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ALSO BY SVEN BECKERT EMPIRE OF COTTON Wt:
The Monied Metropolis: New York City and
the Comolidation ofthe American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896

A Global History

Sven Beckert

V IN TAGE BOOK S
A DIVISION OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LLC
NEW YORK
 FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 2015 For Lisa

Copyright © 2or4 by Sven Beckert

All rights reserved. Published in che United Scates by Vintage Books,

a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by
Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Led., Toronto.
Originally published in hardcover in the United Scates by Alfred A. Knopf, a
division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2014.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

Beckert, Sven.
Empire of cotton : a global history/ Sven Beckerc.-Firsc edition.
pages cm
I. Cotton textile industry-History. 2. Cocron trade-History.
3. Cotton plantation workers-History. 4. Slavery-Economic aspects. 5. Slaves.
6. Textile workers. 7. Capitalism-History. 8. Labor-History. I. Tide.
HD9870.5 .B43 2014
2014009320

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-375-71396-5

eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-35325-o

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Printed in the United Scates of America

109876 4 3 2
 EMPIR E OF COTTON

during the heyday of the Industrial Revolution between 1780 and 1815
would still not come close to matching the volume and the quality of
Asian, Latin American, and African spinners and weavers. Yet their
mills were the future. These water-powered (and, soon, steam-powered)
machines, driven by relentless innovation, animated by wage workers,
enabled by significant capital accumulation and the willing encourage-
ment of a new kind of state, seemed almost magical, and they created the
central pillar of the empire of cotton. From this local spark, England
Sea

/)
Irish Sea LANCAS HI RE
II
600- 1780 •Blackburn
Andcnoo.
Bol1on• • Walmers.ley
Liverpool • Mmchcncr•
. S1<ld.pon
Siyal• •Mellor
CHESHJRE \_&a.• R,,,.,,.

. Nouingham

III
1780-1860

T he changing spatial arrangements between growers, "This Land of Long Chimneys":

manufacturers, and consumers of cotton in the wo rld,
The Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom, 1780-1815
2000 BCE-1860 C E. Phase I: Multipolar, disconnected.
Phase II : After 1600, networks focused increasingly on
Europe, but prod uction remained d ispersed. Phase III:
After the Industrial Revolution, production networks
focused on Europe, and a multicentric industry became
unipolar.
 60 EMPIRE OF COTTON The "Wages of\Vtir Capitalism 61

came to dominate a many-pronged world economy, making one of

humanity's most important industries its own. From this local spark,
industrial capitalism would emerge and eventually spread its wings across
the globe. From this local spark, the world as most of us know it emerged.

Samuel Greg was important to this story; he and his contemporaries

shaped the future. But like most successful revolutionaries, they relied
on the past, on the networks constructed by British merchants, planters,
and the state during the previous two hundred years. In other words, the
power they harnessed in water was only possible because of the power
harnessed by war capitalism. Slavery, colonial domination, militarized
Bringing war capitalism home: Hannah Lightbody, Samuel Greg's wife,
trade, and land expropriations provided the fertile soil from which a
and daughter of a Liverpool merchant family
new kind of capitalism would sprout. Greg's genius lay in realizing that
risk-taking English entrepreneurs like him could build upon this material
and institutional heritage and generate unprecedented wealth and power
by embracing the heretofore ungentlemanly world of manufacturing. Indian technologies captured through British imperial expansion on that
Greg had deep roots in war capitalism, its violent appropriation of continent. Many, moreover, used capital accumulated via the Atlantic
territory and slave labor, as well its reliance on the imperial state to secure trade and catered to Atlantic markets-especially in Africa and in the
new technologies and markets. He had secured his part of the family Americas, economies fueled almost exclusively by slave labor. And for
fortune through Hillsborough Estate, a profitable sugar plantation on them, war capitalism had also provided many learning opportunities-
the Caribbean island of Dominica, where he held hundreds of enslaved how to organize long-distance trade, for example, how to run domestic
Africans until the final abolition of slavery in British territories in 1834. industries; an understanding of the mechanisms to move capital across
Greg's uncles Robert and Nathaniel Hyde, who had raised him from age oceans- lessons that informed the development of domestic financial
nine and also provided much of the capital for the building of Quarry instruments. Even modern labor cost accounting had emerged from the
Bank Mill, were also textile manufacturers, West Indian plantation own- world of the slave plantation and only later migrated into modern indus-
ers, and merchants. Greg's wife, Hannah Lightbody, was born into a fam- try. And British entrepreneurs' incentive and ability to reinvent radically
ily involved in the slave trade, while his sister-in-law's family had moved the production of cotton textiles was protected by a powerful imperial
from the slave trade into the export of cloth to Africa. 1 state, a state that itself had been the product of war capitalism. 2
Most of Greg's fellow cotton manufacturers came from considerably Most crucially, by the second half of the eighteenth century, that
less prosperous circumstances, without Caribbean slave plantations. They heritage allowed British merchants to assume commanding roles at many
had accumulated only modest amounts of capital, but had a wealth of vital nodes of the global cotton industry-even though British workers
tinkering spirit and technical aptitude-as well as a hunger for the huge produced only tiny percentage of global output and Britain's farmers
profits that might be generated by manufacturing. Yet they, too, drew grew no cotton whatsoever. England's domination of these global net-
their essential raw material-cotton-from slave labor. Even they catered works, as we will see, was essential to recast production and become the
to markets that had first been opened by the trade in Indian cotton tex- unlikely source of the cotton-fueled Industrial Revolution. While cer-
tiles, textiles that had been kept out of many European markets in order tainly still revolutionary, industrial capitalism was the offspring of war
to protect noncompetitive European producers. And they, too, drew on capitalism, the previous centuries' great innovation. 3
 EMPIRE OF COTTON The Wages of War Capitalism

