"Empire of Cotton"

[fiefoe]

Sven Beckert's well researched book doesn't offer enough sparkling details to keep this reader's attention on the important question of how capitalism works.

• And you are surrounded by sheep: it would take approximately 7 billion sheep to produce a quantity of wool equivalent to the world’s current cotton crop. Those 7 billion sheep would need 700 million hectares of land for grazing, about 1.6 times the surface area of today’s European Union.
• Until the nineteenth century, cotton, while not unknown, was marginal to European textile production and consumption... China and India, along with many other parts of the world, became ever more subservient to the Europe-centered empire of cotton. These Europeans then used their dynamic cotton industry as a platform to create other industries; indeed, cotton became the launching pad for the broader Industrial Revolution.
• * The first industrial nation, Great Britain, was hardly a liberal, lean state with dependable but impartial institutions as it is often portrayed. Instead it was an imperial nation characterized by enormous military expenditures, a nearly constant state of war, a powerful and interventionist bureaucracy, high taxes, skyrocketing government debt, and protectionist tariffs—and it was certainly not democratic.
• * This book, in contrast, embraces a global perspective to show how Europeans united the power of capital and the power of the state to forge, often violently, a global production complex, and then used the capital, skills, networks, and institutions of cotton to embark upon the upswing in technology and wealth that defines the modern world.
• * Slavery, the expropriation of indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed trade, and the assertion of sovereignty over people and land by entrepreneurs were at its core. I call this system war capitalism. <> We usually think of capitalism, at least the globalized, mass-production type that we recognize today, as emerging around 1780 with the Industrial Revolution. But war capitalism, which began to develop in the sixteenth century, came long before machines and factories.
• We associate industrial capitalism with contracts and markets, but early capitalism was based as often as not on violence and bodily coercion. Modern capitalism privileges property rights, but this earlier moment was characterized just as much by massive expropriations as by secure ownership.
• As industrial capitalism spread, capital itself became tied to particular states. And as the state assumed an ever more central role and emerged as the most durable, powerful, and rapidly expanding institution of all, labor also grew in size and power. The dependence of capitalists on the state, and the state’s dependence on its people, empowered the workers
• cotton spanned the globe unlike any other industry. Because of the new ways it wove continents together, cotton provides the key to understanding the modern world, the great inequalities that characterize it, the long history of globalization, and the ever-changing political economy of capitalism.
• Too often, we prefer to erase the realities of slavery, expropriation, and colonialism from the history of capitalism, craving a nobler, cleaner capitalism. We tend to recall industrial capitalism as male-dominated, whereas women’s labor largely created the empire of cotton.
• By the mid-nineteenth century, one type dominated the empire of cotton— G. hirsutum—also known as American upland.
• The Liverpool Cotton Exchange had an enormous impact on Mississippi cotton planters, the Alsatian spinning mills were tightly linked to those of Lancashire, and the future of handloom weavers in New Hampshire or Dhaka depended on such diverse factors as the construction of a railroad between Manchester and Liverpool, investment decisions of Boston merchants, and tariff policies made in Washington and London. The power of the Ottoman state over its countryside affected the development of slavery in the West Indies;
• we are reminded again and again that no state of capitalism is ever permanent or stable. Each new moment in capitalism’s history produces new instabilities, and even contradictions, prompting vast spatial, social, and political rearrangements.

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• Then they created cloth on a backstrap loom, a simple tool consisting of two sticks attached by the warp threads; one stick was hung from a tree, the other on the weaver herself, who stretched the warp with the weight of her own body and then wove the contrasting thread (the weft) in and out between the warps in an unending dance.
• According to a Navajo belief, “When a baby girl is born to your tribe you shall go and find a spider web…and rub it on the baby’s hand and arm. Thus, when she grows up she will weave, and her fingers and arms will not tire from the weaving.”
