62 pages • 2 hours read
Sven BeckertEmpire of Cotton
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “A War Reverberates Around the World”
Throughout the preceding chapters, Beckert repeatedly emphasizes the colossal importance of American slavery to the global cotton industry:
On the eve of the Civil War, raw cotton constituted 61 percent of the value of all U.S. products shipped abroad. Before the beginnings of the cotton boom in the 1780s, North America had been a promising but marginal player in the global economy. Now, in 1861, the flagship of global capitalism, Great Britain, found itself dangerously dependent on the white gold shipped out of New York, New Orleans, Charleston, and other American ports. By the late 1850s, cotton grown in the United States accounted for 77 percent of the 800 million pounds of cotton consumed in Britain (243).
But as the abolitionist movement grew, and as the demands of Northern industrialists and Southern enslavers diverged dramatically, the Manchester Cotton Supply Association began to realize how “treacherous” (244) a foundation slavery was to the cotton industry. The rise of the abolitionist movement, the fear of rebellions, and the increasingly divergent needs of Northern industrialists versus Southern enslavers all fed these anxieties over slavery’s future.
Those anxieties finally boiled over on April 12, 1861 when Confederate troops attacked a federal garrison at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, thus igniting the American Civil War, the deadliest conflict in US history and also “the world’s first truly global raw materials crisis” (246). Hoping to force Britain to formally recognize the Confederate government, the Confederacy placed a ban on all cotton exports. For the South, the gambit backfired horribly, as the North managed to enforce its own blockade of most cotton exports, depriving the Confederacy of its only bargaining chip with Britain.
As hundreds of thousands died on American battlefields, “a mad scramble ensued” (246) in Europe to meet the sudden demand for raw cotton. While the British cotton industry was able to limp forward for a couple years due to extremely high cotton imports during the late 1850s, “by 1863, unemployed workers rioted in the streets of several British cotton towns, underscoring the explosive social consequences of the cotton famine” (247). Facing little choice, Britain finally embarked on a long-delayed effort to recast the Indian countryside to suit the needs of the global cotton economy. Led by Manchester Chamber of Commerce member Henry Ashworth, industry leaders “pressed a newly receptive British government for massive infrastructure investments, changes in criminal codes to make the adulteration of cotton a crime, and new property laws to create clearly defined and easily marketable property in land” (252). The construction of railroads in India, for instance, had the dual function of improving transportation of cotton and making it easier to mobilize troops to subdue potential rebellions from farmers. Meanwhile, British intellectuals who normally endorsed a laissez-faire approach to capitalism nevertheless supported the state’s intervention in India’s economy on rather racist grounds. The Economist, for example, likened India to “a child both blind and deaf” in need of “education” (254).
The Indian experiment was a success for its European colonizers in many respects. Beckert writes, “Whereas India had only contributed 16 percent of Britain’s supply of raw cotton in 1860, and 1.1 percent of France’s in 1857, it contributed 75 percent in 1862 in Britain and as much as 70 percent in France” (255). In effect, the fall of slavery led to a rise in colonialism: “Colonialism had become a matter of urgent self-interest, as capitalists grasped how vulnerable their global networks and huge capital investments were to local disruption and how unstable slavery had become” (258).
Finally, the relative success of colonial experiments in India and elsewhere worked to undermine the Confederacy’s global standing, as the European markets were no longer so desperately dependent on it. According to US Secretary of State William Seward, “The insurrectionary cotton States will be blind to their own welfare if they do not see how their prosperity and all their hopes are passing away, when they find Egypt, Asia Minor, and India supplying the world with cotton, and California furnishing the gold for its purchase” (264). Moreover, Beckert argues that the eventual emancipation of enslaved people in America following the Civil War was not a foregone conclusion. Thanks to Europe’s diminished reliance on American enslaved labor, the Civil War turned from “a sectional war into a war of emancipation” (265).
Chapter 10 Summary: “Global Reconstruction”
While new opportunities for raw cotton had opened up in India and Africa, cotton industrialists were still eager to mobilize newly freed people in America in the cultivation of cotton, even if they realized production would never be as cheap or fruitful as it was under the model of slavery before the Civil War. Adding even more urgency to these efforts was the fact that the demand for cotton goods was never higher, as consumption doubled between 1860 and 1890. As for freedpeople, they had little desire to return to the plantation, even if it meant receiving wages for their labor. Beckert writes, “Freedpeople believed, for good reasons, that only access to land would secure their newfound freedom, and they argued that their support for the Union war effort and their unpaid labor under slavery had given them the right to such lands” (283).
Despite the fierce reluctance of freedpeople, former enslavers “sought to restore a plantation world as close to slavery as possible” (282). Under these new agreements, freedpeople would receive wages or, more frequently, a share of the crop, but the work stipulations were often extremely onerous, requiring workers to toil away from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week. As seen previously in virtually every large-scale effort to mobilize workers, coercion played a major role. Former enslavers, having restored much of their political influence under the sympathetic presidency of Andrew Johnson, convinced state legislatures to pass “black codes” that among other restrictions made transient freedpeople subject to vagrancy laws, lest they sign employment contracts with former masters.
With the help of Republican allies in the US Congress, freedpeople fought back against these restrictions, and by 1867, “a social compromise emerged, in which African-American families worked particular plots of land without day-to-day supervision, received supplies from landlords, and would then be paid with a share of the crop they had grown” (285). While this arrangement may have been satisfactory in theory, in practice it created widespread poverty among sharecroppers. Beckert writes, “When planters and merchants provided croppers with the supplies they needed, they charged exorbitant interest. Consequently, the crop was barely sufficient to pay creditors at the end of the harvest season” (286). Moreover, the efforts of African-Americans to politically mobilize in the face of extreme poverty were repeatedly stymied by white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which wielded threatened and actual violence against Black sharecroppers and the activists who worked on their behalf with virtually no legal consequences: “By the turn of the century, cotton growers still lived in grinding poverty with few rights and no political voice” (287).