Samuel Greg and his fellow innovators knew chat the global reach not to enslave labor or conquer territory, though that remained essen-
and power of the British Empire gave chem a tremendous advantage tial, but to organize workers into great orchestras of machine-based pro-
over their fellow merchants and artisans in Frankfurt, Calcutta, or Rio duction. Manufacturers' efforts to reorganize production rested on new
de Janeiro. Having started out as a merchant in the employ of his uncles, ways of mobilizing land, labor, and resources-and called, among other
he had already organized a large putting-out network of cotton spinners things, for a new connection between capitalists and the state. It was
and weavers in the Lancashire and Cheshire countryside before invest- chis nexus of social and political power that together animated industrial
ing in his new machines. In addition to the profits and labor from chis capitalism, the transformational invention of the Industrial Revolution.
putting-out network, Greg had easy access to abundant capital from his It was that innovation that would, as we will see, eventually take wing
wife's family. And the Rathbone family, which would become one of the and travel to other parts of the world.
dominant players in the nineteenth-century cotton trade, stood ready in Fueled by the wages of war capitalism, Greg and his contemporaries,
1780 to supply raw cotton to Greg. He knew firsthand that the market as one observer remarked in the 1920s, "wrested the empire of cotton
for cotton fabrics-in continental Europe, along the coast of Africa, and from the East within a vigorous generation of invention," rewriting the
in the Americas-was rapidly expanding. 4 entire geography of global cotton manufacturing. Their work was revolu-
And while the upside was tremendous, the risks of these first ventures tionary because it heralded a new institutional form for organizing eco-
were modest. In the 1780s, Greg invested at first a fairly small amount of nomic activiry and a world economy in which rapid growth and ceaseless
capital into his Quarry Bank Mill: £3,000, the equivalent of about half a reinvention of production became the norm, not the exception. To be
million U.S. dollars today. Then he recruited ninery children between the sure, important inventions had been made in the past, and there had
ages of ten and twelve from nearby poorhouses, attaching chem for seven been moments of accelerated economic growth in various regions of the
years co his factory as "parish apprentices." By 1800 he supplemented world before the Industrial Revolution. Yet none of them had created a
these children with no adult workers who received wages. Greg sold his world in which revolution itself would become a permanent feature of
cloth first mostly to Europe and the West Indies, and, after the 1790s, life, a world in which economic growth would, despite periodic collapses,
increasingly to Russia and the United States. Thanks to chose expanding seem to fuel its own expansion. There had been no radical acceleration
markets, the new factory, like others, was spectacularly profitable from of economic growth in the thousand years before 1800 in Europe or
the beginning, returning annually 18 percent on his original investment, elsewhere, and any that had occurred had soon foundered on the shoals
four times as much as UK government bonds. 5 of resource constraints, a food crisis, or disease. Now industrial capital-
Contemporary observers as well as modern historians have found ism was creating an ever-changing world, and cotton, the world's most
many reasons that explain Greg's venture, and with it why the much important industry, was the mainspring of this unprecedented accelera-
broader Industrial Revolution, "broke out" in chis place, in northern tion of human productiviry. 7
England, and at chis time, in the 1780s. The genius of British inven-
tors, the size of the British market and its unusually deep integration,
the geography of Britain with its easy access to waterborne transport, the In retrospect, late-eighteenth-century England seemed ripe for a rein-
importance of religious dissenters for thinking outside the box, and the vention of cotton manufacturing. British capitalists looked back on two
creation of a state favorable to entrepreneurial initiative have all been centuries of cotton textile production, had access to invescable capital,
cited.6 While none of these arguments are unimportant, they omit a and employed ever more peasants to spin and weave at home. Also, Brit-
core part of the story of the Industrial Revolution: its dependence on the ish textile producers based in households had withstood the pressures
globe-spanning system of war capitalism. of imports from India for decades, an experience that schooled them
As a result of all these factors, for the first time ever, a new character, in the importance of being able to compete with Indian manufacturers
the manufacturer, strode onto the scene, an individual who used capital to capture their markets. And last but not least, workers were available
 EMPIRE OF COTTON The ITTiges ofITTir Capitalism