• for several millennia—the people of the Indian subcontinent were the world’s leading cotton manufacturers...The quality of the top tier of Indian cotton fabrics was legendary: In the thirteenth century, the European traveler Marco Polo elaborated on Herotodus’s observations of nearly nine hundred years earlier,.. Some of their muslins might be thought the work of fairies, or of insects, rather than of men.” They were, in effect, “webs of woven wind.”
• * one of the reasons why Christopher Columbus believed that he had reached India was that he encountered great quantities of cotton in the Caribbean;
• * Just as in Africa, the spread of Islam played a major role in transmitting the skills to grow, spin, and weave cotton across the Middle East, as religious demands for modesty made cotton an “ordinary article of clothing.”
• the Chinese word for cotton and cotton fiber is borrowed from Sanskrit and other Indian languages... Cotton became a major presence in the Chinese countryside during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). During those years, it effectively replaced ramie, which, with silk,
• cotton goods—partly because they were so labor-intensive to produce—became an important store of value and a medium of exchange. Rulers everywhere demanded cotton cloth as tribute or taxes, and indeed it might be said that cotton was present at the birth of political economy as such.
• Cotton’s first serious incursion into Europe, as in West Africa, was the result of the spread of Islam. By 950 CE, cotton was manufactured in such Islamic cities as Seville, Córdoba, Granada, and Barcelona, as well as Sicily... from the Arabic qutun. French coton, English cotton, Spanish algodón, Portugese algodão, Dutch katoen, and Italian cotone all derive from the Arabic root.
• after the early sixteenth century, the Venice-dependent European industry declined, as the Thirty Years War disrupted the industry and trade shifted away from the Mediterranean and toward the Atlantic. In the sixteenth century, indeed, Venice lost control over the Mediterranean trade to a strengthened Ottoman Empire, which was encouraging domestic industries and restricted the export of raw cotton.
• * Christopher Columbus’s landing in the Americas in 1492 marked the first momentous event in this recasting of global connections. That journey set off the world’s greatest land grab... huge territories in the Americas allowed, among other things, the monocultural growing of large quantities of cotton. <> The second momentous event in the history of cotton came five years later, in 1497, when Vasco da Gama sailed triumphantly into the port of Calicut, having pioneered a sea route from Europe to India around the Cape of Good Hope. Now Europeans could for the first time access the products of Indian weavers (easily)
• What all these European trading companies had in common was that they purchased cotton textiles in India, to trade for spices in Southeast Asia, and also to bring to Europe, whence they might be consumed domestically or shipped to Africa to pay for slaves to work the plantations just beginning to take root in the New World. Cotton textiles, for the first time ever, became entangled in a three-continent-spanning trading system; the consequences of Columbus’s and da Gama’s momentous journeys fed on one another... As a result, cotton textiles became central to European expansion into Asia.
• The insertion of armed European merchants into the Asian trade, however, slowly marginalized these older networks, as they muscled the once dominant Indian and Arab traders out of many intercontinental markets. In 1670, one British observer could still note that Middle Eastern merchants “carried off five times as many calicoes as the English and the Dutch.”
• they took away the continent’s movable wealth: gold and silver. It was indeed some of these stolen precious metals that had funded the purchase of cotton fabrics in India in the first place. <> Eventually, however, European settlers in the Americas could not discover sufficient gold and silver and they invented a new road to wealth: plantations growing tropical and semitropical crops, sugar in particular,
• slaves were more frequently traded for a far more banal commodity: cotton textiles.
• This expansion of European trade networks into Asia, Africa, and the Americas did not rest primarily on offering superior goods at good prices, but on the military subjugation of competitors and a coercive European mercantile presence in many regions of the world... These three moves—imperial expansion, expropriation, and slavery—became central to the forging of a new global economic order and eventually the emergence of capitalism.
• Heavily armed privateering capitalists became the symbol of this new world of European domination, as their cannon-filled boats and their soldier-traders, armed private militias, and settlers captured land and labor and blew competitors, quite literally, out of the water. Privatized violence was one of their core competencies.
