by Sven Beckert
Even before Togo’s cotton cultivation stagnated, German colonial authorities understood these forces well. They began to look to experiences elsewhere so as to learn how rural producers could be pressured to increase their production of cotton. Colonial Economic Committee member Karl Supf, aware of the tensions between subsistence and world market production, suggested that the goal of colonial policy should be “to bring the Natives into economic dependence upon us.” One way to do so, he suggested, was to increase local taxes and make them payable in cotton. Alternatively, the governor of Togo suggested in December 1903 that small sums of money, secured by future cotton harvests, be advanced to peasants to enable them to focus on cotton, as “an emphatic influence of the governmental agencies on the natives at least for a number of years is essential.” He thought the government should explicitly look for ways to “pressure those natives, who took on responsibilities by voluntarily accepting seeds, credit or advances or other support for cotton growing.” Yet despite their willingness to force cultivators, the Germans found old habits difficult to break, especially because the relatively weak presence of the German colonial state left the resilient social structure of rural producers, predicated on the continued access to plentiful land, largely untouched. Railroads, markets, and price guarantees were not sufficient to persuade growers to abandon subsistence agriculture.70
With efforts to involve rural cultivators in debt schemes faltering, and outright expropriation of land beyond the power of the colonial administration, other forms of coercion became more appealing. While cotton manufacturer Karl Supf recommended “slight pressure,” local colonial administrator Georg A. Schmidt suggested the need for “strong pressure” as the best way to increase cotton production. Colonialists systematically undermined markets by setting fixed prices that were completely detached from the world market price, compelling cultivators to bring their cotton to market in ways exactly prescribed by the colonial administration, eliminating middlemen, forcing certain cotton strains on producers, and, last but not least, extracting labor from peasants by force. Not only were roads, railways, and cotton gins built by forced labor, but colonial authorities also asserted ever tighter control over cotton production and the trade of raw cotton. Local government officials supervised the planting of cotton, tried to make sure that fields were regularly weeded, and secured a timely harvest. By 1911, for example, the German administration had created forty-seven authorized buying stations throughout the cotton-growing areas to make sure the sale of cotton occurred only under the watchful eyes of the government; at times, soldiers took on the task of purchasing cotton. A year later, in January 1912, the administration further ordered that every ginning or mercantile company send only government-licensed purchasers to markets. They also stipulated that sellers had to separate good- and poor-quality cotton at all times. By 1914, rules as to how cotton had to be treated were honed further and now included corporal punishment for indigenous growers who violated them. As time went by, force, violence, and coercion became ever more central to German policy.71
Such emphasis on coercion increasingly brought conflicts between the Tuskegee teachers and the German colonists. Most pointedly, Robinson believed in the importance of growing subsistence crops along with cotton. He advocated the joint development of cotton and food crops in “harmonious ways,” and his teachings reflected Washington’s concern that rural African Americans focused too much on the growing of cotton and too little on providing their own subsistence. In fact Robinson brought with him the memory of the defeated struggles of freedpeople in the United States. In an exceptionally wide-ranging letter, Robinson opined that “the source and life of all governments are its people, and the first duty of the government is to maintain this life and source. Consequently, the people are its first and Chief Concern. For that same reason we wish to teach the people cotton culture, because it is good for them, they will gain wealth thereby and the Colony grow richer.” “But,” Robinson continued, “the people cannot live by Cotton alone. Therefore we should begin now to teach them. Where they grow only maize we will teach them to grow more maize and better maize, and also Cotton. Where they grow now Yams and Cotton they must be shown how to grow larger Yams and finer Cotton.” To effect such a slow transition, Robinson believed, it was important not to coerce peasants and instead to involve them with “as little excitement and inconvenience” as possible. Robinson and his colleagues from Alabama, however, were increasingly ignored by the German colonial administration.72
Throughout Africa, indeed, coercion became an ever more powerful means of extracting cotton. In Côte d’Ivoire, peasants were forced to grow cotton in specially designated fields under the supervision of local colonial officials. In the Belgian Congo, by 1917 cotton production was made a “culture obligatoire” in which peasants were forced to grow certain amounts and to sell them at below market prices. Those who did not produce sufficient quantities were penalized. If work was not done according to expectations, severe punishments were meted out, including whippings. In the French Soudan, peasants were similarly forced to grow cotton. Peasants in Mozambique faced “sexual degradation and beatings…by which the government agent compelled people to produce cotton.” The regime of violence was so terrifying that as late as the 1970s, the word “cotton” still evoked, according to two historians, “an almost automatic response: suffering.”73