to staff the new factories, workers who did not have the ability to resist point, and was deployed to great success, but the tantalizing possibility of
the process of being turned from rural cultivators or artisans into wage global exports could not be preserved by such prohibitions. What British
laborers. These factors provided the necessary conditions for a radical cotton capitalists needed was a dynamic combination of new technolo-
reimagining of production and the institutions in which it was embed- gies to lower costs, the further growth of elastic markets that already had
ded. Such conditions, however, were hardly unique, in fact they were begun to expand on the tails of British expansion, and a supportive state
shared, if not in all aspects, then at least in many particulars, from China with the ability not just to protect global empire but to transform society
to India to continental Europe to Africa. They cannot alone explain why in Britain itself. ' 0
the Industrial Revolution broke out in a small part of the British Isles in Since labor costs were the primary obstacle to grasping the new tantalizing
the late eighteenth century. 8 opportunities, British merchants, inventors, and budding manufacturers-
British capitalists, however, in contrast to their counterparts else- practical men all-focused on methods to increase the productivity of
where, controlled many global cotton networks. They had access to their high-cost labor. In the process, they effected the most momentous
uniquely dynamic markets, they dominated the transoceanic trade in cot- technological change in the history of cotton. Their first noteworthy
tons, and they had firsthand knowledge of the fabulous potential wealth innovation came in 1733 with John Kay's invention of the flying shuttle.
that could come from selling cloth. The core problem faced by British This small wooden tool in the shape of the hull of a ship allowed weav-
cotton manufacturers was the difficulty of competing with high-quality ers to attach the weft thread and then propel it to "fly'' from one side of
yet cheap Indian products. In the course of the eighteenth century, as we the loom to the other through the warp threads. The shuttle doubled the
have seen, British producers had largely (though not entirely) solved the productivity of weavers. At first it spread only slowly, but its spread was
quality problem by appropriating Indian technology. Expanding output, unstoppable: After 1745, despite resistance from weavers who feared for
and lowering costs, proved more difficult: The putting-out networks that their livelihoods, it was widely adopted. 11
British merchants had built in the countryside proved largely resistant to This tiny piece of wood propelled in novel ways prompted a cascade
higher production. Work was performed irregularly, additional workers of further innovations that would gradually but permanently change cot-
were difficult to mobilize on short notice, and transportation costs rose ton manufacturing. The spread of more productive weaving techniques
with the volume of work. And it was difficult to enforce homogeneous put huge pressure on spinning, as ever more spinners were needed to sup-
quality in products spun and woven on remote farms . With the exist- ply one weaver with sufficient yarn to keep the looms working. Despite
ing technology and social organization of production, British outworkers more women in ever more households working longer hours on the spin-
could hardly compete with cotton workers in other parts of the world. ning wheel, the supply was insufficient. After Kay's invention it took four
Indeed, they succeeded mostly only in the protected domestic and colo- spinners to supply one weaver. Many artisans tried to find ways to cir-
nial markets. 9 cumvent this bottleneck, and by the 1760s productivity increases became
The main reason for this inability to compete, however, was wage possible with James Hargreaves's invention of the spinning jenny. The
costs. Wages in the United Kingdom were significantly higher than in jenny consisted of a hand-operated wheel that would rotate a number
other parts of the world; indeed, in 1770 Lancashire wages were perhaps of spindles within a frame, while the spinner would use her other hand
as much as six times those in India. Even though by this point improved to move a bar back and forth to extend the thread and then to wind it
machinery meant that productivity per cotton worker in Britain was on the spindles hemselves. This machine was at first able to spin eight
already two to three times higher than in India, that multiplier was still separate threads, later sixteen or more, and as early as 1767 it had tripled
not sufficient to level the playing field. War capitalism had created a fun- a spinner's speed. It spread rapidly, and by 1786 there were about twenty
damentally new set of opportunities for British cotton capitalists, but it thousand in use in Britain. 12
had no answer to the question of how to enter cotton cloth markets in a As early as 1769, however, spinning was already seeing further
globally significant way. Protectionism had been a workable answer to a improvements thanks to Richard Arkwright's water frame, a machine
 66 EMPIRE OF COTTON The ™iges of™ir Capitalism

that anticipated Greg's mill by relying on falling water. Consisting of four with che water frame, or, with Robercs's automated mule after 1825, only
rollers that drew out the cotton strands before a spindle twisted them 135 hours. In just three decades, productivity had increased 370 times.
into thread, it allowed for continuous spinning, and unlike the jenny, Labor costs in England were now much lower than in India. 15
which had at first been mostly employed in people's homes, the water Prices for British yarn fell accordingly, and soon were lower than
frame required larger amounts of energy, thus concentrating production chose manufactured in India. In 1830, British cotton merchant Edward
in factories. A decade lacer, in 1779, Samuel Crompton's mule was the Baines cited the price of one pound of Number 40 yarn (the number
capstone of these inventions, combining elements of the jenny with those reflects the quality of the yarn-the higher the number, the finer the
of the water frame (hence its name). The mule was a long machine with thread) in England as r shilling, 2.5 pence, while in India the same quality
two parallel carriages: Bobbins of roving (lightly twisted cotton fibers) and quantity of yarn would cost 3 shillings, 7 pence. Manchester spinners
lined one side, and spindles ready to accept spun yarn lined the other. McConnel & Kennedy reported that the prices for its high-quality 100-
The exterior carriage, mounted on wheels, was pulled out about five feet, count yarn fell by 50 percent between 1795 and 18n, and, despite various
stretching multiple lengths of roving simultaneously. The number of rov- ups and downs, continued to fall further throughout the nineteenth cen-
ings spun depended on the number of spindles mounted to the mule: tury. While yarn prices, especially of fine yarns, fell the most rapidly, the
Although two hundred was the norm in the 1790s, the number would cost of finished cloth also declined. A piece of muslin in the early 1780s
climb to more than thirteen hundred over the ensuing century. The cost (in deflated prices) n6 shillings per piece; fifty years later the same
stretched roving was then twisted into yarn and wound onto the spindles piece could be had for 28 shillings. 16
as the carriage was pushed back in. Unlike with the water frame, which The resulting boom in cotton manufacturing was unprecedented.
operated continuously, yarn was produced in five-foot bursts, but was After nearly two centuries of slow growth in Europe, British cotton
stronger and finer than yarn produced on water frames. The mule was manufacturing expanded by leaps and bounds. Between 1780 and 1800,
first powered by water (which remained the dominant source of power output of cotton textiles in Britain grew annually by 10.8 percent, and
until the 1820s), but later mostly by steam engines (which James Watt exports by 14 percent; already in 1797 there were approximately nine
patented in 1769). 13 hundred cotton factories. In 1788, there had been 50,000 mule spindles,
With spinning no longer a laggard, pressure shifted back to weaving. but thirty-three years later that number had increased to 7 million. While
First came a vast expansion of home-based weaving. With new machines it had been cheaper to produce cotton cloth in India before 1780, and its
and an abundant supply of thread, this was a golden age for weavers quality had been superior, after that year English manufacturers were able
all over the Lancashire and Cheshire countryside, as tens of thousands co compete in European and Atlantic markets, and after 1830 they even
of cottagers spent endless hours on their looms working up the rapidly began to compete with Indian producers in India itself. Once Indians
increasing output of British spinning factories. While Edmund Cart- began using British-manufactured yarn and cloth, it signaled to all that
wright had patented a water-powered loom as early as 1785, productivity the world's cotton industry had been turned on its head. 17
improvements in weaving at first proved modest, and technical problems As ever larger numbers of cotton factories began to dot northern
with power looms great. 14 England to accommodate the new spinning and weaving machines,
Britain's growing class of manufacturers, despite issues with looms, it might come as a surprise that the inventors, who had enabled this
were acutely aware that these new machines allowed chem to increas- departure, had s arced in distinctly unspectacular ways. They created a
ingly dominate the one node in the global cotton complex whose control world radically different from anything ever seen before without recourse
had eluded them: manufacturing. In eighteenth-century India, spinners to theoretical science, often even without much education. They were
required 50,000 hours to spin a hundred pounds of raw cotton; their skilled men in tiny workshops, with little formal education. Among the
cohorts in 1790 Britain, using a hundred-spindle mule, could spin the inventors, Kay came from the most prosperous family, as his father was
same amount in just 1,000 hours. By 1795 they needed just 300 hours a modestly successful woolens manufacturer. He might have received
 68 EMPIRE OF COTTON The Wages ofWar Capitalism