• War capitalism relied on the capacity of rich and powerful Europeans to divide the world into an “inside” and an “outside.” The “inside” encompassed the laws, institutions, and customs of the mother country, where state-enforced order ruled. The “outside,” by contrast, was characterized by imperial domination, the expropriation of vast territories, decimation of indigenous peoples, theft of their resources,
• A multipolar world increasingly became unipolar. Power long spread across multiple continents and through numerous networks increasingly became centralized through a single node, dominated by European capitalists and European states. At the core of this change stood cotton,
• the British East India Company... This assertion of private political power by a state-chartered company over distant territories was a revolutionary reconceptualization of economic might. States shared sovereignty over territory and people with private entrepreneurs.
• Indian weavers’ income fell. In the late seventeenth century, up to one-third of the price of cloth might have gone to a weaver. By the late eighteenth century, according to historian Om Prakash, the producer’s share had fallen to about 6 percent.
• The Indian cotton goods not subject to these bans, such as plain chintz and muslins, were subject to heavy tariffs. In the end, all of these protectionist measures did not help the domestic woolen and linen industry, but did spur domestic cotton manufacture. (France): Over the next seventy years, no fewer than two royal edicts and eighty rulings of the king’s council attempted to repress cottons.
• European states and merchants increasingly dominated global networks that allowed them to capture markets for cotton textiles in other parts of the world. These markets, in fact, provided an outlet for cottons secured in India as well as for domestic producers. Thus Europeans could both increase cloth purchases in India and protect their own uncompetitive national industries—a miraculous feat possible only because war capitalism had allowed Europeans to dominate global cotton networks while at the same time constructing new kinds of ever more powerful states whose constant warfare demanded ever greater resources and thus embraced domestic industry.
• war capitalism also nourished the emerging secondary sectors of the economy such as insurance, finance, and shipping, sectors that would become exceedingly important to the emergence of the British cotton industry, but also public institutions such as government credit, money itself, and national defense... It was this early embrace of war capitalism that was the precondition for the Industrial Revolution
• Since labor costs were the primary obstacle to grasping the new tantalizing opportunities, British merchants, inventors, and budding manufacturers—practical men all—focused on methods to increase the productivity of their high-cost labor. In the process, they effected the most momentous technological change in the history of cotton. Their first noteworthy innovation came in 1733 with John Kay’s invention of the flying shuttle... By 1795 they needed just 300 hours with the water frame, or, with Roberts’s automated mule after 1825, only 135 hours. In just three decades, productivity had increased 370 times.
• manufacturers hired hundreds of workers, most of them children and women. And while not all workers arrived at the factory gates voluntarily and received wages, the majority did. This was, as we will see later, another important institutional innovation of industrial capitalism.
• * in India and China, peasants were more secure on the land than their British counterparts, making it more difficult for eager manufacturers to mobilize large numbers of workers. Because of the different organization of households, especially limitations on women’s outside activities, female-dominated spinning had extremely low opportunity costs in India and China, making the embrace of new technologies less likely.
• The growth of cotton manufacturing soon made it the center of the British economy. In 1770, cotton manufacturing had made up just 2.6 percent of the value added in the economy as a whole. By 1801 it accounted for 17 percent, and by 1831, 22.4 percent... By the last years of the eighteenth century, 61.3 percent of all cotton cloth produced on the British Isles was exported.
• * This state was capable of forging and protecting global markets, policing its borders, regulating industry, creating and then enforcing private property rights in land, enforcing contracts over large geographical distances, forging fiscal tools to tax populations, and building a social, economic, and legal environment that made the mobilization of labor through wage payments possible... “England has only arrived at the summit of prosperity by persisting for centuries in the system of protection and prohibition.”37 Indeed, in the end, it was not so much the new machines that revolutionized the world... The truly heroic invention was the economic, social, and political institutions in which these machines were embedded. These institutions came to further define industrial capitalism and increasingly set it apart from its parent, war capitalism.
