by Sven Beckert
As former craft workers were drawn into cotton cultivation, deindustrialization swept over their world in the following decades. In Berar, “The manufacture of home made cloth has been undermined by the importation of English Piece Goods, and many of the weaver class have become ordinary labourers,” remarked the assistant commissioner in charge of cotton of the government of India in 1874. With less cloth manufactured at home, reported Berar’s cotton commissioner, “The home-made cloths affect not at all the supply of raw materials which England confidently expects from the Berars.”28
For European cotton manufacturers this was reason to celebrate. When Edmund Potter spoke at the Manchester Chamber of Commerce he was cheered by “hear, hear” calls from the otherwise staid audience:
The great expenditure in our military operations; the great outlay in making public works…and the increasing consumption by this country…of the agricultural products of India; all these things have circulated money among and raised in some degree the social condition of the ryots [cultivators] of that country, so that their consumption of manufactured goods has increased. One letter informs me that in some districts the weavers are leaving their ill-paid operations in that handicraft, and are resuming the occupation we wish them to follow, namely, agricultural operations—(“Hear, hear”)—because there is no question the real interest of India would be best promoted by developing the agricultural products of its fertile soil. (“Hear”)29
“Dacca” calicoes, now manufactured in Britain: Gidlow Mills in Wigan, as seen in 1908 (illustration credit 11.11)
For British cotton merchants and manufacturers, news of the deindustrialization of India was so welcome that it allowed for a slight relaxation of decorum.
By the end of the century, that decline had brought with it social catastrophe. In Bengal “from every district it is reported that owing to the widespread use of European piece-goods, which are cheaper and finer, though not always more durable, Indian manufactured goods have gradually disappeared.” One district, Parganas, testified that “weavers have been largely driven from their hereditary calling to agriculture.” When famine struck the Bombay Presidency in 1896–97 the final report of the Revenue Department stated that weavers suffered “not only from the failure of crops and high prices but from the absence of demand for their products.” Such stories can be told about many regions of the world.30
Yet despite these pessimistic reports, domestic production did not disappear. In the Ottoman Empire weavers took advantage of access to cheaper (imported) yarn, and catered successfully to highly differentiated local markets, doing fairly well throughout the nineteenth century. Historians of China have observed that while hand spinning diminished rapidly (by 1913 only 25 percent of all yarn used in China was spun at home), weaving remained, and during the 1930s 70 percent of cloth was still produced in homes, indeed well into the socialist period home manufacturing survived. In Latin America, the home-based production of cottons persisted as well, especially among indigenous communities. Historians of African manufacturing also observe that “contemporary statements as to the complete hegemony of import cottons have no validity outside fairly restricted zones”—basically places near European settlements. Even in India, as the British colonial Department of Commerce and Industry reported in 1906, “The weaving of cloth by hand is not, however, by any means extinct, after agriculture it is still the most important occupation of the native of India, and is pursued, in some parts, as an independent means of livelihood or in order to supplement the earnings derived from agriculture, and in others, as a purely domestic occupation.”31
As the world shifted under their feet, and without the power to respond politically to these shifts, local cotton producers adapted as well as they could. At first, faced with the loss of their export markets, they retooled to supply domestic consumers, by producing coarser goods. They also focused, often successfully, on market niches not supplied by European manufacturers, and on producing more durable cloth. The Commerce and Industries Department reported with some regret of “the difficulty of penetrating too many of the up-country markets, the effects of custom, of caste, of religious beliefs, of the barter system, and so on, has prevented the process from proceeding with the rapidity which it would otherwise have attained.” As late as 1920, there were still about 2.5 million handloom weavers remaining in India. Even Mahatma Gandhi, who made the devastating impact of colonialism on domestic industry a key aspect of his political campaigns, admitted in 1930 that “next to agriculture, hand-weaving is still the largest and most widespread industry throughout the whole of India”—not least because despite all the rapid advances, the capitalist reorganization of the countryside remained far from complete in the early twentieth century.32
If these adjustments did not suffice, weavers tried to reduce the costs of their product by moving production farther into the countryside and giving female household members a more prominent role in production. In the Ottoman Empire, cotton textile production increasingly moved away from male, guild-based labor toward female and child labor, often in the countryside. Deindustrialization, as often as not, shaped gender inequalities as it undermined household economies. Indeed, the ability of local manufacturing to survive was often rooted in the gendered social structure of the countryside, where workers, often women, were idle during parts of the year, and families perceived the “cost” of continuing to produce textiles for family consumption or even sale as extremely low. “In Assam and Burma,” tellingly reported the Department of Industry and Commerce, “weaving forms part of a girl’s education and woman’s ordinary household duties. The family…is supplied in this manner, and the articles turned out are seldom offered for sale; when the surplus production is disposed of in the local market, the cost of the labour spent in the domestic occupation practiced during leisure hours is not taken into consideration in calculating the price.” The incomplete transition to capitalism, in fact, enabled the super-exploitation of members of households who could labor for less than the cost of their subsistence.33
Spinners and weavers also tried collectively to resist the destruction of their ancient industries—from the Black Forest to China to India—but their movements confronted the ever more concentrated power of imperial states allied closely with manufacturers. In the early nineteenth century, spinners in the Black Forest had set machinery ablaze. In 1860, spinners rioted in Guangzhou in response to waves of European imports.34 But states did not take kindly to such rebellions. A group of Indian weavers reported on tax collectors resorting to torture to force them to pay their taxes