some formal education in France. Hargreaves, on the other hand, was a river and diverted through a waterwheel. The waterwheel drove shafts
handloom weaver from Blackburn, who probably never had any formal that ran through the length of the mill, upon which large leather belts
schooling-much like Arkwright, the youngest of seven children born to could be engaged or disengaged in order to run the various machines.
poor parents, who learned how to read first from his uncles and then edu- lJnlike its predecessors, the mill's primary function was not to simply
cated himself. Crompton grew up in dire poverty: After his father died, aggregate and control labor, but to house a complex array of machinery.
Crompton began to spin cotton, perhaps as early as age five, while his And by the 1780s, some mills were taking on gargantuan proportions; at
mother tried to make ends meet by spinning and weaving. All four were rwo hundred feet long, thirty feet wide, and four to six stories in height,
tinkerers, people who breathed and lived with their machines, trying they dominated the surrounding countryside. 20
to solve practical problems with simple tools and insights that emerged Yarn production in these mills entailed three basic steps: willowing,
from their day-to-day efforts to improve production. 18 carding, and spinning. The first step had workers, generally women,
But they were far from local heroes. Their innovations sometimes spread the raw cotton upon meshed tables and beat it with sticks to
even brought down the wrath of their neighbors, who dreaded the job remove any twigs, leaves, and dirt that the ginning had failed to remove.
losses the innovators caused. Fear of mob violence drove Kay and Har- Since the process pushed so much fire-hazardous cotton dust into the
greaves away from the places they had made their inventions. Neither air, it was often completed in adjoining buildings rather than within the
translated their inventions into wealth; after losing their efforts to defend main mill complex. After the cotton was cleaned, a series of machines
their patents, they lived modestly. When Hargreaves died in Notting- centralized in the bottom floors of the mill would transform the raw cot-
ham in 1778, he owned little more than a prize from the Society for the ton into "roving," a thin cord oflightly twisted, parallel fibers ready to be
Encouragement of Arts and Manufactures, and his children were desti- spun. First, the cotton was fed into a carding engine, a spinning cylinder
tute. Only Arkwright profited from his invention-establishing cotton covered in metal teeth fitted into a similarly toothed casing. Through
factories in numerous locations. Yet a rapidly growing number of British carding, a snarled mess of cotton was turned into an untangled so-called
manufacturers did embrace the new technologies, a British state valued sliver with the fibers running parallel. The cotton was then fed into a draw
them so highly that it criminalized their export for nearly half a century frame, a set of rollers through which the sliver was passed-stretching,
after 1786. From then on, technical progress became a constant: Profits twisting, and drawing it-creating the roving. The cotton strand was
were made by increasing the productivity of human labor. This would in then wound into a roving can, from which it could be placed onto a bob-
fact become a defining feature of industrial capitalism. bin. Finally, the cotton was ready to be spun. Spinning machines were
These new machines, the "macro inventions" celebrated by histori- located across the top floors of the mill, and the machines themselves
ans Joel Mokyr, Patrick O'Brien, and many others, not only accelerated usually took one of two forms: Arkwright's water frame or, increasingly,
human productivity, but also altered the nature of the production process Crompton's mule. 21
itself: They began to regulate the pace of human labor. 19 Dependent on To operate all this machinery and to move the cotton through the
central energy sources and requiring large spaces, production moved out factory, manufacturers hired hundreds of workers, most of them chil-
of the home and into factories. Along with the machines, workers assem- dren and women. And while not all workers arrived at the factory gates
bled in unprecedented numbers in central locations. While putting-out voluntarily and received wages, the majority did. This was, as we will see
merchants had traversed the countryside searching for laborers, now later, another important institutional innovation of industrial capitalism.
workers sought out manufacturers in search of employment. Outside the slave plantations of the Americas capitalists for the first time
The mechanization of cotton spinning created a novel entity: the organized, supervised, and dominated the production process. 22
cotton mill. Although mills could vary tremendously in size, they shared Such domination of labor by capital, embrace of technological rev-
one attribute: a nearby source of running water. To harness its energy, olution, and social innovation did not happen elsewhere, including in
either a dam was constructed or an inlet was cut from a steep section of the heart of the world's cotton industry, China and India. This was in
 70 EMPIRE OF COTTON The Wages ofWar Capitalism 71