• * perhaps most decisive for this early moment in the emergence of industrial capitalism, the mechanisms of war capitalism could be externalized thanks to the state’s imperial expansion, in effect reducing capitalists’ need to recast the domestic social structure and their dependence on domestic resources.. it was again a strong state (a state fortified by the institutional and financial accumulations of war capitalism) that was the root cause of the ability to externalize some of the labor, land, and resource mobilization.
• The modern state at its core was sometimes less “visible” than autocratic monarchical rule, and thus seemed “weaker” as its power was increasingly embedded in impersonal rules, laws, and bureaucratic mechanisms.
• the institutional innovation that the Caribbean experiment produced: the re-creation of the countryside through bodily coercion, something only possible under war capitalism... Slavery and land expropriation on a continental scale created the expansive, and elastic, global cotton supply network necessary for the Industrial Revolution
• In the largest slave revolt in history, Saint-Domingue’s enslaved population armed themselves and defeated the French colonial regime, leading to the creation of the state of Haiti and the abolition of slavery on the island... Saint-Domingue cotton production had equaled 24 percent of British cotton imports the year before the revolution, while four years later, in 1795, it was only 4.5 percent.
• Jean Montalet, for example, one of many of Saint-Domingue’s former cotton planters, sought refuge on the mainland, and upon his arrival in South Carolina converted a rice plantation to the growing of cotton. Revolution thus in one stroke both brought needed growing expertise to the United States and increased the financial incentive for American planters to grow cotton.
• Eventually they decided that wage labor did not work, with one of the planters stating categorically that “cultivation by paid labor could, under no circumstances, be profitably applied to Cotton in that part of the country.” <> The experiences in India indeed seemed to confirm cotton’s dependence on coercion. Yet slavery, manufacturers began to understand, could not be completely trusted... As late as 1854, there were only thirty-four miles of railroad in India. One expert indeed argued that American cotton was so much more competitive than Indian cotton because of the vastly better system of railroads, and, one should add, a vastly superior system of rivers.
• British difficulties in India clarify the decisive difference from the United States. Though settler conflicts with Native Americans were costly, both in lives and treasure, the result left settlers in full control of the land and its resources... Indian peasants, like their counterparts in Anatolia, western Africa, and elsewhere, had shaped a world in which they could resist the onslaught of European merchant capital.
• In the 1820s and 1830s, between 10 and 25 percent of the revenues of the Egyptian state derived from this sale of cotton.
• even a cursory glance around the edges of these newfangled machines in the countries and regions that adopted them first reveals a host of characteristic economic, social, and political relations—the embryonic features of industrial capitalism... it was an entirely different thing to scale that model by several orders of magnitude and forge it into a new social order. It was the capacity of a newly emerging type of state, as we will see, that was decisive.
• The most dramatic such move was undertaken by a group of Boston merchants looking for new outlets for capital suddenly and ruinously idled due to the American trade embargo against Britain and France from 1807 to 1812. In 1810 Francis Cabot Lowell traveled to the United Kingdom to acquire the blueprints for a cotton mill. Upon his return, he and a group of wealthy Boston merchants had signed the “Articles of Agreement between the Associates of the Boston Manufacturing Company,” which created a huge integrated spinning and weaving mill in Waltham near Boston,
• * In 1787, Alexander Hamilton (two years before he became secretary of the Treasury) and Tench Coxe sent Andrew Mitchell to Britain to acquire models and drawings of Arkwright’s machinery, a project that failed only when Mitchell was caught. Most famously, Francis Cabot Lowell ventured to Britain in 1810, allegedly for “health reasons,” and came back with blueprints for his factory at Watertown.
• * Similarly, in the United States, Alexander Hamilton in his “Report on the Subject of Manufactures” in 1791 had strongly advocated a policy of government support for industrial development... Much more important was a state’s ability to isolate its domestic manufacturing efforts from competition, especially from Britain... Napoleon’s continental blockade gave a boost to the cotton industry of Europe and the Americas at a crucial moment in its development.
