Empire of Cotton

Between 1861 and 1930, Britain’s share of the world’s cotton machinery plummeted from 61 percent to 34 percent, signaling a decline across the North Atlantic giants in cotton manufacturing. This came largely as a result of workers in industrialized nations demanding better working conditions, better pay, and fewer hours. The nations that most readily picked up the slack were Japan, China, and India, where the number of cotton spindles increased by factors of seven, four, and eight, respectively, between the turn of the century and 1930. Beckert writes, “As workers organized across the United States and Europe, their collective action increased labor costs. This made low-wage producers elsewhere competitive on global markets” (382). Ironically, these upstarts in the global South filled their cotton mills with the very workers who had been displaced by the European recasting of the countryside decades earlier. With laborers in places like China working twice as many hours as in New England while receiving 6.1 percent of the wages, “cotton manufacturing became a ‘race to the bottom’” (390).

These trends were also witnessed inside the United States. While in 1879 northern states counted 17 times as many spindles as the South, by 1965 the South outnumbered the North in spindles by a ratio of 24-to-1. Beckert writes, “Lax labor laws, low taxes, low wages, and the absence of trade unions made the South alluring to cotton manufacturers” (394). Many of the workers in these southern cotton mills were African-Americans fed up with sharecropping. Beckert writes that other perennial manufacturing giants were unable to follow the US’s model because “no other industrial country contained within itself such uneven regional conditions or the legacy of slavery” (395).

While places like the American South, Japan, and Brazil overcame their own major challenges in their efforts to industrialize, these challenges paled in comparison to those faced in places like India, which still operated under colonial rule. Beckert writes, “Dominated by a foreign colonial power, Indian industrialists faced insurmountable hurdles to molding the kind of state they so urgently wanted—hurdles that eventually would draw them into an anticolonial struggle that, while successful, would also weaken their dominance over workers and peasants” (410). Indeed, the fight for Indian independence from Britain often focused on imperial cotton policies: “Symbolizing the great significance of cotton to nationalism and anticolonialism, […] [Indian freedom fighter Mohandas ‘Mahatma’] Gandhi not only wrote a history of cotton in India, but also publicly spun cotton on a spinning wheel, the same mechanism that the Indian National Congress chose in 1930 as the centerpiece for its flag” (420). Once India gained independence in 1947, the state became beholden to its people rather than its imperial overlords in Britain. As such, Indian cotton workers’ wages rose by 65 percent between 1950 and 1963. Beckert writes, “As cotton workers assumed important role in anticolonial struggles, they would eventually translate their role into further social and economic gains” (425).

Meanwhile, China embarked on its own project of domestic industrialization. By 1916, China was the world’s lowest-cost producer of cotton goods. It accomplished this feat by mobilizing tens of thousands of workers, most of them women and children, putting them to work for twelve-hour days, and paying them a daily wage equivalent to 10 US cents. When these workers attempted to improve their lots by organizing into collective action, the state was instrumental in repressing these movements. Beckert writes, “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” (416).

In 1963, a group of Liverpool cotton barons met at the Cotton Exchange Building not to lord over their empire but, literally, to sell off the furniture of the Liverpool Cotton Association. Of this event, Beckert writes, “Europe’s reign over the cotton empire ended with a whimper” (427). Despite its former glory, Britain’s share of global cotton cloth exports now amounted to only 2.8 percent of the global total.

Beckert takes stock of the new global cotton market: “While a century ago your shirt would have likely been sewn in a shop in New York or Chicago, using fabric spun and woven in New England, from bolls grown in the American South, today it is probably made of cotton grown in China, India, Uzbekistan, or Senegal, spun and woven in China, Turkey, or Pakistan, and then manufactured in a place like Bangladesh or Vietnam” (428). Thanks to extremely lax labor laws in China, India, Pakistan, and elsewhere, 98 percent of all clothing sold in the US are manufactured abroad, a massive reversal more akin to the pre-1780 cotton industry which was centered around South and Central Asia.

But while the cotton industry has returned to its roots geographically, the legacies of coercion and suffering inaugurated during the last two centuries persist. In countries like Uzbekistan, governments employ the same tactics of coercion used by European colonial powers to mobilize farmers to produce cotton. In India, farmers go into deep debt by relying on expensive genetically modified cotton plants to produce viable crop yields. Beckert writes, “In India in 2005, after a season of weak rains and crop failures, hundreds of heavily indebted farmers of genetically modified cotton committed suicide by drinking their own pesticides, a trend that persists to this day” (432).

The modern era has also seen the rise of new kind of merchant: the giant corporate retailer. Beckert writes, “Instead of manufacturers, or cotton or cloth merchants, it is massive retailers like Walmart, Metro, and Carrefour that have come to dominate the commodity chains linking contractors, subcontractors, farmers, mills, and sweatshops” (433). These retailers, having benefited greatly from the expansion of consumer markets around the world, have so successfully organized global production that they rely far less on the might of any particular state than the merchants of old. In Beckert’s view, “In today’s empire of cotton, merchants have finally managed to emancipate themselves from their previous dependence on particular states. As a result, the protections that strong nation-states offered, to at least some of their workers, for at least part of the twentieth century, have been gradually eroded” (437).

Despite the rather dismal outlook for the growers and factory workers of the modern cotton industry, Beckert ends his book on an optimistic note, writing, “The human capacity to organize our efforts in ever more productive ways should give us hope, the hope that our unprecedented domination over nature will allow us also the wisdom, the power, and the strength to create a society that serves the needs of all the world’s people—an empire of cotton that is not only productive, but also just” (442).