some ways surprising, since for centuries manufacturing in these parts ally, the chain between the weaver and the final consumer was a long
of the world had defined the cutting edge of global cotton production one, with many intermediaries. "To break out of this traditional histori-
technology. Way back in 1313, Wang Zhen had written a description of cal institution" proved difficult, as one historian has remarked, and in
a "machine for spinning hemp thread" that came quite close to Har- the minds of many, of little advantage. Many spinners and weavers in
greaves's spinning jenny and Arkwright's water frame. Developing new the English countryside likely felt similarly to their brethren in India
spinning machines was certainly within the grasp of Chinese artisans, or, and China; they knew that newer spinning technology would make
for that matter, their French or Indian counterparts. Moreover, trade in their home-based manufacturing unsustainable. And yet with few other
cotton and cotton textiles was the most important facet of an increasing means of earning income, and with their episodic efforts to organize
commercialization of the Chinese economy between the fourteenth and against the encroachment of technology defeated by a determined state,
nineteenth centuries. 23 they had little choice but to capitulate to industrial capitalism. 24
Despite these promising preconditions, neither China nor India- Embracing new technologies, subduing labor without enslaving it,
nor, for that matter, England's closest European competitor in techni- and finding new ways to organize production emerged in cotton mills
cal education, Prussia-came close to dominating as many nodes within first, and as a result the once modest industry scattered along the rivers of
the global cotton production complex as Britain. Nor did any other Lancashire and neighboring Cheshire grew by leaps and bounds-around
country embrace war capitalism as effectively. Moreover, in India and the time of Greg's construction of his first mill in 1784, new mills blos-
China, peasants were more secure on the land than their British counter- somed, and in the decades thereafter existing mills expanded, sometimes
parts, making it more difficult for eager manufacturers to mobilize large quite significantly. Greg himself employed 2,084 workers in five mills
numbers of workers. Because of the different organization of households, in 1833, and the number of spindles at his Quarry Bank Mill had qua-
especially limitations on women's outside activities, female-dominated drupled, to 10,846. In 1795, cotton manufacturer Robert Peel expanded
spinning had extremely low opportunity costs in India and China, mak- operations into twenty-three different mills, all owned and managed by
ing the embrace of new technologies less likely. Women's labor, in the him. In other instances, new producers entered the industry, often people
calculation of peasant households, was inexpensive. In India, addition- with little capital but the right kinds of connections. When Irish mer-
chant William Emerson wanted to help a relative start a spinning mill,
he wrote to his business partners McConnel and Kennedy in Manchester,
informing them in a letter "that a relation of mine has a desire to acquire
a knowledge of Carding and Spinning, and for which purpose, I wd will-
ingly send him to you for Six Mo and pay you any reasonable price for
his instruction, you d be so good to say if you could with convenience
have him Instructed Either in your own House or any other and on what
terms." 25
As factories multiplied, many remained small and their owners were
often not wealthy by the standards of Liverpool merchants, Somerset
landowners, or bondon bankers. In 1812, 70 percent of all firms had fewer
than ten thousand spindles and were valued at less than fz,ooo. The
entrepreneurs who entered the industry came from a variety of back-
grounds. Many had been merchant-manufacturers, others manufacturers
in different industries, while others had started out as well-off farmers,
Water-powered ramie spinning wheel, China, 1313 or even as apprentices with unusual mechanical abilities. There were cer-
 72 EMPIRE OF COTTON The Wages ofWtir Capitalism 73

tainly examples of extraordinary social mobility, such as Elkanah Armit- One example of the rapid growth of cotton mills was the Manchester
age, who began work at a cotton factory at age eight as a spinner's helper cotton manufacturers McConnel & Kennedy. They founded their part-
and fifty-nine years later owned mills that employed 1,650 workers. 26 nership in 1791, focusing on the production of spinning machines, a busi-
Others, however, started with more substantial resources, such ness chat came naturally to machine maker James McConnel. One day,
as Samuel Oldknow, who was born in 1756 in Anderton, Lancashire. however, McConnel produced two mules that his customer could not
His father already owned a successful muslin manufacturing operation pay for, and this seeming bad luck led him to begin using them himself.
worked entirely by handlooms. Following his father's premature death, His partner, John Kennedy, and two other investors expanded both the
Oldknow was apprenticed to his uncle, a draper, before he returned to production of machines and spinning, investing a total capital of £500,
his hometown in 1781 to rebuild the family muslin business. It was aus- an exceedingly modest sum. Calling themselves "machine makers and
picious timing. The introduction of the spinning mule in 1779 made spinners," they expanded their mills rapidly, focusing on high-quality
high-quality, mass-produced yarn available on an unprecedented scale, yarns. In 1797 they operated 7,464 spindles; by 18rn the number of spin-
allowing Oldknow to break into a market previously dominated by Indian dles had increased to 78,972, while the number of workers they employed
manufacturers. Oldknow also partnered with two London firms to secure grew from 312 in 1802 to 1,020 in 1816. Like others, they financed that
wide access to British and overseas markets. As he put it in a draft of a expansion out of retained profits, which had averaged 26.5 percent annu-
1783 letter, "The prospect is at present very propitious." By 1786, he was ally between 1799 and 1804.29
the most successful muslin manufacturer in Britain. Oldknow continued The growth of cotton manufacturing soon made it the center of
to build mills and expand his enterprises, at one point controlling some the British economy. In 1770, cotton manufacturing had made up just
twenty-nine mills. By 1790, he was branching out into spinning with the 2.6 percent of the value added in the economy as a whole. By 180I it
construction of a steam-powered factory in Stockport; by 1793, an even accounted for 17 percent, and by 1831, 22.4 percent. This compared to
larger six-story spinning mill in Mellor began production. 27 the iron industry's share of 6.7 percent, coal's 7 percent, and woolens' 14.1
Cotton manufacturing, even if engaged in on a small scale, was aston- percent. In Britain, as early as 1795, 340,000 people worked in the spin-
ishingly profitable in the 1780s and 1790s. The firm of Cardwell & Birle ning industry. By 1830, one in six workers in Britain labored in cottons.
had average annual returns on their capital of 13.1 percent, N. Dugdale At the same time, the industry itself became centered on a small part of
24.8 percent, and McConnel & Kennedy 16 percent. Such profits allowed the British Isles: Lancashire. Seventy percent of all British cotton workers
them to expand without much recourse to formal capital markets. Indeed, would eventually labor there, while 80.3 percent of all owners of cotton
"the favorite source of capital [for expansion] was retained profits." Yet facto ries originated in that same county. 30
such capital was often augmented by merchants who invested in mills The explosion of the cotton industry was not a flash in the pan.
that they did not run themselves, and, more important, by London and Instead, as we will see, other industries would be made possible by the
Liverpool merchants' credit for the purchase of raw cotton and the sale of rise of cotton: a railroad network, the iron industry, and later in the nin~-
yarn and cloth. This additional working capital was crucial: While in 1834 teenth century a new set of industries that would amount to a second
fixed capital investments in factories and machines in the British cotton industrial revolution. But cotton was the vanguard. As historian Fernand
industry may have amounted to fI4.8 million, working capital invested Braudel has argued, the Industrial Revolution in cottons affected the
in raw cotton and wages equaled £7-4 million-a very significant share. "entire nationa"kconomy." 31 As late as the mid-nineteenth century, the
Access to such capital rested often on personal connections, and as the Industrial Revolution was still, numerically, the story of cotton.
need to secure significant amounts of circulating capital increased, it
became more difficult for people outside the middle class to join the
ranks of cotton capitalists. High profits from production in turn made The spectacular take off of the British cotton industry allowed British
manufacturing an ever more attractive field for further investments. 28 capitalists-along with the British state-to retain even more of the wages
 74 EMPIRE OF COTTON The Wages ofWar Capitalism 75