• Protectionism, once seen as a wartime cataclysm, now became a permanent feature of newly industrializing states—who in this respect followed the British example, as Britain had protected its home market from Indian competition just as furiously... By 1843, the prohibition of cotton textile imports was written into the Mexican constitution.
• Sometimes the state also became an important customer, as for example in Russia, mostly to equip their militaries. But most important of all was the road building, canal digging, and railway construction that characterized assertive states in the first half of the nineteenth century.
• * a state that could protect domestic markets, forge access to remote markets, and create an infrastructure that facilitated manufacturing was the distinctive feature of early industrial leaders. And these increasingly powerful states also forged the institutions necessary to underpin industrial capitalism—from markets for wage labor (enabled by the undermining of precapitalist dependencies in the countryside and alternative means of gaining access to subsistence) to property rights created by laws and administrative infrastructures.
• No place illuminates the double impact of war capitalism on the cotton industry better than Egypt... War capitalism may have brought cotton industries to Egypt by herculean determination, but the progeny did not last for long... Egypt was never able to build the institutional framework that would have enabled a full transition to industrial capitalism; even something so basic as wage labor did not take hold. Its reliance on war capitalism, both in the cotton fields and in the cotton factories, ultimately limited the growth of domestic markets. Egypt was, moreover, in the end unable to protect its domestic market.
• the provider of agricultural commodities produced by slave labor, a vision that ran counter to a project of domestic industrialization... slavery demanded low tariffs to facilitate the flow of sugar and coffee from Brazil into global markets and thus precluded the kind of protectionism that had enabled European, North American, and for a time Egyptian industrialization
• However, a society dominated by slavery was not conducive to cotton industrialization. Early industrialization depended, globally, on war capitalism, but in regions of the globe in which war capitalism took on its most violent edge cotton industrialization never resulted... However, a society dominated by slavery was not conducive to cotton industrialization. Early industrialization depended, globally, on war capitalism, but in regions of the globe in which war capitalism took on its most violent edge cotton industrialization never resulted... the United States, the only country in the world divided between war and industrial capitalism, a unique characteristic that would eventually spark an unprecedentedly destructive civil war.
• The great premodern cotton power of India did not just fail to leap forward via mechanization, but experienced the world’s most rapid and cataclysmic deindustrialization ever. Faced with huge imports of ever cheaper cotton yarns and fabrics from its colonial ruler, and denied the services of its own government, India’s cotton industry was decimated—first its production for export, and then its domestic spinning... Colonialism, by undermining the state capacity of colonized territories and making them subservient to the interests of the colonizers, was decisive.
• The state thus created a legal framework for wage labor that made it more fathomable to rising manufacturers... The 1823 Master and Servant Act, for example, explicitly allowed “English employers to have their workmen sent to the house of correction
• Children from English poorhouses, Danish Bornehus, Swedish Barnhus, and Russian priiut dlia sirot all ended up in textile factories.21
• The availability of women was crucial to the early cotton manufacturers... “The Chinese family system did not allow much migration by single women, either to cities or to peripheries, until twentieth-century factories with tightly supervised dormitories made this seem possible within the bounds of respectability.” Sociologist Jack Goldstone even argues that the different roles of women explain why Europe industrialized and China did not. In Europe and the United States, women married relatively later and were therefore able to join the factory proletariat before marriage.
• Such conditions had a dramatic impact on workers’ health: When the Saxon government sought to recruit soldiers in the 1850s, only 16 percent of spinners and 18 percent of weavers were deemed healthy enough to serve.
• on the ability of capitalists to turn thousands and eventually millions of people into proletarians... This was, as one historian has remarked in regard to the Black Forest’s Wiesental, a process of “inner colonializations”—the colonialization and domination by capital of ever more territories and social relations.
