Empire of Cotton
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10. Report of the Select Committee of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, Upon the Subject of the Cotton Manufacture of this Country, 1793, Home Miscellaneous Series, 401, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London.
11. “Objections to the Annexed Plan,” November 10, 1790, Home Miscellaneous Series, 434, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London.
12. See for example Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 75, 82–83; Ellison, The Cotton Trade, 28, 84; East-India Company, Reports and Documents Connected with the Proceedings of the East-India Company in Regard to the Culture and Manufacture of Cotton-Wool, Raw Silk, and Indigo in India (London: East-India Company, 1836); Copy of letter by George Smith to Charles Earl Cornwallis, Calcutta, October 26, 1789, in Home Miscellaneous Series, 434, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London; Various Copies of Letters Copied into a Book relating to Cotton, 729–54, in Home Miscellaneous Series, 374, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library.
13. On the long history of cotton in the Caribbean see David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change Since 1492 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 158–59, 183, 194, 296; Charles Mackenzie, Facts, Relative to the Present State of the British Cotton Colonies and to the Connection of their Interests (Edinburgh: James Clarke, 1811); Daniel McKinnen, A Tour Through the British West Indies, in the Years 1802 and 1803: Giving a Particular Account of the Bahama Islands (London: White, 1804); George F. Tyson Jr., “On the Periphery of the Peripheries: The Cotton Plantations of St. Croix, Danish West Indies, 1735–1815,” Journal of Caribbean History 26, no. 1 (1992): 3, 6–8; “Tableau de Commerce, &c. de St. Domingue,” in Bryan Edwards, An Historical Survey of the Island of Saint Domingo (London: Printed for John Stockdale, 1801), 230–31.
14. “Report from the Select Committee on the Commercial State of the West India Colonies,” in Great Britain, House of Commons, Sessional Papers, 1807, III (65), pp. 73–78, as quoted in Ragatz, Statistics, 22; Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 250; Selwyn H. H. Carrington, The British West Indies During the American Revolution (Dordrecht: Foris, 1988), 31; “An Account of all Cotton Wool of the Growth of the British Empire Imported annually into that part of Great Britain Called England,” National Archives of the UK, Kew, Treasury Department, T 64/275, in the chart on page 90. The numbers (totals, and details for 1786) in the chart on page 90 are from Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 347.
15. “Report from the Select Committee on the Commercial State of the West India Colonies,” in Great Britain, House of Commons, Sessional Papers, 1807, III (65), pp. 73–78, as quoted in Lowell J. Ragatz, Statistics for the Study of British Caribbean Economic History, 1763–1833 (London: Bryan Edwards Press, 1928), 22; Lowell J. Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833: A Study in Social and Economic History (New York: Century Co., 1928), 38; M. Placide-Justin, Histoire politique et statistique de l’île d’Hayti, Saint-Domingue; écrite sur des documents officiels et des notes communiquées par Sir James Barskett, agent du gouvernement britannique dans les Antilles (Paris: Brière, 1826), 501. On “coton des isles” see Robert Lévy, Histoire économique de l’industrie cotonnière en Alsace (Paris: F. Alcan, 1912), 56; Nathan Hall to John King, Nassau, May 27, 1800, Box 15, CO 23, National Archives of the UK, Kew.
16. Robert H. Schomburgk, The History of Barbados: Comprising a Geographical and Statistical Description of the Island; a Sketch of the Historical Events Since the Settlement; and an Account of Its Geology and Natural Productions (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848), 640; Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 79; Selwyn Carrington, “The American Revolution and the British West Indies Economy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (1987): 841–42; Edward N. Rappaport and José Fernandez-Partagas, “The Deadliest Atlantic Tropical Cyclones, 1492–1996,” National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service, May 28, 1995, accessed August 6, 2010, http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdeadly.shtml; Ragatz, Statistics, 15; S. G. Stephens, “Cotton Growing in the West Indies During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Tropical Agriculture 21 (February 1944): 23–29; Wallace Brown, The Good Americans: The Loyalists in the American Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1969), 2; Gail Saunders, Bahamian Loyalists and Their Slaves (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1983), 37.