of war capitalism. With cheaper production costs thanks to the unprec- ence on world markets-and at the same time thousands of spinners and
edented productivity of their new machines and the new organization of weavers in newly built factories all over the English countryside, not to
production, with wage workers in large factories, British manufacturers, mention hundreds of factory owners and merchants and seamen, were
as expected, broke into new markets. Domestic markets expanded as cot- newly dependent on such foreign markets. As Edward Baines observed
tons became cheaper and as cotton fabrics became ever more fashionable in amazement in 1835, cotton exports "at the present day ... are three
as their changing designs mattered increasingly to the self-presentation of times as large as the woolen exports,-having in so short a period out-
middle-class consumers. 32 stripped and distanced a manufacture which has flourished for centuries
British cotton manufacturers also moved decisively into the all- in England and which for that length of time all writers on trade had
important export market. By the 1780s, they came to sell in markets that justly considered as the grand source of commercial wealth to the coun-
British merchants previously had served with Indian textiles. Fine mus- try." Indeed, such record trade in cottons influenced the entire British
lins that had been the pride of Bengal and "which for some thousands of economy: 56 percent of all additional British exports from 1784-86 to
years stood unequalled" were henceforth produced in the United King- i804-6 were in cottons. 34
dom. This was clearly decisive, since the British market, with its 8.66 mil- British cottons now rapidly replaced Indian cottons on world mar-
lion people, was quite small, and per capita disposable income grew only kets. While in fiscal year 1800-1801, piece goods valued at £1.4 million
modestly. Over the course of the eighteenth century cotton exports from were still exported from Bengal to Britain, by 1809-10, only eight years
Britain increased two hundred times-yet 94 percent of that increase later, cloth exports had been reduced to just a bit more than £330,000-
took place in the two decades after 1780, when exports exploded by a fac- and would continue to fall rapidly thereafter. As a result, Indian weavers,
tor greater than sixteen from their 1780 value of £355,060 to £5,854,057 in who had dominated global cotton textile markets for centuries, went into
1800. By the last years of the eighteenth century, 61.3 percent of all cot- free fall. In 1800, commercial resident John Taylor wrote a detailed history
ton cloth produced on the British Isles was exported. After 1815, thanks of the clothing industry of the Bengali city of Dhaka and reported that
to these exports, England had indeed pretty much "eliminated all rivals the value of cloth exports there had fallen by 50 percent between 1747 and
from the non-European world" in the global trade of cotton yarn and 1797. Spinners especially had been hurt by British competition, and as a
cloth. 33 result a great number, he reported, "died of famine." The people of the
The true boom of the British cotton industry was thus an export once thriving manufacturing city had been "reduced and impoverished,"
boom. By 1800 British manufactured cottons had become a major pres- its houses "ruined and abandoned," and its commercial history become
"a melancholy retrospect." The "ancient celebrity" and "great wealth" of
Dhaka were all but gone. By 1806, another report on Bengali commerce
concluded that "the exports of Piece Goods on the public account, have
also very considerably decreased ... ; the consequences are, that the weav-
ers finding no employment for their looms, many of them have been
necessitated to quit their homes and seek employment elsewhere; most
of them take to the plough, some remain in their own districts, while
others migrate'into distant parts of the country." One critic of the East
India Company, observing that it seemed the goal of British policy to
1700 1725 1750 1775 1800 make India into an importer of cotton cloth and an exporter of raw cot-
Year ton, found it "a policy similar to that which Spain pursued towards the
unhappy aborigines of America." 35
The export explosion: growth of British exports of cotton goods, 1697-1807 British cottons captured the multifaceted export markets formerly
 EMPIRE OF COTTON The ~ges of~r Capitalism 77