• Cotton grade: Without such standards, such a high-volume long-distance trade of bulk commodities would have been all but impossible—the vast diversity of nature had to be distilled and classified to make it correspond to the imperatives of machine production.
• For a futures market to work, information and samples had to travel faster than bulk cotton itself, something that seems to have emerged in the 1810s in Liverpool... was still on the high seas, exchanging so-called “bills of lading”—documents certifying ownership of certain bales of cotton.
• * Cotton began to be sold that had not yet been shipped, indeed that would only come onto the market in distant months, and might not even have been planted yet.20 This further abstraction of the trade would blossom during the American Civil War, when true futures dealings came about.
• The cotton profits of just five years could finance the construction of a huge and fully furnished English country manor; as the nineteenth century wore on, more and more such stately homes dotted Liverpool’s countryside.
• Bremen’s cotton trade emerged largely as return freight in the holds of ships that had brought European immigrants to the United States... The Bremen cotton trade demonstrated the symbiosis between the export of continental Europe’s surplus labor and the import of agricultural commodities. Globalization increasingly fed upon itself
• Much of that European and, increasingly, New York and Boston capital went into the expansion of cotton agriculture via a group of intermediary merchants who connected cotton merchants with American cotton planters—the factors. They completed the chain of traders between factory and plantation.
• * They understood better than others that with the state’s capacity expanding, the role of merchant capital was diminishing, and that a future beckoned in which industrialists, in conjunction with the state, would be able to burrow even further into the global countryside to find still more land and labor for the production and consumption of cotton. The most forward-looking manufacturers and merchants discerned that such new forms of domination would decisively weaken the power of commodity producers.. The United States was unique in that the schism between economic elites was so great that, in a moment of great crisis, even merchant capitalists aligned with slave owners dropped their old allies... The realignment of the economic elites of the United States, along with the promise of tapping nonslave hinterlands as the Volkarts had done in India, threw the rising costs and diminishing benefits of combining slavery and industrial capitalism into high relief.
• By midcentury, cotton had become central to the prosperity of the Atlantic world. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier called it the “Haschish of the West,” a drug that was creating powerful hallucinatory dreams of territorial expansion, of judges who decide that “right is wrong,” of heaven as “a snug plantation” with “angel negro overseers.”
• Civil War: Looking back at the early months of the war, Moskva, the voice of Moscow’s industrialists, reported that the conflict at first helped “rid us of our own crisis in the cotton industry, which was about to erupt” due to overproduction... By 1863, three-fifths of the looms in Normandy were idle,
• The war, in fact, resulted “in a revolutionary modernization of trade” in which the establishment of a formal futures market was perhaps the most important element. <> While merchants and speculators benefited from the global scramble for cotton, manufacturers loudly and frantically demanded the opening of new sources of the fiber.
• The Prussian minister to Washington, Freiherr von Gerolt, along with his British and French counterparts, repeated many times in his meetings with U.S. secretary of state William Seward how important cotton was to their countries’ economic well-being.
• there were good reasons not to intervene: Britain had to consider the fate of its Canadian provinces, and its growing dependence on wheat and corn imports from the northern United States, while continental powers such as France, Russia, and Prussia had an interest in maintaining a strong United States to balance British economic and military power. But European mediation of the conflict and even European recognition of the Confederacy always remained a possibility,
• the U.S. government indeed did its best to encourage production in other parts of the world, for example by moving vast quantities of cottonseed abroad. Washington, wrote Seward in April 1862, had “an obvious duty…to examine the capacities of other countries for cotton culture and stimulate it as much as possible, and thus to counteract the destructive designs of the factious monopolists at home.” Egypt, with its long-staple crop, was of particular importance in these calculations
• * As Seward put it a few years after the war, in 1872, when he came to the Indian city of Agra—the site of the Taj Mahal—to visit a cotton gin there, “From the tomb of the Mogul monarch Of India, Akbar, we passed to the tomb of the pretended monarch of America, King Cotton.”