Yet in Togo, all these efforts yielded minimal results. After the peak year of 1909, Togo never produced more cotton while under German rule. The experiences of other colonial powers in many other parts of Africa were similar. Meanwhile, the German colonial authorities watched with envy the great expansion of cotton production in Central Asia and western India, where Russian and British colonialists had virtually recast local social structures to make them conducive to cash-crop production. To reorient an economy toward the world market in the absence of clear-cut economic incentives, social relations in the countryside had to be drastically recast—a process that usually took either several decades, as in India, or severe violence, as in the slavery-dominated societies of the American South, the West Indies, and Brazil. To be sure, Africans adapted rapidly to a new set of incentives, as (in a very different context) the pioneering efforts of Gold Coast peasants in the 1890s and 1900s to produce cocoa for world markets demonstrate. But in the absence of such incentives, the Germans in Togo could not wait long enough, nor did they have the administrative, economic, or military capacity to shorten the process. It was only during the 1920s, when France got to govern much of the territory of Togo, that world market production of cotton expanded significantly—three times between 1913 and 1938. But, tellingly, cotton production only truly took off after independence, and today Togo exports 84 million pounds of cotton, or seventy-five times as much as under German rule. Togo is still one of the world’s poorest countries.74
Forced cotton cultivation by peasants in the Belgian Congo, c. 1920
The venture of a small group of Tuskegee cotton experts in Togo speaks to a story much larger than itself. The encounter between African Americans one generation removed from slavery, German colonial authorities, and Togolese rural cultivators illuminates a vast recasting of the empire of cotton—and with it global capitalism—in the early twentieth century. Imperial states had taken on unprecedented importance in structuring global raw cotton markets: They secured huge swaths of territory on which cotton could be grown and they used their accumulated bureaucratic, infrastructural, and military might to mobilize cotton-growing labor. And such commitments were only one facet of policies that also included import duties, imperial preferences, and powerful national industrial policies. Within the empire of cotton, global networks had spread their geographic reach and intensified significantly. States shaped these networks, demonstrating how state formation and globalization were part and parcel of the same processes. States captured territories, facilitated their infrastructural incorporation, and mobilized workers to labor on this new land. Wherever we look�
��in the colonial world, in Russia, in the United States—the control of the cotton-growing countryside depended ever more on powerful nation-states and empires.
To be sure, imperial powers competed with one another over the control of territory, but in their search for ways to make potential cotton-growing lands serve the interests of metropolitan industries, people from all over the empire of cotton also tried to learn from each other’s experiences. French, Japanese, and British cotton interests, for example, observed the German activities in Togo closely; they sent delegates to meet with John Robinson. J. Arthur Hutton, the chairman of the British Cotton Growing Association, even saw German efforts in Togo as a model for African cotton growing. The French government now monitored cotton harvests globally and its consulate in Saint Petersburg reported in great detail on developments in Central Asian cotton, as did the German consulate. Though all these efforts were fundamentally about isolating national industries from the vagaries of the world market, they themselves formed part of a new global conversation on cotton. Cotton manufacturers’ shared interests in the transformation of the global countryside transcended national boundaries, resulting in the formation of an incipient transnational bourgeoisie during the period before World War I as manufacturers from a wide variety of countries met not just to discuss how to make rural cultivators in Egypt, India, or elsewhere grow more cotton, but also to take pleasure rides on the Nile or dance in the concert halls of Vienna.75
The lessons learned from the imperial recasting of the global cotton-growing countryside eventually spread, during the twentieth century, to the most unlikely places: the Soviet Union, independent India, and then to the People’s Republic of China. It was the Indian Central Cotton Committee, largely under Indian control, that finally succeeded in recasting Indian cotton agriculture to better suit the needs of its mills in the 1920s and beyond. Just as tellingly, in 1923 the cotton experts of the German Colonial Economic Committee, with the support of some of Germany’s major banks and cotton industrialists, became involved in Soviet Central Asia’s cotton industry. After having lost the German colonial empire, the object of their work, in World War I they hoped to find yet another source of cotton for German industry, while their Soviet partners eagerly read the publications that the Germans had produced before the war on colonial cotton and hoped to make use of German expertise. The orders that the Soviet cotton committee received in 1923 from the Council of Work and Defense in Moscow were almost identical to the many documents that colonial cotton bureaucrats had produced in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere.76
The revolutionary vanguard II: Azerbaijan, Soviet cotton production, 1937 (illustration credit 12.7)
One of the effects of this new political economy of strengthened imperial nation-states was the marginalization of areas once central to regional or even global networks of exchange and power.77 Nation-states everywhere now focused on their industrial cores and their attendant political economies, leaving little if any space for the political demands of the producers of agricultural commodities such as the planters in the American South had enjoyed before 1865. After the American Civil War, in fact, cotton growers throughout the world had become politically and economically marginalized—a new global periphery had emerged in which millions of farmers, sharecroppers, peasants, and agricultural laborers toiled to keep up industrial capitalism’s awe-inspiring advances, while themselves not sharing in them. The particular ways in which regions, countries, and even entire continents were integrated into this new industrial capitalism drastically sharpened global inequalities and cemented them through much of the twentieth century.
