Ironically, their shocking success also awakened the very forces that eventually would marginalize them within the empire they had created.

Europe’s domination of the world’s cotton industry resulted in a wave of deindustrialization throughout much of the rest of the world, enabling a new and different kind of integration into the global economy.

a vibrant but often stultifyingly presentist conversation on globalization.

capitalists are for the first time able to emancipate themselves from particular nation-states,

evidence that they spun and wove flax as early as thirty thousand years

About five thousand years ago, on the Indian subcontinent, people, as far as we know, first discovered the possibility of making thread out of cotton fibers. Almost simultaneously, people living on the coast of what today is Peru, ignorant of developments in South Asia, followed suit.

Today, more than 90 percent of the world’s cotton crop is G. hirsutum cultivars,

“from undisciplined perennial shrubs and small trees with small impermeable seeds sparsely covered by coarse, poorly differentiated seed hairs, to short, compact, annualized plants with copious amounts of long, white lint borne on large seeds that germinate readily.”

Most regions within South Asia produced all the textiles they consumed well into the nineteenth century.

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, had traditionally served the Chinese as a fiber for making cloth.

northern farmers shipped raw cotton south to the lower Yangtze, where farmers used it, along with their own homegrown cotton, to manufacture textiles, some of which they sold back to the north. So vibrant was this interregional trade that cotton cloth accounted for one-fourth of the empire’s commerce.

So many people in so many parts of the world grew cotton, spun it, and wove it into fabrics that it was very likely the world’s most important manufacturing industry.

“cotton was at the center of trade.” Gujarati cotton cloth, as early as the fourth century BCE, came to play a very significant role in the trade between the various lands bordered by the Indian Ocean, and large quantities were sold along the East African coast, to be traded far into the African hinterland.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, Indian cottons, in fact, were what historian Beverly Lemire has called the “first global consumer commodity.”

The ultimate result was a radical reorganization of the world’s leading manufacturing industry: an explosion in how and where cotton was grown and manufactured, and a shocking vision of how the crop could yoke the world together. This recasting of cotton did not at first derive from technical advances, nor from organizational advantages, but instead from a far simpler source: the ability and willingness to project capital and power across vast oceans. With increasing frequency, Europeans inserted themselves, often violently, into the global networks of the cotton trade—within Asia as well as between Asia and the rest of the world—before using that same power to create entirely novel networks between Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

After a series of Anglo-Dutch wars, the Dutch and the British agreed to divide their spheres of interest in Asia, with the Indian textile trade falling mostly into British hands.

By the early seventeenth century, the Dutch and British were replacing the Portuguese in violently regulating the trade in Gujarati textiles, seizing Gujarati ships, and limiting local merchants’ access to the markets of Arabia and, increasingly, Southeast Asia, which were supplied from factories in southern India, along the Coromandel coast, with Madras at its center.

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;

Cotton cloths, in fact, became the company’s most important trading good; by 1766 that cloth constituted more than 75 percent of the East India Company’s total exports.

To secure the very large quantities of Indian textiles they exported, European merchants depended on local traders, banias , who guarded their crucial relationships with the inland farmers and weavers who grew, spun, and wove these increasingly valuable goods. Europeans set up warehouses—so-called factories—along the coast of India, in cities such as Madras, Surat, Dhaka, Cossimbazar, and Calicut, where their agents placed orders with banias for cloth and received the wares ready for shipment.

Banias then advanced cash to various middlemen, who would travel from village to village to advance funds and contract for finished cloth with individual weavers. 6 Eventually the cloth traveled the same chain back to the English factory in Dhaka,

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, but also rice, tobacco, and indigo. Such plantations needed large numbers of workers, and to secure these workers, Europeans deported at first thousands and then millions of Africans to the Americas.

They paid African rulers to go on a hunt for labor, exchanging captives for the products of Indian weavers.

African rulers and merchants almost always demanded cotton cloth in exchange for slaves.

Never before had the products of Indian weavers paid for slaves in Africa to work on the plantations in the Americas to produce agricultural commodities for European consumers.