controlled by Indian spinners and weavers, while manufacturers focused a complicated dance between various interests. A rising group of manu-
at first on selling to parts of the world subject to war capitalism. During facturers pressed for a recognition of their interests, while statesmen and
the last decades of the eighteenth century, the heyday of the Industrial bureaucrats came to understand that their own exalted position in the
Revolution, more than two-thirds of British cotton exports went to such world rested on Great Britain's rapidly expanding manufacturing capac-
places. Exports flowed, in effect, within the same channels of the Atlantic ity. Manufacturers fought competing interests-the East India Company,
economy that Britain had spent two hundred years and untold treasure for example-and competing elites, such as aristocratic landowners. And
building. Slaves on plantations in the Americas, unlike agricultural pro- as merchants and manufacturers accumulated significant resources on
ducers elsewhere, did not produce their own clothing and provided a which the state came to depend, these capitalists could translate their
uniquely rich market despite the low level of their masters' provisioning. growing importance to the national economy into political influence. 39
In the African trade-mostly in slaves-demand was just as high (and Cotton mill owners became increasingly active politically, culminating
even increasing, as a result of the cotton planting boom in the Americas), in the 1832 Reform Act that extended them the suffrage, allowing many
as African merchants began to accept British-made cloth as equivalent to textile entrepreneurs to move into the House of Commons, where they
Indian cloth in quality and price. After 1806, British cottons were deci- strenuously lobbied for the (global) interests of their industry, from the
sively dominating this market that had for so long eluded them. 36 Corn Laws to British colonial expansion. 40 The argument of the manu-
facturers for policies conducive to their interests was straightforward and
strikingly modern, as this 1789 petition of rn3 cotton goods manufactur-
The ability of merchants and manufacturers to access these markets ers from around Glasgow to the Treasury shows:
pointed to the importance of a peculiar and novel form of state, a state
that would be the crucial ingredient for industrial capitalism and would That your Petitioners began early to Manufacture British Mus-
eventually travel in quite peculiar patterns around the globe. After all, cot- lins, and of late years have made great Progress in extending and
ton exports expanded on the strength of British trade networks and the improving this valuable branch of Trade, as well as the other
institutions in which they were embedded-from a strong navy creating Articles denominated Callicoes, and Mixed Goods. That the
and protecting market access to bills of lading allowing for the transfer of Power of Machinery applied on this Manufactory, joined to the
capital over large distances. This state was capable of forging and protect- new Facilities, which a more extended Practice has enabled your
ing global markets, policing its borders, regulating industry, creating and Petitioners to introduce, occasions a surplus of Goods which the
then enforcing private property rights in land, enforcing contracts over Home Consumption cannot exhaust: and therefore a foreign
large geographical distances, forging fiscal tools to tax populations, and Sale to a much greater extent becomes indispensably necessary,
building a social, economic, and legal environment that made the mobi- in order to occupy the Machinery. 4 1
lization of labor through wage payments possible.
As one perceptive French observer argued in the early nineteenth cen- Built by newly empowered manufacturers and a state with vastly
tury, "England has only arrived at the summit of prosperity by persisting increased capacity, industrial capitalism found a very different answer to
for centuries in the system of protection and prohibition." 37 Indeed, in the the question of how to mobilize labor, capital, and markets compared to
end, it was not so much the new machines that revolutionized the world, its parent, war c pitalism. Labor, unlike in the Americas, could be mobi-
impressive and important as they were. The truly heroic invention was lized because changes in the countryside, including legal changes, had
the economic, social, and political institutions in which these machines already produced a large group of landless proletarians who were forced
were embedded. These institutions came to further define industrial capi- to sell their labor power to survive, and did so without being physically
talism and increasingly set it apart from its parent, war capitalism. 38 coerced. Moreover, unlike for the plantation economy of the Americas,
The creation of such a state at the core of industrial capitalism was the territorial needs of cotton manufacturing were limited and focused
 EMPIRE OF COTTON The Wages ofWitr Capitalism 79

mostly on accessing waterpower. As markets in land had emerged cen- Tellingly, even though Edward Baines argued in 1835 that "this [cot-
turies before, and property rights in land were relatively secure and pro- ton] trade was not the nursling of government protection," he proceeded
tected by the state, the land grab so typical of war capitalism did not and to list in chronological order all "interferences of the legislature" that
could not emerge in Britain itself. At the same time, an interventionist related to the cotton industry, from prohibitions to tariffs-a list that
state was able to promote land uses deemed helpful to general economic would fill seven pages, a striking reminder of the state's importance to
development, for instance by allowing expropriations for the building ensuring the "free" market of cotton. 43 In Great Britain and eventually
of turnpikes and canals. Moreover, a highly centralized and bureaucratic in a few other states, this dependence of capitalists on the state attached
state regulated and taxed domestic industry. 42 them firmly to one another and resulted in a kind of territorialization and
Finally, and perhaps most decisive for this early moment in the emer- "nationalization" of manufacturing capital. Ironically, that link between
gence of industrial capitalism, the mechanisms of war capitalism could capitalists and the state would eventually also empower workers, who
be externalized thanks to the state's imperial expansion, in effect reducing could deploy the state's dependence on the consent of the governed to
capitalists' need to recast the domestic social structure and their depen- mobilize collectively for higher wages and better working conditions.
dence on domestic resources, ranging from labor to food to raw materi- It was also because of the awe-inspiring capacity of modern states
als. Some of the problems in the mobilization of labor, raw materials, (what Hegel would call the "spirit of history") that war capitalism's way
territories, and markets had indeed been solved by war capitalism in the of mobilizing land, labor, and markets would be largely irrelevant within
Americas, Africa, and Asia. And it was again a strong state (a state forti- Europe itself This is in many ways surprising. Afrer all, large-scale and
fied by the institutional and financial accumulations of war capitalism) capital-intensive enterprises, the mobilization of vast numbers of work-
that was the root cause of the ability to externalize some of the labor, ers, and the tight managerial supervision of those workers had all been
land, and resource mobilization. This state could in fact enforce different pioneered to great profit on the plantations of the Americas and seemed
kinds of institutions in different parts of the world, with slavery and wage to show the way toward the reorganization of production. Yet in Britain
labor coexisting, for example. itself, war capitalism provided only the foundation, not the nature, of
Manufacturers, merchants, and statesmen constructed a new form of capitalism. To dominate production, workers were neither enslaved nor
capitalism-a capitalism that would dominate much of the world by the populations murdered, for capitalists were not fulfilling frontier fantasies
late nineteenth century. beyond the reach of the state. This was revolutionary, but in our world, in
The modern state at its core was sometimes less "visible" than which the institutional foundations of industrial capitalism have become
autocratic monarchical rule, and thus seemed "weaker" as its power commonplace, it is hard to appreciate just how revolutionary it was.
was increasingly embedded in impersonal rules, laws, and bureaucratic And the relationship between the expansion of manufacturing and
mechanisms. Paradoxically, industrial capitalism made state power less the strengthening of the state was mutually reinforcing. Just as the Brit-
visible as it amplified it. No longer did the personal authority of the king, ish state undergirded the economic dynamism of the cotton industry,
the lord, or the master, or age-old custom, regulate the market; instead that industry's many progeny became ever more important to the Brit-
the market was made by explicit rules relentlessly enforced by contracts, ish state. To fuel the wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
laws, and regulations. Weaker states continued to rely on client networks, centuries that established British hegemony in the Atlantic, according
the subcontracting of authority, and arbitrary rule-characteristics that to Edward Bain , Britain relied heavily on its commerce, and the most
would not provide fertile ground for industrial capitalism. And as Euro- important line of commerce was cotton: "Without the means supplied
pean colonialism spread its tentacles into ever more areas of the world, by her flourishing manufacturers and trade, the country could not have
it further strengthened the state capacity of the colonizers, while at the borne up under a conflict as prolonged and exhausting." Cotton goods
same time undermining political authority and state capacity among the valued at fa50 million were exported between 1773 and 1815, estimated
colonized. Just as state capacity became ever more important, its distribu- Baines, filling the coffers of manufacturers, merchants-and the state. It
tion around the globe became more unequal. was the volume and balance of trade that provided the state the revenues
 80 EMPIRE OF COTTON The Wages o/War Capitalism 81