• the English Ladies’ Free Grown Cotton movement, a loose association of women who committed themselves to purchasing only cloth produced with free labor cotton.
• shall be possible without strikes or quarrels, and that, above all, there shall be no unnatural addition to the price of labour in the shape of bribes to the workmen to obey orders naturally repulsive to their prejudices.
• the capture of Charleston by Union forces, it observed, “Panic in Liverpool. Cotton down to one shilling,” a panic that rapidly spread to Bombay itself. Boston ice merchant Calvin W. Smith reported from Bombay that “I am sorry to say such long faces I never saw on any set of mortals as the English & Parsees put on here.
• A subscriber from South Carolina remarked that “the negro [is] the proper, legitimate and divinely ordained laborer of the South…[who] has become wild in the exuberance of his freedom…and will be trained to work as a free man. He cannot be permitted to become what he is in St. Domingo.”
• * One of the first things these “reconstructed” state governments did was to try to enforce labor discipline and keep workers on plantations. So-called black codes, passed as early as November 1865 in Mississippi, required freedpeople to sign labor contracts that defined mobility as “vagrancy.”
• by 1900 more than three-quarters of all black farmers.. were sharecroppers, retaining a share of the crop, or renters, who paid a fixed sum to the landowner but retained the crop.
• With world market prices for cotton declining, profits for growers diminished. At the same time, the structure of tenancy, debt, and the marketing of the crop in the postbellum South continued to create enormous pressure on farmers to produce ever more cotton, despite—or even because of—falling prices. While it was perfectly rational for each farmer to embrace cotton, such a concentration was self-defeating for the region as a whole. <> As the economic situation of cotton growers deteriorated, and as northern willingness to intervene on behalf of the freedpeople waned, their political strength diminished as well.
• the Civil War had disempowered the world’s last politically powerful group of cotton growers. From the vantage point of cotton manufacturers, this marginalization stabilized the empire of cotton, making the recurrence of the kind of upheaval that had emerged in defense of slavery quite unlikely.
• Indian cotton growers: Cultivators paid exorbitant rates of interest on these loans (30 percent annually was not unusual), and in turn they signed over their cotton crop to moneylenders, usually many months before the harvest—creating what one historian has called “debt bondage.”
• The significance of these struggles can perhaps best be seen in an area where production failed, despite decisive efforts: Australia. Starting in the early twentieth century, the British colonial administration made efforts to grow cotton in a continent with virtually unlimited supplies of land perfectly suited for cotton agriculture.
• The role of merchants diminished not least because many of their core functions were usurped by states. Even the all-important standards on which contracts increasingly rested, based as we have seen on private contractual arrangements of merchants and enforced by the Liverpool Cotton Association, were after the turn of the century increasingly defined and enforced by state classifiers in the United States... the result of the growing U.S. influence on the global economy, and also the political pressure of cotton producers in the United States, who felt disadvantaged by Liverpool’s rules.
• China’s markets were just as tempting. .. As cotton yarn and cloth from the heartlands of the world’s cotton industry flowed into the world’s cotton-growing areas newly constituted as backwaters, they brought with them a tsunami of deindustrialization.
• more remarkable was their mission: They had boarded the Graf Waldersee that morning as part of a journey that was to bring them to new jobs in a faraway land—the German colony of Togo, a sliver of West Africa that the Germans had acquired in 1884. In the ancient homeland of the Ewe, these African Americans were to instruct the German colonialists and their subjects on how to grow cotton for export, “to determine the possibility of a rational cotton culture as a native culture, and…to show the marketability of the product for German industry. <> For the next eight years, these Tuskegee experts advised German colonialists on how to extract more cotton for export from African rural cultivators. They built experimental cotton farms, introduced new strains of cotton, opened a “cotton school,” expanded the local infrastructure, and (colonialists) used increasingly coercive measures to force local cultivators to grow cotton for world markets.