The deportation of many millions of Africans to the Americas intensified connections to India because it increased pressure to secure more cotton cloth. It was that trade that established a more significant European mercantile presence in Africa. And

as early as the sixteenth century, expanded cotton manufacturing in Europe was contingent on a link to the rapidly expanding markets throughout the Atlantic world—from the cloth markets in Africa to the newly emerging sources of raw cotton in the Americas.

cottons were at first manufactured in the countryside. Merchants, many of them Puritans and other dissenters, advanced raw cotton to peasants, who employed family labor seasonally to spin and weave, before returning the cloth to the merchants who sold it.

As they accumulated capital, they expanded production by providing ever more credit to ever more spinners and weavers, encouraging an “extensification” of production—its geographic dispersal throughout ever larger areas of the countryside. This was the classic putting-out system, quite similar to its incarnations across Asia centuries earlier, or to the British woolens industry. The countryside became ever more industrial and its inhabitants ever more dependent on putting-out work for distant merchants. 18

the heyday of the new machines that would by 1780 revolutionize cotton manufacturing,

European traders were helped in securing cotton cloth in the quantity and quality they needed, and at the price they desired, because their business practices were reinforced with political control of increasingly extensive Indian territories. They came not just as traders, but increasingly as rulers.

British merchants’ increasing investment in the raw cotton trade between India and China by the late eighteenth century, which made them hope for the integration of western Indian cotton tracts into East India Company territories as well. This assertion of private political power by a state-chartered company over distant territories was a revolutionary reconceptualization of economic might.

the “grand Fundamental principle of the Agency System.” Through its Indian agents the company now made direct advances to weavers, something the British had not done in earlier years, which was greatly aided by territorial control and the attendant political authority.

In the 1790s the East India Company even encouraged weavers to relocate to Bombay and produce cloth there—all with the goal of being able to supervise them better

The company hired large numbers of Indians to supervise and implement new rules and regulations, in effect bureaucratizing the cloth market. Extensive new regulations attached weavers legally to the company, making them unable to sell their cloth on the open market. Company agents now inspected cloth on the loom, and endeavored to ensure that the cloth was, as promised, sold to the company. A new system of taxation penalized those weavers who produced for others. 33

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.

cotton from India, slaves from Africa, and sugar from the Caribbean moved across the planet in a complex commercial dance.

In 1774, Parliament decreed that cotton cloth for sale in England had to be made exclusively of cotton spun and woven in England.

Explicitly excluded from the long list of prohibited Indian textiles, however, were those destined for Guinée, that is, textiles used in the slave trade. Slaves, after all, could only be gotten by exchanging them for the cottons from India.

Europe’s movement toward manufacturing cotton textiles was based, in fact, on what might be considered one of history’s most dramatic instances of industrial espionage.

Mercantile cities such as Liverpool, which derived their wealth largely from slavery, became important sources of capital for the emerging cotton industry, and cotton merchants in Liverpool provided ever more credit to manufacturers to enable them to work up the cotton.

as these merchants gained wealth in long-distance trade, they could demand political protections from a government increasingly dependent on extracting revenue from them. 53

starting in the sixteenth century, armed European capitalists and capital-rich European states reorganized the world’s cotton industry.

swift transition from the older world of cotton—discontinuous, multifocal, horizontal—to an integrated, centralized, and hierarchical empire of cotton.

By 1780, Europe in general, and Britain in particular, had become a hub of the world’s cotton networks.

In 1784, on the bank of the stream, Samuel Greg gathered together in a small factory a few newfangled spinning machines, so-called water frames, a collection of orphaned children, putting-out workers from surrounding villages, and a supply of Caribbean cotton.

In an area forming an arc of about thirty-five miles around Manchester, the countryside filled with mills, country towns turned into cities, and tens of thousands of people moved from farms into factories.

water-powered (and, soon, steam-powered)machines, driven by relentless innovation, animated by wage workers, enabled by significant capital accumulation and the willing encouragement 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 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.