17. David Eltis, “The Slave Economies of the Caribbean: Structure, Performance, Evolution and Significance,” in Franklin W. Knight, ed., General History of the Caribbean, vol. 3, The Slave Societies of the Caribbean (London: Unesco Publishing, 1997), 113, Table 3:1. On production see Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 79. On French demand and reexports from European French ports see Jean Tarrade, Le commerce colonial de la France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 748–49, 753. I assumed that most of the colonial cotton reexported from France went to Great Britain.
18. In 1790, there were 705 cotton plantations on the island, compared to 792 sugar plantations. Edwards, An Historical Survey, 163–65, 230, 231. On Saint-Domingue cotton production see also Schomburgk, The History of Barbados, 150; Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class, 39, 125; David Eltis et al., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-Rom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Tarrade, Le commerce colonial, 759.
19. Stefano Fenoaltea, “Slavery and Supervision in Comparative Perspective: A Model,” Journal of Economic History 44 (September 1984): 635–68.
20. Moore, “Sugar,” 412, 428.
21. Resat Kasaba, “Incorporation of the Ottoman Empire,” Review 10, Supplement (Summer/Fall 1987): 827.
22. Transactions of the Society Instituted at London for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce 1 (London: Dodsley, 1783), 254; Ellison, The Cotton Trade, 28; Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 77; Governor Orde to Lord Sydney, Roseau, Dominica, June 13, 1786, in Colonial Office, 71/10, National Archives of the UK; President Lucas to Lord Sydney, Granada, June 9, 1786, Dispatches Granada, Colonial Office, 101/26; Governor D. Parry to Lord Sydney, Barbados, May 31, 1786, Dispatches Barbados, Colonial Office, 28/60, National Archives of the UK; President Brown to Sydney, New Providence, 23 February 1786, in Dispatches Bahamas, Colonial Office 23/15, National Archives of the UK. On the pressure by manufacturers see also Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 75–76; Governor Orde to Lord Sydney, Rouseau, Dominica, March 30, 1788, National Archives of the UK.
23. The role of slavery in the history of capitalism has been the subject of many debates, and is ably summarized by Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (New York: Verso, 1997), 509–80. See also the important article by Ronald Bailey, “The Other Side of Slavery: Black Labor, Cotton, and Textile Industrialization in Great Britain and the United States,” Agricultural History 68 (Spring 1994): 35–50; Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 9. The notion of “second slavery” is from Dale Tomich and Michael Zeuske, “The Second Slavery: Mass Slavery, World-Economy, and Comparative Microhistories,” Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 31, no. 3 (2008). Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch argues that this expansion of slavery in the Americas also led to a “second slavery” in Africa. See Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “African Slaves and Atlantic Metissage: A Periodization 1400–1880,” paper presented at “2nd Slaveries and the Atlantization of the Americas” colloquium, University of Cologne, July 2012; Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org, accessed January 31, 2013.
24. Alan H. Adamson, Sugar Without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838–1904 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 24; Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 288.
25. See for example, Roger Hunt, Observa
tions Upon Brazilian Cotton Wool, for the Information of the Planter and With a View to Its Improvement (London: Steel, 1808), 3; Morris R. Chew, History of the Kingdom of Cotton and Cotton Statistics of the World (New Orleans: W. B. Stansbury & Co., 1889), 28; John C. Branner, Cotton in the Empire of Brazil: The Antiquity, Methods and Extent of Its Cultivation; Together with Statistics of Exportation and Home Consumption (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1885), 9, 46; Celso Furtado, The Economic Growth of Brazil: A Survey from Colonial to Modern Times (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), 97; Caio Prado, The Colonial Background of Modern Brazil (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 171–73, cited on 458; Luiz Cordelio Barbosa, “Cotton in 19th Century Brazil: Dependency and Development” (PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 1989), 31; Francisco de Assis Leal Mesquita, “Vida e morte da economia algodoeira do Maranhão, uma análise das relações de produção na cultura do algodão, 1850–1890” (PhD dissertation, Universidade Federal do Maranhão, 1987), 50.
26. Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 99; William Milburn, Oriental Commerce: Containing a Geographical Description of the Principal Places in the East Indies, China, and Japan, With Their Produce, Manufactures, and Trade (London: Black, Parry & Co., 1813), 281; Mesquita, “Vida e morte,” 63; Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 83.
27. John Tarleton to Clayton Tarleton, St. James’s Hotel, February 5, 1788, 920 TAR, Box 4, Letter 5, Tarleton Papers, Liverpool Records Office, Liverpool. For cotton merchants owning a plantation see Sandbach, Tinne & Co. Papers, Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool. For cotton merchants trading in slaves see John Tarleton to Clayton Tarleton, April 29, 1790, letter 8, 4, 920 TAR, Tarleton Papers, Liverpool Records Office; Annual Profit and Loss Accounts of John Tarleton, 920 TAR, Box 2 and Box 5, Liverpool Records Office.
28. In 1820, 873,312 acres of land were needed to cultivate the cotton consumed by British industry, which would have taken up 7.8 percent of Britain’s arable land and employed 198,738 agricultural laborers. The amount of cotton consumed in 1840 required 3,273,414 acres of land, which would have taken up 29 percent of British arable land and 544,066 agricultural laborers. Cotton consumption in 1820 (152,829,633 pounds according to Mann, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain, 93–4) divided by 1820 yield per acre (175 pounds according to Whartenby, “Land and Labor Productivity,” 54); 1820 required cotton acreage (873,312 acres) as a share of 1827 arable land (11,143,370 acres). Figure for arable land taken from Rowland E. Prothero, English Farming Past and Present (New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1972 [1st ed. London, 1917]), [(“Table 2.–1827”) and Select Committee on Emigration, 1827. Evidence of Mr. W. Couling. Sessional Papers, 1827, vol. v., p. 361]. 1840 cotton consumption (592,488,010 pounds according to Mann, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain, 94) divided by 1840 yield per acre (181 pounds according to Whartenby, “Land and Labor Productivity,” 54). Cotton consumption in 1860 (1,140,599,712 pounds) divided by 1840 yield of cotton per acre in the United States (181 pounds). And 1860 cotton consumption divided by 1840 yield per worker (1,089 pounds) in the United States. See also Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 276, 315. Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 75. The resistance to change in the European agricultural system is also emphasized by Philip McMichael, “Slavery in Capitalism: The Rise and Demise of the U.S. Ante-Bellum Cotton Culture,” Theory and Society 20 (June 1991): 326. For discussion of the great divergence see also David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technical Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: Norton, 1998); Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (New York: Penguin, 2011); Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1998). For an overview see also Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England, chapter 2.
29. This is also argued for the West Indies by Ragatz, Statistics, 10, 370. On the importance of sugar as a competitor to cotton see Imperial Department of Agriculture for the West Indies, Information Relating to Cotton Cultivation in the West Indies (Barbados: Commissioner of Agriculture for the West Indies, 1903). Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 79, 250. Luiz Cordelio Barbosa, “Cotton in 19th Century Brazil: Dependency and Development” (PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 1989), 170; James Mann, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1860), 79, 80, 86; DB 176, Sandbach, Tinne & Co. Papers, Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool.
30. Edensor, An Address to the Spinners and Manufacturers of Cotton Wool, 14, 21–3; Franklin, The Present State of Hayti (St. Domingo), with Remarks on Its Agriculture, Commerce, Laws, Religion, Finances, and Population, etc. (London: J. Murray, 1828), 123; Pennsylvania Gazette, June 13, 1792.
31. John Tarleton to Clayton Tarleton, September 27, 1792, letter 33, February 4, 1795, letter 75, 920 TAR, Tarleton Papers, Liverpool Records Office, Liverpool. See also Orhan Kurmus, “The Cotton Famine and Its Effects on the Ottoman Empire,” Huri Islamoglu-Inan, ed., The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 16; Brian R. Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 490. On rising prices see also Stanley Dumbell, “Early Liverpool Cotton Imports and the Organisation of the Cotton Market in the Eighteenth Century,” Economic Journal 33 (September 1923): 370; Emily A. Rathbone, ed., Records of the Rathbone Family (Edinburgh: R. & R. Clark, 1913), 47; Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 88.
