Credit
Print Collector, via Getty Images
The
history of an era often seems defined by a particular commodity. The
18th century certainly belonged to sugar. The race to cultivate it in
the West Indies was, in the words of the French Enlightenment writer
Guillaume-Thomas de Raynal, “the principal cause of the rapid movement
which stirs the Universe.” In the 20th century and beyond, the commodity
has been oil: determining events from the Allied partitioning of the
Middle East after World War I to Hitler’s drive for Balkan and Caspian
wells to the forging of our own fateful ties to the regimes of the
Persian Gulf.
In
his important new book, the Harvard historian Sven Beckert makes the
case that in the 19th century what most stirred the universe was cotton.
“Empire of Cotton” is not casual airplane reading. Heavy going at
times, it is crowded with many more details and statistics (a few of
them repeated) than the nonspecialist needs. But it is a major work of
scholarship that will not be soon surpassed as the definitive account of
the product that was, as Beckert puts it, the Industrial Revolution’s
“launching pad.”
More
than that, “Empire of Cotton” is laced with compassion for the millions
of miserably treated slaves, sharecroppers and mill workers whose
labors, over hundreds of years, have gone into the clothes we wear and
the surprising variety of other products containing cotton, from coffee
filters to gunpowder. Today some 350 million people are involved in
growing, transporting, weaving, stitching or otherwise processing the
fibers of this plant.
“Until
the 19th century,” Beckert explains, “the overwhelming bulk of raw
cotton was spun and woven within a few miles from where it was grown.”
Nothing changed that more dramatically than the slave plantations that
spread across the American South, a form of outsourcing before the word
was invented. These showed that cotton could be lucratively cultivated
in bulk for consumers as far afield as another continent, and that
realization turned the world upside down. Without slavery, he says,
there would have been no Industrial Revolution.
Beckert’s
most significant contribution is to show how every stage of the
industrialization of cotton rested on violence. As soon as the profit
potential of those Southern cotton fields became clear in the late
1780s, the transport of slaves across the Atlantic rapidly increased.
Cotton cloth itself had become the most important merchandise European
traders used to buy slaves in Africa. Then planters discovered that
climate and rainfall made the Deep South better cotton territory than
the border states. Nearly a million American slaves were forcibly moved
to Georgia, Mississippi and elsewhere, shattering many families in the
process.
The
search for more good cotton-growing soil in areas that today are such
states as Texas, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma was a powerful incentive
to force Native Americans off their traditional lands and onto
reservations, another form of violence by the “military-cotton complex.”
Beckert’s coinage seems not far-fetched when he points out that by
1850, two-thirds of American cotton was grown on land that had been
taken over by the United States since the beginning of the century. And
who structured the bond deal for the Louisiana Purchase, which made so
much of that possible? Thomas Baring of Britain, one of the world’s
leading cotton merchants.
Beckert
practices what is known as global or world history: the study of events
not limited to one country or continent. The perspective serves him
well. For it was not just in the United States that planters’ thirst to
sow large tracts with cotton pushed indigenous peoples and
self-sufficient farmers off their land; colonial armies did the same
thing in India, West Africa and elsewhere. When he talks about the rise
of late-19th-century American Populism (driven in part by the grievances
of small cotton farmers), he also mentions parallel movements in India,
Egypt and Mexico. And it was not only white Southerners who were
responsible for the harsh regime of slave-grown cotton: merchants and
bankers in the North and in Britain lent them money and were investors
as well. With sons strategically stationed in cities on both sides of
the Atlantic, the Brown family — patrons of the Museum of Natural
History in New York and the corporate ancestors of Brown Brothers
Harriman — owned more than a dozen Southern cotton plantations
outright.
Beyond
violence, another major theme of “Empire of Cotton” is that, contrary
to the myth of untrammeled free enterprise, this expanding industry was
fueled at every stage by government intervention. From Denmark to Mexico
to Russia, states lent large sums to early clothing manufacturers.
Whether it was canals and railways in Europe or levees on the
Mississippi, governments jumped in to build or finance the
infrastructure that big cotton growers and mills demanded. Britain
forced Egypt and other territories to lower or eliminate their import
duties on British cotton.
Beckert
has a larger ambition, however, than just telling the story of cotton;
he wants to use that commodity as a lens on the development of the
modern world itself. This he divides into two overlapping phases: “war
capitalism” for the stage when slavery and colonial conquest prepared
the ground for the cotton industry, and “industrial capitalism” for the
period when states intervened to protect and help the business in other
ways. This makes “Empire of Cotton” read a bit like two books combined,
with one of them incomplete. Cotton’s story Beckert more than fully
tells, but his analysis of capitalism really requires a bigger-picture
scrutiny of other industries as well. And here, his two categories are
not so easily separated. For example, we no longer go to war over
cotton, but would America have spent hundreds of billions of dollars
fighting in Iraq if that country had no oil?
About
the history of cotton itself, Beckert is on firmer ground. Today, a
“giant race to the bottom” by an industry always looking for cheaper
labor has shifted most cotton growing and the work of turning it into
clothing back to Asia, the continent where it was first widely used
several centuries ago. And violence in different forms is still all too
present. In Uzbekistan, up to two million children under 15 are put to
work harvesting cotton each year — just as the mills of St. Petersburg,
Manchester and Alsace once heavily depended on child labor from
poorhouses and orphanages. In China, the Communist Party’s suppression
of free trade unions keeps cotton workers’ wages down, just as British
law in the early 1800s saw to it that men and women who abandoned their
ill-paid jobs and ran away could be jailed for breach of contract. And
in Bangladesh, the more than 1,100 people killed in the notorious
collapse of the Rana Plaza building in 2013 were mostly female clothing
workers, whose employers were as careless about their safety as those
who enforced 14- or 16-hour workdays in German and Spanish weaving mills
a century before. A long thread of tragedy is woven through the story
of the puffy white substance that clothes us all.
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