Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  Considering the size of the industry, German cotton industrialists understandably expressed a desire to secure an ample, regular, and inexpensive supply of raw cotton. From the beginnings of a German mechanized cotton industry that supply had largely come from the United States. However, the cotton shortages of the 1860s had indelibly etched in the minds of cotton industrialists and statesmen the danger of depending on the United States for raw cotton. Indian and Egyptian cotton did gain market share during the crisis, but by the 1880s and 1890s the United States again supplied—depending on the years—between 50 and 90 percent of cotton to the German industry.32 Such overwhelming market dominance worried cotton interests. By late century, these concerns sharpened as German cotton importers realized that new, competing low-cost manufacturers were emerging in places such as Japan, the southern United States, and Mexico.

  German manufacturers and statesmen could do little to alter this situation before their creation of a colonial empire in the 1880s. Once Germany acquired colonies in Africa and the South Seas, however, new ways of solving the “cotton question” emerged. Interest in African cotton reached fever pitch at the turn of the century, when cotton industrialists spoke of a global “Baumwollkulturkampf”—a “cotton-growing struggle.” Following these concerns, in 1896 these manufacturers created the Colonial Economic Committee (Kolonial-Wirtschaftliches Komitee), an organization devoted to utilizing colonies as a source of raw materials for home industries. More than four hundred German cotton industrialists contributed funds to its operation.33

  Four factors spurred cotton industrialists’ interest in raw cotton production in German colonies. They were deeply concerned about the rise in cotton prices at century’s end, which more than doubled between 1898 and 1904. German industrialists argued that the ever greater use of cotton by the two major growing countries, the United States and India, was the root cause of such increases, which they saw as permanent. Most dramatically, the United States had used only about 20 percent of its home-grown cotton in its own factories before the Civil War, yet by the 1870s that proportion had grown to around 33 percent and to nearly 50 percent after 1900. Moreover, like many American industrialists and landowners, German manufacturers feared that the United States lacked sufficient cheap labor to plant, prune, and harvest all the additional cotton now required on global markets. Labor shortages, they argued, would eventually limit the expansion of American cotton agriculture. The cotton market remained volatile, and these price fluctuations made it difficult to plan profitable production. Colonial cotton, in contrast, promised to ensure stable and low prices, and as an added benefit could prevent a repeat of the market disruption they had experienced during the cotton famine of the 1860s.34

  With that scarcity in mind, manufacturers feared that demand for U.S. cotton by newly emerging manufacturing nations, especially Japan, would further diminish their supplies. And in a strategic move meant to secure broad political support for their agenda, cotton manufacturers argued that a prosperous cotton industry was essential to combatting working-class upheaval. Karl Supf invoked the terrible social effects of the American Civil War, and concluded that “it [was] obvious that a crisis…in the cotton industry would include a social danger whose results are unpredictable.” Even the generally anticolonial Social Democrats expressed their hope that colonial cotton would break the “cotton monopoly” of the United States. The fantastic plan of these cotton industrialists was to grow cotton for German manufacturers on German-controlled soil under German supervision—in fact, to become more like their American and Russian competitors.35

  With these arguments, cotton industrialists moved boldly into Germany’s public arena. Their interests intersected with those of powerful statesmen and bureaucrats who argued that securing colonial cotton was of great geostrategic importance. As the scholar, engineer, and Africa expert Ernst K. Henrici observed in 1899, “In the great economic competition among peoples, mass production and mass consumption are becoming central. Our colonies, if they should be of real benefit to the mother country, need to aspire towards delivering great quantities of raw materials, so that they can in turn purchase great quantities of the industrial products of the motherland.” Only colonial cotton production, argued economist Karl Helfferich, could break the “economic rule of America over the European cotton industry.” Colonial cotton, in short, was the only way to resist “American rape.”36

  Colonial cotton symbolized the new symbiosis of a powerful nation-state with powerful national industries. This symbiosis in fact characterized a new form of global capitalism centered on the strengthening of national capital in rival capitalist nations.37

  Cotton growing was important to European expansion in Africa from its very beginning, just as Africa had provided much of the labor that had enabled cotton industrialization since the 1780s. For example, in 1888—only four years after its African explorations had begun—Germany embarked upon its first systematic trials of growing cotton for world markets on the African continent. In May 1890, a Samoan cotton planter, Ferdinand Goldberg, arrived in the German colony of Togo to investigate the possibilities of cotton growing there. While his experiment failed, in 1900, as we will see, the German imperial government made another effort, recruiting cotton farmers from Alabama to go to Togo and expand its cotton agriculture. At the same time, colonial bureaucrats and cotton manufacturers built huge cotton plantations in German East Africa. In 1907, German textile industrialists Heinrich and Fritz Otto opened a cotton farm in Kilossa; three years later, about a thousand workers cultivated cotton on a full 37,065 acres. Soon the Ottos were joined by the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei and by manufacturer Hermann Schubert from Zittau in Saxony.38