• the rural cultivators around Tove, reported John Robinson in astonishment, “were as afraid of a horse or cow as a common American youth is of a ‘mad dog.’ ” Not only were they unfamiliar with using draft animals, but the animals themselves did not survive long in the local disease environment.
• While many mid-nineteenth-century Europeans had persuaded themselves that the wonders of modern industry were reserved to them because of such unchangeable factors as the local climate and geography, their superior religious beliefs and “culture,” or even their “racial” characteristics, the geographic shifts of the world’s first modern industry showed anyone willing to see that essentializing the particular global geography of a particular moment in the history of capitalism was nothing but a self-serving justification for global inequality.
• the Japanese story once more demonstrates the tight link between colonial expansion and industrial capitalism—the one, in effect, enabling the other. Reparations gained from the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War—essentially a land grab—were used to subsidize the nation’s shipping industry, thus helping cotton exports, and fueled the government’s ability to provide credit to the country’s trading firms and forgo the revenue generated by duties on raw cotton imports, which were removed in 1896, cheapening the industry’s essential raw material.
• Stories like Egypt’s indicated to capital owners throughout the global South that they needed to create a state supportive of their project of domestic industrialization, and that under conditions of colonialism such a state could not be forged.
• Yet unlike in Japan, and in a sign that Indian capitalists enjoyed significantly less sway over the state than their Japanese counterparts, working conditions improved and labor costs increased thanks to government intervention. The Indian Factory Act of 1891, passed at the behest of Lancashire cotton manufacturers concerned with Indian competition, limited the number of hours children were allowed to work in mills.
• the exceptional character of the colonial state in India when it came to the question of market access. Its greatest success, in many ways, was to facilitate the vast influx of British cotton goods, making India into Lancashire’s most important market, and severely damaging its handicraft industry... it was the Janus-faced nature of the Indian state, strong but beholden to foreign interests, that delayed and stunted Indian cotton industrialization.
• * The Chinese state helped keep labor costs down by repressing workers’ collective action with a strong police or even army presence in cotton mills. During the 1920s, Shanghai mill owners, with the support of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek, went along with the murder of thousands of left-leaning labor leaders.
• When the Imperial Legislative Council was enlarged in India in 1911, mill owner Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata demanded abolition of the excise duties, supported by fifteen of the sixteen Indian members. For freedom fighter Mahatma Gandhi, these duties were “an instance of fiscal injustice…unparalleled in any civilized country of modern times.” Indeed, the struggle over the excise duty on cotton goods was one of the first great flare-ups of the anticolonial struggle,
• The seeds for these plants are more expensive to buy and maintain, but they are also far more productive, thus pushing costs up at the same time that they push cotton prices down. Many Tajik cotton farmers, for instance, are locked in a cycle of debt and forced cotton production just like their counterparts a century ago in India and the American South. Indeed, cotton growers have remained relatively powerless.
• Unlike in the nineteenth century, these modern merchants focus not on the trade in raw cotton, yarn, and cloth, but on the apparel business. They source cotton, yarn, cloth, and clothing from the cheapest suppliers they can locate, without engaging in manufacturing themselves. They then focus their energies on developing channels to sell those goods, with branding, as in the case of the American company Gap (“Get together”), Chinese Meters/bonwe (“Be different”),..  also with the development of new forms of retailing, as in the case of Walmart.. As a result, they foster competition not just between manufacturers and growers, but among states... Workers today are increasingly at the mercy of corporations that can easily shift all forms of production around the globe. Globalization is nothing new in the empire of cotton, but the ability of capitalists to utilize a number of states and thus remain free of the demands of all of them, is new.
• the journey through the empire of cotton reveals that the global countryside should be at the center of our thinking about the origins of the modern world. Although our historical imaginations are usually dominated by cities, factories, and industrial workers, we have seen that much of the emergence of the modern world occurred in the countryside—by the often violent turning of rural people into the creators and consumers of commodities made or used elsewhere. <> This emphasis on the countryside allows for an equally important emphasis—the importance of coercion and violence to the history of capitalism.