by Binding up with chords and wood cut out for the purpose, the most delicate and private places, by placing stone on their head and backs; By making them to stand in the sun, by pinching the thighs and the ears, by pulling the whiskers, by tying the locks of one man to that of one another, by sealing the doors of Houses, by selling at Auction the Property of others which they obtained by force of arms, by the confinement of some of us, without allowing them to go to their means; by abusing and striking some, and abusing others and making use of violent and coercive means.35
Unrestrained violence did not just characterize the world of the slave plantation. Weavers understood the logic of this new political economy well, though they lacked the power to alter it: “Those who come to India from Europe…after having collected large fortunes, take the same to Europe, all which is obtained from our Labour, but we ourselves are left without means of support.”36
Despite individual resistance and collective protest, the overall trend was unwavering and ultimately devastating: around the globe millions of household cotton spinners and weavers lost their ability to spin and weave. In India alone, historian Tirthankar Roy concluded, “There is undeniable empirical evidence that the community of hand-spinners gave up spinning on a large scale, and this factor alone may account for a loss of industrial employment to the extent of 4–5 million persons.” Other historians have suggested that the loss of manufacturing between
1830 and 1860 amounted to between 2 and 6 million full-time jobs in India alone. The vast expansion of cotton manufacturing in Europe and the increasing orientation of large swaths of the global countryside toward the growing of cotton for export destabilized and even destroyed ancient cotton manufacturing—with devastating consequences for spinners, weavers, and rural cultivators alike.37
Life in much of the world’s cotton-growing countryside had always been difficult at best. A focus on growing cotton for export could, both theoretically and in fact, be beneficial to rural cultivators. Many peasants, as we have seen, profited from rising cotton prices during the American Civil War. Yet the radical recasting of ever larger swaths of the world’s countryside also had less positive consequences. Most crucially, it undermined food security. During the American Civil War, British officials in Ahmedabad, Haira, and Surat had reported that “the increasing area of land devoted to cultivation of Articles of Export, such as Cotton…[has led to a] proportionate decrease in cultivation of articles of food.” As a result, food prices rose between 1861 and 1865 by more than 325 percent, and even Sir Charles Trevelyan had to admit that “at the present high prices of food, the body of the people, in several parts of India, are barely able to subsist.” In Egypt, the situation was quite similar. Once a grain-exporting country, it became dependent on imports of food crops as the result of its greater dedication to cotton during the American Civil War. When in the summer of 1863 disease killed nearly all of Egypt’s cattle, a food crisis emerged in which tens of thousands of felaheen perished.38
The increasing world market orientation of cotton cultivators also had significant effects on social structures. Throughout western India’s Maharashtra, for example, British efforts to increase revenue and encourage peasants to participate in distant markets led to the undermining of the collective nature of villages, making individual peasants instead of villages as a whole responsible for taxes, and handing judicial power to distant courts instead of village-based and peasant-dominated tribunals. The market now increasingly subsumed all aspects of society, not just in Lancashire or Alsace, but in Berar and Lower Egypt as well. In Anatolia, “a large-scale transition to a cash-crop economy” took place in response to the cotton boom, with cotton replacing food crops, the abolition of feudal social relations in the countryside, and the financing of the crop by local merchants who charged peasants interest rates between 33 and 50 percent. In Egypt as well, the booming cotton export industry, according to historian Alan Richards, “destroyed the old quasi-communal forms of land tenure, broke up the protective web of village social relations, replaced them with private property in land and individual tax responsibility, and helped create four classes: large landowners…, rich peasants…, small peasant landowners, and a landless class.” As early as the 1840s, the government had begun compelling peasants to grow specific crops, including cotton, and to “deliver them to government warehouses.” Peasants had responded to this pressure by leaving the land in droves, which the government took as a reason to deny any claims to the land by those who had “deserted” it. By 1862, anyone who left the land for more than two months lost his claim to the property. In 1863, when Isma’il, Egypt’s new ruler, took power, he focused his efforts on creating large estates, giving land to relatives and officials in his government, and forcing peasants to work on infrastructure projects and on his own plantations. Resistance to such measures was violently repressed.39
The most serious impact on cotton farmers, however, emerged after the American Civil War. Once world market prices declined after the onset of the global depression of 1873, Indian, Egyptian, Brazilian, and American rural cultivators had a hard time making up for lost income, as falling prices made it ever more difficult to repay loans and make tax payments. The price for Surat cotton delivered in Liverpool between 1873 and 1876 fell by 38 percent. Cotton growers in Brazil, Egypt, India, the United States, and elsewhere, often highly indebted to local moneylenders, now faced plummeting returns on their cash crops. In India and Brazil, the problems were compounded by severe droughts that led to a rapid increase in food prices. Though historians disagree as to how much the fall in world market prices affected cotton growers, at the very least world market integration increased the economic uncertainty faced by people in remote corners of the world. Their incomes, and quite literally their survival, were now linked to global price fluctuations over which they had no control. All too often, the only response open to farmers with little control over the land was to grow more cotton to make up for lost income due to falling prices—which resulted in a glut of cotton that depressed prices even further.