  French cotton manufacturers and colonial bureaucrats made similar efforts. In the French Soudan, in Côte d’Ivoire, and in French Equatorial Africa, colonial penetration went hand in hand with an effort to secure cotton—the French minister of colonies studied the prospects for colonial cotton in great detail. African cotton exports to France at first only supplied a very small percentage of the cotton used by the French industry, but they increased rapidly. Côte d’Ivoire, for example, supplied next to no cotton in 1912, but more than 4.4 million pounds in 1925. In other colonies, similar developments occurred. Portuguese colonialists in Mozambique began their first cotton-growing experiments in 1901, an effort that produced 6 million pounds by 1928. The Belgians had begun their first tentative cotton-growing efforts in the Congo territory in 1890, yet production only exploded in the 1920s, and at a cost of tremendous violence. In 1920, rural cultivators produced 3.4 million pounds of cotton in the Belgian Congo, 98.8 million pounds in 1931, and 312 million pounds in 1941. This was a respectable amount, equaling about 15 percent of the production of the United States before the Civil War, when King Cotton reigned supreme.39

  The British, however, undertook the most significant effort to grow cotton in Africa. By 1913, 74 percent of all cotton exported from Africa to Europe came out of British colonies. In the eyes of the British Cotton Growing Association, no other part of the world had “larger latent possibilities than our West African possessions,” with plenty of land and labor available. As Africa’s people could no longer be sold to the Americas, Europeans concluded that they might profitably be encouraged or compelled to grow agricultural commodities for world markets at home. Altogether, Africa exported more than 2.315 billion pounds of cotton in 1930, a little more than the United States in the year before the Civil War.40

  Taken together, between 1860 and 1920, 55 million acres of land in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, at the very least, were newly planted with cotton for world markets—an area larger than that of Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and New York combined. Approximately 80 percent of all that new cotton-growing land was situated in territories that had not grown cotton in 1860, the vast majority of which had come under the effective control of colonial powers only during those years. Indeed, by 1905, cotton experts estimated, a full
15 million people, or about 1 percent of the world’s population, were engaged in the growing of cotton. Imperial expansion and the production of ever more cotton for world markets were inextricably linked.41

  With the territorial scope of the cotton empire spreading on the wings of powerful imperial states, the struggles over labor mobilization spread as well. Territory alone never sufficed. Indeed, the core question that continued to face these states was the same as it had been in 1865, upon the emancipation of cotton workers in the United States: how to motivate rural cultivators to grow cotton for world markets—that is, how to effect the transformation of the countryside. As the French Association Cotonnière Coloniale put it, it was easy to secure land, but that land “needs arms, labor.”42

  No colonial ruler followed the example of the United States, which had made cotton-growing territories available by removing the native peoples who had dwelled on those lands for centuries. Native peoples in places such as the Çukurova, Central Asia, Egypt, and East Africa were certainly also forced to abandon their use of the land to make space for cotton—a wave of expropriation that accompanied the geographic spread of cotton agriculture in particular, and capitalism in general. Yet colonial governments and strengthening nation-states usually tried to integrate these rural cultivators into the cotton-growing complex. Instead of displacing them, colonizers drew upon their labor in three distinct ways. In some settings, such as India, Central Asia, and western Africa, cotton continued to be produced by indigenous farmers and sold to Western merchants. In other parts of the world, labor was mobilized by settling formerly nomadic people. This was the case, as we will see, in Central Asia, and in the Çukurova, where nomadic groups who for centuries had herded their animals on these plains were settled so as to make space for Anatolia’s most significant cotton-growing complex. In yet other areas, settlers from elsewhere came to organize cotton growing by indigenous people on plantations, such as in Algeria and German East Africa, but also in parts of Mexico and Argentina.43

  No matter which strategy colonial bureaucrats and capitalists employed, eventually the push toward commercial cotton agriculture, as we have seen elsewhere in the cotton countryside, permanently recast social structures. Russian Central Asia provides one example for such a shift. Before Russian occupation, Central Asians grew cotton, spun yarn, and wove cloth, using some for their own needs and exporting the rest to distant markets. Indeed, throughout Central Asia, cotton and cotton products were the most significant industry. Caravans of up to five thousand camels traversed the steppes between the Central Asian khanates and Russia carrying cotton cloth and yarn. The raw cotton for this thriving industry was harvested on small family farms as one crop among many, often sharing the same field with rows of wheat. Most of the cotton grown by family labor was used for the production of textiles within the household, while local merchants bought small quantities to be worked up for trade in more distant markets.44

  Central Asia was thus a source of manufactured cotton textiles for Russia. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, after Russia captured these territories, it became, as we have seen, a supplier of raw cotton for the factories in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and a market for Russian cotton cloth. To effect that transition, Russian entrepreneurs and colonial bureaucrats rapidly and radically reshaped the cotton-growing countryside. At first, as elsewhere in the empire of cotton, metropolitan merchants and agents of Russian textile firms arrived, purchasing cotton from small farmers and providing them with credit, enabling them to specialize in a nonedible crop. Once cotton exports expanded, these firms increasingly specialized in exporting the crop to metropolitan Russia, and an indigenous capitalist class emerged to deal with the myriad peasant producers, a development roughly parallel to what was unfolding in the southern United States and in India. They provided essential working capital to small farmers, typically charging interest of between 40 and 60 percent annually, though rates of more than 100 percent were not unknown. Such exorbitant interest rates, combined with one or two poor harvests or a price downturn, usually sufficed to make peasants entirely dependent on these advancing merchants even when they did not lose outright control over the land.45