Yet despite the enormously more important role of nation-states and empires—a direct result of the overcoming of war capitalism—the cotton empire remained as global as ever. By 1910, for example, it included Indian merchants selling Ugandan cotton to Japan. Former American slaves advised German colonialists in Togo. An Indian from Madras, who had apprenticed in a German textile mill, now directed a cotton plantation in German East Africa. Texas farmers walked the Congolese countryside along with Egyptian agricultural experts to advise their Belgian hosts how to expand cotton production. Russian agricultural experts scouted the Indian, Egyptian, and U.S. countryside to study irrigation schemes. And Japanese agricultural bureaucrats carefully observed cotton agriculture in German West Africa. By 1913, E. R. Bartley Denniss, member of Parliament for the British cotton manufacturing town of Oldham, had concluded, quite perceptively, that the question of cotton supply had become “a world question. The cotton industry of the world is one which makes nations dependent upon one another more than any other industry that exists.”78
This new geography of global capitalism, so decisively constructed by European and North American states and capitalists, ironically would also bring to an end the more than one-hundred-year dominance of Europe and North America, the twin hubs of the empire of cotton. As the vast expansion of cotton agriculture fed the factories spreading throughout the world, the number of spindles that dotted the global countryside exploded. In 1865, 57 million spindles turned worldwide. By 1920 that number had increased to 155 million.79 Yet increasingly, these spindles and looms did not twist yarn and weave fabrics in the cities and countryside of western Europe and the northern United States, but in those of the global South.
Chapter Thirteen
The Return of the Global South
The rise of the South: cotton mill near Petropolis, Brazil, c. 1922 (illustration credit 13.1)
Sprawling along the shores of the river Sabarmati near India’s western coast, Ahmedabad today is a bustling metropolis of 6 million people. It is Gujarat’s most important city. But just a century and a half ago, it was still essentially a medieval town with “its old institutions…flourishing; the sarafs and mahajans…dominat[ing] trade and industry; the ancient crafts…the basis of its prosperity; and its imports and exports mov[ing] on pack animals along the narrow unpaved lanes, flanked by high, unpainted wooden houses, and through the guarded gates in its walls.” All that changed, however, with the unprecedented profits and productivity of a new wave of Indian cotton manufacturing. On May 30, 1861, Ranchhodlal Chhotalal ordered steam-powered spinning machines into motion for the first time in the city’s history. A few years earlier, the youthful Chhotalal had floated the idea of creating a spinning mill while working as a clerk in a government office. Inspired by the opening of cotton mills in Bombay, he understood that the new technology might radically recast India’s industry. Not discouraged by a general lack of enthusiasm among Ahmedabad’s commercial classes, he eventually found some merchants and bankers to back his venture. The novel machinery was ordered from Great Britain, complete with a team of British mechanics; after several months Chhotalal’s spinning machines arrived in a lurching processional of bullock carts.1
In May 1861, sixty-five Shapur Mill workers set twenty-five hundred spindles in motion. While this was but a hobby shop in size, even by contemporary Bombay standards, one fact made it a lighthouse of future investment: The factory was profitable right from the beginning. By early 1865 Chhotalal had hired an additional 235 workers and expanded the mill to ten thousand spindles, and also added one hundred power looms.2
Ahmedabad’s spectacular rise as one of the world’s prime cotton manufacturing locales was only partly due to these cutting-edge British machines. The new enterprises drew deeply from Ahmedabad’s long history in cottons. Local merchants, organized in guilds, had for many centuries engaged in the long-distance trade in cottons. Some had accumulated significant amounts of capital in the process, and when the British took over the city from the Marathas in 1818, those merchants continued to play a prominent role in local and long-distance trade. Even after British cotton yarns began to arrive in large quantities by the 1830s, displacing local handicraft manufacturers, many of these merchants incorporated foreign-made yarn into their operations, continuing to finance the domestic weaving sector.3
Despite Chhotalal’s early success and the region
’s cotton history, most of the merchants and traditional business classes of Ahmedabad remained reluctant to invest in further mills, content for the time being with high rates of return on moneylending. The transformative wave of cotton mill construction hit those shores only in the 1870s. By then, the deepening crisis in the export-dependent countryside made moneylending less certain, and capital-rich Ahmedadians turned to cotton manufacturing. The Jain merchants Masukhbhai and Jamnabhai Bhagubhai were the first members of Ahmedabad’s merchant class to take the plunge. In 1877, they opened the Gujarat Spinning and Weaving Company with 11,561 spindles and 209 looms. In quick order, other merchant families, increasingly shut out of transoceanic trade, followed suit. As in Europe a few decades earlier, old commercial capital was now reinvested in textile manufacturing, soon accounting for the vast majority of investments. And as in the Alsatian city of Mulhouse and elsewhere, these investors were tightly linked to one another. Vaishnav Vanias and Jains dominated the industry. Members of these castes institutionalized their social connections through organizations such as the Jain Conference and the Gujarat Vaishya Sabha, among whose leaders were the city’s mill owners.4 Thanks to the entrepreneurial capital of Ahmedabad’s merchants, by 1918, fifty-one cotton mills dotted the banks of the Sabarmati and thirty-five thousand laborers streamed each morning through their gates and toiled relentlessly to turn these investments into profits.