Slavery, colonial domination, militarized trade, and land expropriations provided the fertile soil from which a new kind of capitalism would sprout.

a new character, the manufacturer, strode onto the scene, an individual who used capital not to enslave labor or conquer territory, though that remained essential, but to organize workers into great orchestras of machine-based production. Manufacturers’ efforts to reorganize production rested on new ways of mobilizing land, labor, and resources—and called, among other things, for a new connection between capitalists and the state. It was this nexus of social and political power that together animated industrial capitalism, the transformational invention of the Industrial Revolution. It was that innovation that would, as we will see, eventually take wing and travel to other parts of the world.

a new institutional form for organizing economic activity and a world economy in which rapid growth and ceaseless reinvention of production became the norm,

industrial capitalism was creating an ever-changing world, and cotton, the world’s most important industry, was the mainspring of this unprecedented acceleration of human productivity. 7

What British cotton capitalists needed was a dynamic combination of new technologies to lower costs, the further growth of elastic markets that already had begun to expand on the tails of British expansion, and a supportive state with the ability not just to protect global empire but to transform society in Britain itself. 10

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.

1733 with John Kay’s invention of the flying shuttle.

by the 1760s productivity increases became possible with James Hargreaves’s invention of the spinning jenny.

Richard Arkwright’s water frame,

the water frame required larger amounts of energy, thus concentrating production in factories.

1779, Samuel Crompton’s mule was the capstone of these inventions, combining elements of the jenny with those of the water frame (hence its name).

water (which remained the dominant source of power until the 1820s),

In eighteenth-century India, spinners required 50,000 hours to spin a hundred pounds of raw cotton; their cohorts in 1790 Britain, using a hundred-spindle mule, could spin the same amount in just 1,000 hours. By 1795 they needed just 300 hours with the water frame, or, with Roberts’s automated mule after 1825, only 135 hours.

While it had been cheaper to produce cotton cloth in India before 1780, and its quality had been superior, after that year English manufacturers were able to compete in European and Atlantic markets, and after 1830 they even began to compete with Indian producers in India itself. Once Indians began using British-manufactured yarn and cloth, it signaled to all that the world’s cotton industry had been turned on its head. 17

Profits were made by increasing the productivity of human labor. This would in fact become a defining feature of industrial capitalism.

British cottons now rapidly replaced Indian cottons on world markets. While in fiscal year 1800–1801, piece goods valued at £1.4 million were still exported from Bengal to Britain, by 1809–10, only eight years later, cloth exports had been reduced to just a bit more than £330,000—and would continue to fall rapidly thereafter. As a result, Indian weavers, who had dominated global cotton textile markets for centuries, went into free fall. In 1800, commercial resident John Taylor wrote a

The truly heroic invention was the economic, social, and political institutions in which these machines were embedded.

An 1808 English visitor saw in Manchester a town that was “abominably filthy, the Steam Engine is pestiferous, the Dyehouses noisesome and offensive, and the water of the river as black as ink.”

As late as 1791, most of the cotton grown for manufacturing purposes around the world was produced by small farmers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and consumed locally. 3 When cotton manufacturing exploded in Great Britain, it was unclear where enough cotton would come from to feed its hungry factories. Yet despite these challenges, never before had an industry grown so large so fast. Indeed, it grew as large as it did, as fast as it did, not despite but because of its peculiar spatial arrangements and its ability to draw on slave labor.

the first major industry in human history that lacked locally procured raw materials.

the first globally integrated manufacturing industry.

in 1780 a massive hurricane destroyed much of the island’s sugar infrastructure, which could not easily be rebuilt because of limited access to raw materials from revolution-torn North America. Transformed essentially into a huge cotton plantation, Barbados became the most productive cotton island within the British Empire. Similarly, Tobago planters had exported no cotton in 1770 but shipped a full 1.5 million pounds in 1780.

many of the slaves who were doing the backbreaking labor to grow cotton had been and were still being sold for cotton cloth that the European East India companies shipped from various parts of India to western Africa.

the true importance of the Caribbean planters was not the cotton that was shipped, though that remained essential, but the institutional innovation that the Caribbean experiment produced: the re-creation of the countryside through bodily coercion, something only possible under war capitalism. Cotton grown by slaves motivated and financed the unprecedented incorporation of newly depopulated territories into the world economy. Slavery and land expropriation on a continental scale created the expansive, and elastic, global cotton supply network necessary for the Industrial Revolution, and with it the mechanisms through which the needs and rhythms of industrial life in Europe could be transferred to the global countryside.

