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THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Copyright © 2014 by Sven Beckert All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. www.aaknopf.com Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beckert, Sven. Empire of cotton : a global history / Sven Beckert.—First edition. pages cm ISBN 978-0-375-41414-5 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-385-35325-0 (eBook) 1. Cotton textile industry—History. 2. Cotton trade—History. 3. Cotton plantation workers—History. 4. Slavery—Economic aspects. 5. Slaves. 6. Textile workers. 7. Capitalism—History. 8. Labor —History. I. Title. HD9870.5.B43 2014 338.4767721—dc23 2014009320 Maps by Mapping Specialists Jacket images: (top to bottom) Spinning Mill at Dornach by Jean Mieg. Musée Historique de Mulhouse; Cotton-making, Dutch Antilles, East Indies by Paolo Fumagalli. Private Collection. The Stapleton Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library; A Loom © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / The Bridgeman Art Library Jacket design by Eric White First Edition v3.1 For Lisa Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction Chapter 1 The Rise of a Global Commodity Chapter 2 Building War Capitalism Chapter 3 The Wages of War Capitalism Chapter 4 Capturing Labor, Conquering Land Chapter 5 Slavery Takes Command Chapter 6 Industrial Capitalism Takes Wing Chapter 7 Mobilizing Industrial Labor Chapter 8 Making Cotton Global Chapter 9 A War Reverberates Around the World Chapter 10 Global Reconstruction Chapter 11 Destructions Chapter 12 The New Cotton Imperialism Chapter 13 The Return of the Global South Chapter 14 The Weave and the Weft: An Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index Illustration Credits Other Books by This Author Introduction Edgar Degas views the empire of cotton: merchants in New Orleans, 1873. (illustration credit itr.1) In late January 1860, the members of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce assembled in that city’s town hall for their annual meeting. Prominent among the sixty-eight men who gathered in the center of what was then the most industrialized city in the world were cotton merchants and manufacturers. In the previous eighty years, these men had transformed the surrounding countryside into the hub of something never before seen—a global web of agriculture, commerce, and industrial production. Merchants bought raw cotton from around the world and took it to British factories, home to two-thirds of the world’s cotton spindles. An army of workers spun that cotton into thread and wove it into �nished fabrics; then dealers sent those wares out to the world’s markets. The assembled gentlemen were in a celebratory mood. President Edmund Potter reminded his audience of the “amazing increase” of their industry and “the general prosperity of the whole country, and more particularly of this district.” Their discussions were expansive, touching on the a�airs of Manchester, Great Britain, Europe, the United States, China, India, South America, and Africa. Cotton manufacturer Henry Ashworth added superlatives of his own, celebrating “a degree of prosperity in business which has probably been unequalled in any previous time.”1 These self-satis�ed cotton manufacturers and merchants had reason to be smug: They stood at the center of a world-spanning empire—the empire of cotton. They ruled over factories in which tens of thousands of workers operated huge spinning machines and noisy power looms. They acquired cotton from the slave plantations of the Americas and sold the products of their mills to markets in the most distant corners of the world. The cotton men debated the a�airs of the world with surprising nonchalance, even though their own occupations were almost banal—making and hawking cotton thread and cloth. They owned noisy, dirty, crowded, and decidedly unre�ned factories; they lived in cities black with soot from coal- fueled steam engines; they breathed the stench of human sweat and human waste. They ran an empire, but hardly seemed like emperors. Only a hundred years earlier, the ancestors of these cotton men would have laughed at the thought of a cotton empire. Cotton was grown in small batches and worked up by the hearth; the cotton industry played a marginal role at best in the United Kingdom. To be sure, some Europeans knew of beautiful Indian muslins, chintzes, and calicoes, what the French called indiennes, arriving in the ports of London, Barcelona, Le Havre, Hamburg, and Trieste. Women and men in the European countryside spun and wove cottons, modest competitors to the �nery of the East. In the Americas, in Africa, and especially in Asia, people sowed cotton among their yam, corn, and jowar. They spun the �ber and wove it into the fabrics that their households needed or their rulers demanded. As they had for centuries, even millennia, people in Dhaka, Kano, and Teotihuacán, among many other places, made cotton cloth and applied beautiful colors to it. Some of these fabrics were traded globally. Some were of such extraordinary �neness that contemporaries called them “woven wind.” Instead of women on low stools spinning on small wooden wheels in their cottages, or using a dista� and spinning bowl in front of their hut, in 1860 millions of mechanical spindles—powered by steam engines and operated by wage workers, many of them children—turned for up to fourteen hours a day, producing millions of pounds of yarn. Instead of householders growing cotton and turning it into homespun thread and hand-loomed cloth, millions of slaves labored on plantations in the Americas, thousands of miles away from the hungry factories they supplied, factories that in turn were thousands of miles removed from eventual consumers of the cloth. Instead of caravans carrying West African cloth across the Sahara on camels, steamships plied the world’s oceans, loaded with cotton from the American South or with British-made cotton fabrics. By 1860, the cotton capitalists who assembled to celebrate their accomplishments took as a fact of nature history’s �rst globally integrated cotton manufacturing complex, even though the world they had helped create was of very recent vintage. But in 1860, the future was nearly as unimaginable as the past. Manufacturers and merchants alike would have sco�ed if told how radically the world of cotton would change in the following century. By 1960, most raw cotton came again from Asia, China, the Soviet Union, and India, as did the bulk of cotton yarn and cloth. In Britain, as well as in the rest of Europe and New England, few cotton factories remained. The former centers of cotton manufacturing—Manchester, Mulhouse, Barmen, and Lowell among them—were littered with abandoned mills and haunted by unemployed workers. Indeed, in 1963 the Liverpool Cotton Association, once one of cotton’s most important trade associations, sold its furniture at auction.2 The empire of cotton, at least the part dominated by Europe, had come crashing down. This book is the story of the rise and fall of the European-dominated empire of cotton. But because of the centrality of cotton, its story is also the story of the making and remaking of global capitalism and with it of the modern world. Foregrounding a global scale of analysis we will learn how, in a remarkably brief period, enterprising entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen in Europe recast the world’s most signi�cant manufacturing industry by combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers. The very particular organization of trade, production, and consumption they created exploded the disparate worlds of cotton that had existed for millennia. They animated cotton, invested it with world-changing energy, and then used it as a lever to transform the world. Capturing the biological bounty of an ancient plant, and the skills and huge markets of an old industry in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, European entrepreneurs and statesmen built an empire of cotton of tremendous scope and energy. Ironically, their shocking success also awakened the very forces that eventually would marginalize them within the empire they had created. Along the way, millions of people spent their lives working the acres of cotton that slowly spread across the world, plucking billions of bolls from resistant cotton plants, carrying bales of cotton from cart to boat and from boat to train, and working, often at very young ages, at “satanic mills” from New England to China. Countries fought wars for access to these fertile �elds, planters put untold numbers of people into shackles, employers abbreviated the childhoods of their operatives, the introduction of new machines led to the depopulation of ancient industrial centers, and workers, both slave and free, struggled for freedom and a living wage. Men and women who had long sustained themselves through small plots of land, growing cotton alongside their food, saw their way of life end. They left behind their agricultural tools and headed to the factory. In other parts of the world, many who had worked at their looms