. These workers were treated with great violence, shot dead if they tried to escape. So harsh was the treatment that Smith was eventually the subject of a state inquiry and an 1886 letter writer to the Cartersville Courant accused him of severely whipping convicts, noting that some prisoners received as many as 225 lashes—a charge he denied.29

  As Smith’s example shows, the mobilization of labor for cotton growing in the United States went hand in hand with coercion. The degree of violence was in some ways surprising, considering that freedpeople’s transition to proletarian agricultural labor was much easier to effect than that of Indian or African rural cultivators, who enjoyed a greater degree of control over land and their labor. Yet the violence descending upon the countryside of the U.S. South testified in an indirect way to the enormously powerful desire of freedpeople for a different way of life and was as much a sign of the weakness of landowners as their strength. It took the determined initiative of landowners in alliance with the state to guarantee that rural cultivators’ efforts at building subsistence-oriented economies were undermined and their labor deployed for the production of agricultural commodities for world markets. Few observers in 1865 had expected such a spectacularly successful transition away from slavery and toward new systems of labor—a transition that filled with hope the hearts of imperial statesmen and metropolitan cotton manufacturers the world over.30

  Controlling labor: prisoners on a Louisiana cotton farm, 1911 (illustration credit 10.5)

  As struggles on plantations, in statehouses, and in the halls of power in Washington, D.C., determined labor regimes in the cotton-growing regions of the South, Reconstruction resulted in a rapid, vast, and permanent increase in the production of cotton for world markets in the United States. American rural cultivators recovered, despite all predictions to the contrary, their position as the world’s leading producers of raw cotton. By 1870 their total production had surpassed their previous high, set in 1860. By 1877 they had regained their prewar market share in Great Britain. By 1880 they exported more cotton than they had in 1860. And by 1891 sharecroppers, family farmers, and plantation owners in the United States grew twice as much cotton as in 1861 and supplied 81 percent of the British, 66 percent of the French, and 61 percent of the German market. So successful was the reconstruction of cotton growing in the United States that it came to be seen by imperial bureaucrats and capitalists everywhere as a model. Imperialists of all stripes and colors, from Great Britain to Germany to Japan, studied the United States to draw lessons for their own cotton-growing projects, and American cotton growers became sought-after experts, advising colonial governments on the transition to commercial cotton production.31

  The emergence of new forms of cotton-growing labor in the United States was, in the wake of the emancipation of the world’s preeminent cotton growers, the single most important change within the empire of cotton. Yet in other parts of the world, partly encouraged by the crisis of cotton production in the United States, manufacturers, merchants, and bureaucrats accelerated the transformation of the countryside that had already begun during the Civil War, though by varied methods and with divergent results. Thanks to their activities, between 1865 and 1920 several million sharecroppers, wage workers, and peasant operators in Asia, Africa, and the Americas began to grow the white gold for the spinning mills of Europe and North America, and by the turn of the century, for factories in Japan, India, Brazil, and China as well.

  In the last decades of the nineteenth century it was India that experienced the most dramatic expansion of cotton production for world markets. Indeed, at the end of the Civil War in the United States, the Bombay Chamber of Commerce had already observed that the “emancipation of American slaves [was] a matter of paramount importance” for the future of India’s cotton industry, signifying a permanent change in the social structure of a large swath of the Indian countryside and in the trade of India. While Indian rural producers were not able to hold on to their dominant position in world cotton markets after the war (especially after 1876), their production for export still rose rapidly, expanding from 260 million pounds in 1858 to nearly 1.2 billion pounds in 1914. Export merchants, however, no longer sold most of this much larger crop to manufacturers in India’s two traditional markets—Great Britain and China—but instead found buyers in continental Europe and, after the turn of the century, among Japanese spinners. By 1910, only 6 percent of Indian cotton exports went to Great Britain, while Japan consumed 38 percent, and continental Europe 50 percent. Continental and Japanese manufacturers, in contrast to their British counterparts, had adjusted their machines to work up the shorter Indian staple, successfully mixing Indian with American cotton, producing coarser cloth. As a result, in the thirty years after 1860, continental European consumption of Indian cotton increased sixty-two-fold, “a substantial help,” as the Bremen Chamber of Commerce put it in 1913. To supply these needs, cotton acreage in India expanded, and by the late 1880s in some areas of India (such as Berar) one-third of all land was under cotton. This expansion of export occurred simultaneously with an explosion in the number of mechanized spindles in India itself. Indeed, by 1894, less than 50 percent of the Indian cotton harvest was exported, as Indian cotton mills consumed about 518 million pounds of cotton and an additional 224 to 336 million pounds were used in hand spinning.32

  While Indian cotton played an important role in the coarse goods market, Brazilian cotton matched the quality of the U.S. crop much better. As a result, in Brazil cotton exports expanded in the last third of the nineteenth century. During the 1850s they had averaged 32.4 million pounds per year. During the following three decades, Brazil exported an average of 66.7 million pounds of cotton annually—despite the simultaneous growth of domestic cotton manufacturing by a factor of fifty-three. In 1920, Brazil produced 220 million pounds of cotton, of which it exported one-quarter.33

  Meanwhile in Egypt, fellaheen had quintupled their cotton production between 1860 and 1865 from 50.1 million to 250.7 million pounds. To be sure, Egyptian cotton was of much higher quality than much of
the U.S. crop; it was, as Roger Seyrig, a French cotton manufacturer observed, “an article of luxury.” After the U.S. Civil War, its production at first fell significantly to about 125 million pounds, but by 1872 merchants shipped again more than 200 million pounds from the port of Alexandria to European destinations. Even during the post–Civil War trough of cotton production, Egypt’s output was still two and a half times as large as it had been before the Civil War. And by 1920, it produced 598 million pounds of cotton, or twelve times as much as in 1860. A full 40 percent of all land in Lower Egypt was planted in cotton. To some, Egypt now seemed like a giant cotton plantation.34

  By the last third of the nineteenth century, Egyptian, Brazilian, and Indian cotton had become a significant new presence on world markets. In 1883, cotton from these regions had captured a full 31 percent of the (now much larger) continental European market, or a little more than twice as much as in 1860.35

  The expansion of cotton growing on multiple continents was all the more remarkable because it happened without slavery. The problem that had vexed cotton capitalists since the 1820s, namely how to make nonenslaved rural cultivators into growers of cotton for world markets, moved toward a resolution that seemed to please the interests of European and North American cotton manufacturers and statesmen. Yet, as in the American South, which in many ways came to serve as a model of how such a transition could be effected, the precise ways in which rural cultivators became growers of cotton for world markets varied widely and were the outcome of drawn-out conflicts among labor, landowners, providers of capital, and imperial bureaucrats.