What wage workers, tenants, and sharecroppers had in common was that they had lost access to subsistence agriculture—basic production and consumption now depended on global markets. While “cotton [was once] a subordinate product” and “the ryot [did] not neglect the raising of food for the sake of cotton, however high its price may be, for in doing so he runs the risk of starvation,” by the late nineteenth century millions of rural cultivators became primarily dependent on cotton. Moreover, as world market integration usually went along with social differentiation, a growing group of landless tenants and agricultural laborers periodically faced life-threatening difficulty in accessing food crops. In Africa, one author found that “cotton and food insecurity went hand in hand.” In La Laguna, Mexico, an unprecedented percentage of children suffered from malnutrition. In Argentina, misery characterized small cotton-growing farms.40
Between 1864 and 1873 the amount of cotton that a tenant or farmer had to produce to buy a given quantity of Berar’s most important food grain, jowar, doubled, and then it doubled again by 1878. Perhaps even more significant, the relative price of grains to cotton changed dramatically from year to year (changes of 20 percent or even 40 percent were not exceptional), introducing a new level of uncertainty into cotton growers’ precarious lives. As one historian of India has remarked, “Successful participation in markets requires economic autonomy and the capacity to take risks and sustain losses. Poor and indebted peasants had neither.” Contemporaries believed that this crisis was at least partly the result of the diversion of land and labor away from food crops and toward cotton. As the colonial government of India observed in 1874, “The more the area’s food stocks is diminished in favor of fibres, the greater the danger from any failure of the monsoon becomes, & the greater appears to be the necessity of some security against the consequences of such failure.” Indeed, cotton production for export typically produced a quagmire of poverty, debt, and underdevelopment well into the twentieth century. As H. E. Neguib Shakour Pasha, the director of the Gharbieh Land Company in Cairo, reminded his audience during a speech to the Congress of the International Federation of Master Cotton Spinners’ and Manufacturers’ Associations, “You have only to go to the villages and see the dwellings our people live in, their very small interest in life, their hard work from morning till evening without distractions would give you an idea as to how the Egyptian peasant lives his gloomy and uninteresting existence.”41
The causes of the uncertainties they faced often remained mysterious to rural cultivators themselves. The cotton commissioner for Berar, Harry Rivett-Carnac, reported in 1868 that “the great rise and then the sudden fall in the price of cotton, and the constant fluctuations in the market, by which the cultivator, in even the most remote of the cotton-growing villages is affected, has led some of the less intelligent to regard cotton not only with distrust, but with a certain degree of awe.” Traveling into the “more distant parts of the cotton-growing tracts of the Provinces,” he found people who were mystified as to why the price of cotton changed rapidly, as they “find some difficulty in realizing the present state of the trade, and the fact that, by means of the Electric Telegraph, the throbbings of the pulse of the Home markets communicate themselves instantly to Hingunghat and other trade centres throughout the country.” These cotton growers told Rivett-Carnac that they attributed such volatility to “luck,” “a
war,” the “kindness of a paternal Government,” or that the “the Queen had given every one in England new clothes” on the occasion of the crown prince’s wedding.42 These cultivators understood perfectly well that remote events over which they had no control now determined the most basic conditions of their existence.
This uncertainty could be life-threatening on a massive scale. In 1877 and again in the late 1890s, Berar, as well as northeastern Brazil, witnessed the starvation of millions of cultivators as cotton prices fell while food grain prices rose, putting food out of reach of many cotton producers. Specializing in cotton could result in disaster, as in the 1870s famine, which was not caused by a lack of food (indeed, food grains continued to be exported from Berar), but by the inability of the poorest agricultural laborers to buy urgently needed food grains. In India alone, between 6 and 10 million people died in the famines of the late 1870s. Observed one gazetteer, “Had Berar been an isolated tract dependent on its own resources, it is possible that in the plain taluks [British administrative units] there would have been no famine.” High prices had made food unavailable to many peasants and agricultural laborers, and during the 1900 famine, another 8.5 percent of the population of Berar died, with the greatest numbers of deaths occurring in districts most specialized in cotton production. Landless agricultural workers and former weavers in particular suffered, “for not only did they have to pay more for their food, but their wages are reduced from the competition” of workers from other regions. The British medical journal The Lancet estimated that famine death during the 1890s totaled 19 million, with fatalities concentrated in the tracts of India that had recently been recast to produce cotton for export. In the town of Risod, a contemporary observed that people “died like flies.”43