32. Tench Coxe, A Memoir of February, 1817, Upon the Subject of the Cotton Wool Cultivation, the Cotton Trade and the Cotton Manufactories of the United States of America (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of American Manufactures, 1817).
CHAPTER FIVE: SLAVERY TAKES COMMAND
1. Petition, To the Right Honorable the Lords of His Majesty’s Privy Council for Trade and Foreign Plantations, December 8, 1785, in Board of Trade, National Archives of the UK, Kew. Other sources speak of a similar incident in 1784. See for example Morris R. Chew, History of the Kingdom of Cotton and Cotton Statistics of the World (New Orleans: W. B. Stansbury & Co., 1884), 37.
2. See, for example, Ernst von Halle, Baumwollproduktion und Pflanzungswirtschaft in den Nordamerikanischen Südstaaten, part 1, Die Sklavenzeit (Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker & Humblot, 1897), 16–17; Jay Treaty, Article XII; Thomas Ellison, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain (London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, 1886), 85; Chew, History of the Kingdom of Cotton, 45.
3. Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 1978), 14; Chew, History of the Kingdom of Cotton, 39; George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, February 13, 1789, reprinted in Jared Sparks, The Writings of George Washington, vol. 9 (Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Metcalf & Hilliard, Gray, and Co., 1835), 470; Tench Coxe, A Memoir of February 1817, Upon the Subject of the Cotton Wool Cultivation, the Cotton Trade, and the Cotton Manufactories of the United States of America (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of American Manufactures, 1817), 2; on Coxe in general see James A. B. Scherer, Cotton as a World Power: A Study in the Economic Interpretation of History (New York: F. A. Stokes Co., 1916), 122–23; Tench Coxe, View of the United States of America (Philadelphia: William Hall, 1794), 20; Michael M. Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 1780–1815 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 87; Tench Coxe to Robert Livingston, June 10, 1802, in Papers of Tench Coxe, Correspondence and General Papers, June 1802, Film A 201, reel 74, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
4. “Cotton. Cultivation, manufacture, and foreign trade
of. Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury,” March 4, 1836 (Washington, DC: Blair & Rives, 1836), 8, accessed July 29, 2013, http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011159609.
5. Joyce Chaplin, “Creating a Cotton South in Georgia and South Carolina, 1760–1815,” Journal of Southern History 57 (May 1991): 178; Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1933), 673; Chew, History of the Kingdom of Cotton, 36, 41; on the household production of cotton and cotton cloth see also Scherer, Cotton as a World Power, 124–25; Ralph Izard to Henry Laurens, Bath, December 20, 1775, as reprinted in Correspondence of Mr. Ralph Izard of South Carolina, From the Year 1774 to 1804; With a Short Memoir (New York: Charles S. Francis & Co., 1844), 174, see also 16, 82, 246, 296, 300, 370, 386, 390.
6. John Hebron Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest: Mississippi, 1770–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 77; Chaplin, “Creating a Cotton South,” 177, 188, 193.
7. Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 80, 85; Chew, History of the Kingdom of Cotton, 40. However, there was and continues to be substantial controversy as to who planted the first cotton. See Nichol Turnbull, “The Beginning of Cotton Cultivation in Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 2, no. 1 (March 1917): 39–45; Gray, History of Agriculture, 675–79; S. G. Stephen, “The Origins of Sea Island Cotton,” Agricultural History 50 (1976): 391–99; Trapman, Schmidt & Co. to McConnel & Kennedy, Charleston, January 3, 1824, record group MCK, Box 2/1/30, Letters Received by McConnel & Kennedy, Papers of McConnel & Kennedy, John Rylands Library, Manchester.
8. “La Rapida Transformacion del Paisaje Viorgen de Guantanamo por los immigrantes Franceses (1802–1809),” in Levi Marrero, Cuba: Economía y sociedad, vol. 11, Azúcar, ilustración y conciencia, 1763–1868 (Madrid: Editorial Playor, 1983), 148; Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom, 4; Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 92; Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 12.