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Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2015)

Yi Yu Fu & Arthur Hamilton

 

The story of cotton as a commodity is tied to the story of capitalism. Cotton, a plant native to every continent except Europe, became dominated by European states and European modes of production in the nineteenth century. To understand why this happened and the story of cotton as a commodity, Sven Beckert guides us through cotton’s commodity chain and how it changed through time. For cotton’s history until the 1860s Beckert identifies three distinct periods: an early regionalized period, a transitory middle period where European war capitalism pulled cotton trade toward Europe, and a final period in which states that can be characterized as peripheral provided raw cotton for a European industrial center. Each of these periods saw changes in the geography of cotton as well as the mode of labor manufacturers chose to produce and transform cotton. Through it all, varying degrees of coercion were central to securing labor for both the growing of cotton and the manufacture of cotton textiles. 

 

The manufacture of cotton textiles in all periods required the following process: the cotton plant must be grown and harvested, the seeds must be removed from the raw cotton, the raw cotton must be beaten or spun into thread, the thread must be then weaved into fabric (4). In the first period, 2000 BCE to 1600 CE, the whole process occurred locally, meaning the spread of cotton as a commodity was limited to the plant’s natural growth zone (58). The earliest evidence of humans spinning cotton fibers into thread is from approximately five thousand years ago in India (6). The plant would also be cultivated in Mesoamerica, the Andes, Africa, the Middle East, and China before 1600 (12-13). Up to this point, imports of cotton from the Ottoman Empire supplied Europe with the small amounts of cotton textiles that a continent predominantly used to wool clothing demanded (11).


In the second period, 1600 to 1780, European war capitalism, a system in which European states and companies used violence to seize control of commodity chains in the Americas and Asia, allowed increased European control of

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Changes in spatial arrangements between the growers, manufacturers, and consumers of cotton in the world.

international cotton markets (30). Although in new cotton-producing zones, such as the Caribbean, “cotton remained a marginal crop compared to sugar,” some planters began using the labor of African slaves to grow the “white gold,” which had been grown in the Americas for thousands of years before European arrival (41). While plantations began growing cotton in the Americas, European states and trade companies, such as the British East India Company, began injecting themselves into the traditional heart of cotton production in India. From its trading posts in Dhaka, the British East India Company competed with Indian traders in developing a “factory” system for cotton exports (39). Unlike in the first period, under war capitalism some of the cotton cultivated in the America’s or India began to be shipped to Europe, in particular Britain, for spinning and weaving. Although Britain had not yet developed an industrial mode of production for cotton textiles, the so-called putting-out system facilitated the creation of cotton textiles from imported raw cotton, picked for seeds but not spun (57). Despite the best efforts of European capitalists, supported by mercantilist states that used tariffs to protect domestic industry, the largest cotton markets remained in India and China beyond the control of Europeans (92).

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The system of war capitalism created before 1780 gave European capitalists the ability to further reshape cotton commodity chains at the dawn of the industrial era. In the third period, 1780 to 1860, an industrial mode of production, first using water power and later steam power, used new technologies such as the spinning jenny and the power loom to exponentially increase the efficiency of the spinning and weaving processes (152). This new industrial capability was met with technological innovation in the picking process as well, with Eli Whitney’s cotton gin dramatically reducing the cost of the historically painstaking process of picking seeds from the cotton (102-103). However, it was not the inventors of these machines who drove industrial capitalism, it was the individuals who harvested the cotton, drove the cotton gin, and worked the power looms.

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 Cotton imports into Great Britain, annual averages, in percent, by country of origin


The creation of this industrial cotton system revitalized slavery in the United States, as cotton became the staple commodity of the American South. Slavery and cotton growing became so intricately connected that a contribution to the American Cotton Planter in 1853 read, “its idle to talk of producing Cotton for the world’s supply with free labor. It has never yet been successfully grown by voluntary labor” (119). Cotton growing became synonymous with slave labor, and when British capitalists, attempting to diversify their cotton imports, attempted to bring American style cotton growing to India, the planters were unable to convince the local labor force, who maintained a significant degree of autonomy, to submit to the work life of an American slave (127). Workers in Britain were also resistant to the new factory system. The scientific management of the factory floor, the lesser pay, and tenement house living conditions led groups like the Luddites, who specifically identified new technology as a culprit, into a state of rebellion (196). However, a combination of anti-worker labor law, the enclosure movement, and debtors prisons ultimately coerced the British working class into cotton’s industrial era (197-8). As the whole tropical and temperate world planted cotton, British factories turned it into clothes that Britain, making a hefty profit, returned to the whole world.

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Interior of the silver mines, the "mouth of hell," by Theodor De Bry

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