Planters yearned for a device that would more quickly separate seed from fiber. In 1793, Eli Whitney, only a few months after arriving in Savannah from his college days at Yale, built the first working model of a new kind of cotton gin that was able to rapidly remove the seeds of upland cotton. Overnight, his machine increased ginning productivity by a factor of fifty.

the same patch could not be used for more than a few years without either planting legumes on it or applying expensive guano to it.

The settlers eventually won a bloody and centuries-long war, succeeding in turning the land of Native Americans into land that was legally “empty.” This was a land whose social structures had been catastrophically weakened or eliminated, a land without most of its people and thus without the entanglements of history.

by 1850, 67 percent of U.S. cotton grew on land that had not been part of the United States half a century earlier.

Cotton, until the advent of mechanized harvesting during the 1940s, was a labor-intensive crop. Even more than the hours required to spin and weave, the shortage of workers to harvest was the most constraining factor in its production.

the internal slave trade moved up to a million slaves forcefully to the Deep South, most to grow cotton. 23

85 percent of all cotton picked in the South in 1860 was grown on units larger than a hundred acres; the planters who owned those farms owned 91.2 percent of all slaves.

aside from the spike in innovation around the invention of Eli Whitney’s gin in the 1790s technological progress in cotton agriculture was limited, productivity gains on plantations could only result from a reorganization of labor.

Since the expansion of cotton agriculture depended on the advance of credit, sometimes secured by mortgages on slaves, most of which derived from the London money market, its patterns now followed the competitive logic of markets rather than the whimsy of personal aspiration and regional circumstance—capital moved to wherever cotton could be produced in the greatest quantities and at the cheapest cost. To the great lament of southern planters, the factor—a merchant who would sell a planter’s cotton, supply him with goods, and provide credit—and with him the London money market, was a decisive source of their wealth and power. But the London money market and the Lancashire manufacturers depended just as much on the local experts in the violent expropriation of land and labor.

By 1850, one British observer estimated that 3.5 million people in the United Kingdom were employed by the country’s cotton industry—all subject to the whims of American planters and their tenuous hold on their nation’s politics. 42

In 1789, Providence merchant Moses Brown hired a skilled British cotton worker, Samuel Slater, and built the first successful spinning factory in America.

Early cotton industrialists such as the Cabot, Brown, and Lowell families all had ties to the slave trade, the West Indian provision trade, and the trade in agricultural commodities grown by slaves. The “lords of the lash” and the “lords of the loom” were, yet again, tightly linked. 20

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.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, production of synthetic fiber began to outpace cotton textile manufacturing. Today, about 52 million metric tons of petroleum-based synthetic fiber is produced annually to make, for instance, the fleece jacket you might be wearing, almost twice the worldwide figure for cotton. 4

the emergence of new, genetically modified cotton plants has doubly amplified the burdens of many farmers. 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.

it is the way the elaborate networks that move the fiber through its various iterations are held together. 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. Manufacturers no longer “push” their products upon consumers; instead, products are “pulled” across oceans by retailers, allowing them to pit manufacturers, contractors, and workers against one another to ensure the quickest speed and lowest cost.

By the mid-twentieth century, governments had transformed the global countryside; the capitalization of everyday life had reached an unprecedented level. Most of the world’s people were now inextricably tied to both commodity production and consumption.

the constant shifting recombination of various systems of labor, and various compositions of capital and polities is the very essence of capitalism. As capitalists search for ever cheaper labor, better infrastructure, and greater markets, they combine and recombine the world’s workers and consumers, and the world’s lands and its raw materials, in ever new ways. 17