  By the 1880s, Russian entrepreneurs set out to create large cotton plantations to supplement the cotton grown by small farmers. These plantations, however, quickly failed due to labor shortages. As elsewhere, rural cultivators were reluctant to work for wages and instead preferred to work their own or rented land. As one German observer remarked, “There are only a few propertyless, who can be considered for this kind of work. Landless natives prefer to cultivate on their own account small rented fields. For these reasons, the sowing of cotton on large plantations occurs too late in the season…. Entrepreneurs, who own large plantations, find themselves forced to rent them in small units to the natives, under the condition that all cotton grown is to be delivered to the landlord.”46

  As a result of both the inability to mobilize sufficient numbers of workers for large cotton plantations and the tenuous situation of owner-occupiers, a system of sharecropping increasingly emerged, akin to the one prevailing in the U.S. South. The German consul in Saint Petersburg remarked on these changing social relations in 1909, noting that “more and more of the land of long-settled planters is being absorbed by capital-rich merchants; the former owners of the soil in many cases continue to work their former properties as renters of the purchasers of the land.” As a result of the crisis of owner-occupiers, middlemen acquired large tracts of land, while the refusal of these landless rural cultivators to work for wages on plantations forced landowners to employ them as sharecroppers. The class structure of this portion of the cotton zone, as elsewhere, changed significantly in the course of a few decades, with the emergence of a large group of indebted farmers and landless agricultural workers.47

  Sharecropping, however, was often just a way station on a path toward wage labor. An ever larger number of cultivators eventually became hired laborers, despite their preferences, as a result of a large wave of expropriation that swept the cotton-growing countryside. Small farmers, highly indebted, lost access to the land and thus were left with few options but to sell their labor. In the cotton district of Fergana, there were approximately two hundred thousand landless workers by 1910. By 1914, 25 to 30 percent of the Fergana population was landless, as the Central Asian countryside, thanks to the determined actions of the Russian state and its cotton capitalists, came to resemble that of the American South. In addition, many of the nomads of Turkestan, losing land and access to fodder crops for their animals, were now forced to settle and make themselves available as agricultural laborers. Globalization once more fixed people to particular places, particularly those places that were not their own, while divorcing them from control over agricultural resources.48

  “The second hilling of cotton with native hoes”: Central Asian cotton growers, 1913 (illustration credit 12.4)

  This drastic recasting of Central Asian economies opened up new markets for Russian cotton manufacturers, and by 1889 a British traveler observed that “money…is being taken from the pockets of Bombay and Manchester, and transferred to the pockets of Nijni Novgorod and Moscow.” This escalating focus on cotton growing, as elsewhere, had a grave impact on food security. Like other cotton-growing areas of the world, Central Asia now became dependent on food imports, while at the same time peasants’ income became “highly vulnerable to fluctuations in” the cotton market. By World War I, the recast class structure, along with a huge deficit in food crops thanks to the reorientation of local agriculture toward cash crops, produced terrible famines, resulting in significant depopulation. In Turkestan, for example, the population fell by 1.3 million people, or 18.5 percent, between 1914 and 1921.49

  As states’ efforts to control territories by administrative, infrastructural, legal, and military means sharpened along with their capabilities and resources, the question of how precisely to mobilize cotton-growing labor remained prominent. Exper
tise was in high demand. The surprising, even unlikely story, of how a small group of African Americans, the descendants of slaves, came to play an important role in the efforts by German colonists to recast cotton agriculture in Togo illustrates both the efforts to access colonial sources of cotton for national industries and the ongoing struggle to find cotton-growing labor.

  It was a stormy November morning in 1900 when the Graf Waldersee steamed out of the port of New York for its journey across the Atlantic to the German city of Hamburg. Among the more than two thousand travelers who glanced one last time at the receding steeples of Trinity Church, the towering Manhattan Life Insurance Building, and the Statue of Liberty, four passengers stood out: James N. Calloway, John Robinson, Allen Burks, and Shepard Harris. All were the sons of slaves, from Alabama, and connected to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Industrial and Normal Institute. Calloway was a teacher, and Robinson, Burks, and Harris were students or recent graduates. Perhaps even more remarkable was their mission: They had boarded the Graf Waldersee that morning as part of a journey that was to bring them to new jobs in a faraway land—the German colony of Togo, a sliver of West Africa that the Germans had acquired in 1884. In the ancient homeland of the Ewe, these African Americans were to instruct the German colonialists and their subjects on how to grow cotton for export, “to determine the possibility of a rational cotton culture as a native culture, and…to show the marketability of the product for German industry.50