it needed to invest, for example, in expanded naval power in the first visitor saw in Manchester a town that was "abominably filthy, the Steam
place. State revenues indeed increased by a factor of sixteen between the Engine is pestiferous, the Dyehouses noisesome and offensive, and the
late seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries, as Britain engaged in water of the river as black as ink." Alexis de Tocqueville made that same
these years in a total of fifty-six years of warfare. And fully one-third of tax pilgrimage in 1835 and saw a "sort of black smoke [that] covers the city.
revenues in 1800 came from customs. As the Edinburgh Review remarked The sun seen through it is a disk without rays. Under this half daylight
in 1835, "How great a degree of our prosperity and power depend on their 30 0,000 human beings are ceaselessly at work. A thousand noises disturb
[manufacturers'] continued improvement and extension." State bureau- this damp, dark labyrinth, but they are not at all the ordinary sounds one
crats and rulers understood that manufacturing was a way to produce hears in great cities." However, Tocqueville added, it was "from this foul
revenue for the state, as the state itself now rested on the industrial world drain [chat] the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise
it had helped create. 44 the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity
The first, lurching stages of this great acceleration, as seen at Quarry attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilisa-
Bank Mill, might still have appeared modest. To modern eyes, the new tion works its miracles, and civilised man is turned back almost into a sav-
technologies seem quaint, the factories small, and the impact of the cotton age." Observers from the still pastoral United States were terrified by this
industry limited to a few regions in just one small part of the world, while new Old World; Thomas Jefferson wished that his compatriots would
much of the globe, even much of Great Britain, continued as before. The "never .. . twirl a distaff ... lee our workshops remain in Europe."46
productive capacity of the first factories dotting the English countryside, Within Britain, and within two decades, cotton's evolution was vast.
looked at from a global perspective, was indeed minuscule. After all, Chi- It began as one of the many spoils of imperial expansion, and became the
nese spinners and weavers processed about 420 times as much cotton in driving commodity behind the Industrial Revolution. From tufted white
1750 as their counterparts in Britain in 1800, and the numbers for India bolls emerged a new global system: industrial capitalism. There was of
were similar. 45 In 1800, two decades afrer Greg's midwifery to the Indus- course inventiveness and innovation in ocher industries, but cotton was
trial Revolution, less than one-tenth of r percent of global cotton cloth the only one with a global scope, a strong connection co coercive labor,
production came from machines invented on the British Isles. Yet once and a unique level of the state's imperial attention to capture the neces-
the social and institutional scaffolding of industrial capitalism had been sary markets across the world.
invented in a decades-long conflict between capitalists, aristocrats, the Although industrial capitalism would eventually dominate the world,
state, workers, and peasants, it could spread to other industries and other in the immediate afrermath of its birth it helped to expand and sharpen
parts of the world. The territory for further transformations was huge. war capitalism elsewhere. That was because England's lopsided lead in
the exploitation of industrial capitalism rested in the ability of its mer-
chants to secure ever more inexpensive and predictable supplies of cotton
The Industrial Revolution, powered by cotton, was, as historian Eric for its factories .47 And while British cotton manufacturers quite suddenly
Hobsbawm has put it, "the most important event in world history." It demanded huge new quantities of cotton, the institutional structures of
created a world unlike any that had come before. "This land of long industrial capitalism were still too immature and provincial to generate
chimneys," as cotton manufacturer Thomas Ashton called it in 1837, was the labor and rritory needed to produce all this cotton. For a terrible
not just different from the centuries-old world of the British countryside, ninety years, from about 1770 to 1860, as we will see, industrial capitalism
it was also a vast leap from the world of war capitalism that merchants, reinvigorated rather than replaced war capitalism.
planters, and state officials had forged over the previous two hundred In 1858, the president of the Galveston, Houston, and Henderson
years. Its spectacle attracted visitors from all over the world, simultane- Railroad Company, Richard B. Kimball, visited Manchester. His obser-
ously awed and horrified by the sheer scale of it all: the endless chimneys, vations are startling in their prescience: "As I entered your city, a sort
the chaotic cities, the spectacular social transformations. An 1808 English of hum, a prolonged, continuous vibration struck my ear, as if some