The new sharecropping model, along with the rise of white yeoman cotton farmers, helped the United States regain its position as the world’s leading producer of raw cotton: “By 1870, their total production had surpassed their previous high, set in 1860” (291). Meanwhile, though India’s importance inevitably declined as a result of the reopening of American cotton markets, its cotton exports still increased dramatically, “expanding from 260 million pounds in 1858 to nearly 1.2 billion pounds in 1914” (292). Much of this was due to the global implementation of the telegraph, which allowed cotton orders to be made over long distances. Meanwhile, Egypt also re-emerged as an important cotton provider in the last half of the 19th century, though its dependence on European credit and its eventual inability to service its debt resulted in its losing sovereignty in 1882 and being taken over by the British government.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Deconstructions”
Here, Beckert goes into detail about the various groups who lost their livelihoods in the new post-slavery, Imperial era of the cotton industry. These include sowkars, Indian merchants who once dominated India’s export industry but were pushed aside by Europeans like the Volkart Brothers, a group of Swiss merchants who vertically integrated their businesses, cutting out the middlemen between growers and manufacturers. In Egypt and Anatolia as well, local capitalists could not compete with European merchants who, thanks to the telegraph and greater railroad infrastructure, came to dominate every step of the cotton commodity chain. Even in the United States, local merchants known as factors found themselves muscled out of the cotton trade.
In a counterintuitive development, Beckert writes that merchants’ own success led to the thinning out of their ranks: “So successful had merchants become in connecting distant growers and manufacturers to one another that their own labor had become less and less important” (319). Furthermore, the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866 made it far easier for European buyers and financiers to obtain information about growing conditions without a vast network of expert merchants at their disposal. State power also played a major role, as the US Department of Agriculture and Census Bureau each collected and disseminated data about crop yields and other aspects of the domestic cotton industry.
The last half of the 19th century also decimated weavers and spinners in India. As Britain flexed its colonial muscles to recast India as an export market of raw cotton, local artisans across the countryside found it much harder to obtain raw cotton, more and more of which was sent to European manufacturers for their mills: “As a result, the number of weavers decreased by as much as 50 percent during the American war, with former weavers moving into agricultural labor” (329).
An even more dramatic consequence of this recasting of the colonial countryside was that as farmers used more and more land to grow cotton, they used less and less to grow food. This was largely the result of Britain’s decision to charge individuals in its colonial lands taxes that could be paid in cotton. Beckert writes, “In 1877 and again in the late 1890s, Berar, as well as northeastern Brazil, witnessed the starvation of millions of cultivators as cotton prices fell while food grain prices rose, putting food out of reach of many cotton producers” (336). Citing the British medical journal The Lancet, Beckert estimates that in India alone, famine resulted in the deaths of 19 million people over the course of the 1890s.
Chapters 9-11 Analysis
These chapters emphasize the extent to which slavery—and in particular, slavery utilized in the production of cotton—played an enormous role in the origins, the development, and the conclusion to the American Civil War, the deadliest conflict in US history. Unlike Britain, which effectively exported its war capitalism to the American South and, to a lesser extent, India, the United States was the only nation where an economy of war capitalism coexisted with an economy of industrial capitalism within the same borders. As a result, a reckoning between these two regions—the industrial North and the pro-slavery South—was virtually inevitable. By illustrating this, Beckert debunks several myths regarding the origins of the Civil War.
In the years and decades following the Civil War, several Southern politicians and writers sought to advance a theory known as the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Under this revisionist ideology, slavery is ignored as a major cause of the Civil War as adherents instead point to Northern aggression in the face of the sovereignty of Southern states and the desire to maintain a beneficent and chivalrous Southern way of life. In Beckert’s narrative, the South’s political and economic reliance on slavery was by far the most significant factor in causing the Civil War. He writes, “American slavery had begun to threaten the very prosperity it produced, as the distinctive political economy of the cotton South collided with the incipient political economy of free labor and domestic industrialization of the North” (245). Beckert adds that the Southern establishment viewed the ascendancy of President Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party as an existential threat to slavery, which the South considered “vital to secure its economic, and even more so its political viability” (245).
While the South’s motivations for rebelling against the North were readily apparent, the stated goals of the North regarding the war and slavery in general were initially unclear. It was not a foregone conclusion that slavery, in the event of the Southern defeat or surrender, would be abolished across the United States. Beckert points out that well into the Civil War, several European observers in particular were unable “to imagine an empire of cotton without slavery” (265). While the importance of President Lincoln’s 1862 Emancipation Proclamation cannot be overstated, it was more a symbolic gesture than an actual legal and enforceable dictate freeing massive amounts of enslaved people from bondage. Beckert points out that enslaved laborers’ own role in mounting an agrarian revolution, alongside Lincoln’s political revolution, was of enormous importance in ensuring that a Northern victory would truly mean an end to slavery:
Considering these fears, it was the more remarkable that 4 million slaves in the United States—among them the world’s most important cotton growers—gained their freedom during or immediately after the war. Encouraged by their perception of their masters’ weakness in the face of a national government bent on subduing the rebels, slaves embarked upon an agrarian insurrection. By deserting plantations, withdrawing their labor power, giving intelligence to federal troops, and eventually taking up arms as Union soldiers, American slaves pressed to make a sectional war into a war of emancipation. And they succeeded. Never before and never thereafter did cotton growers revolt with similar success, their strength fortuitously amplified by a deep and irreconcilable split within the nation’s elite (265).
Seen through the lens of the cotton industry, Beckert’s narrative also emphasizes the ways in which formerly enslaved people’s transition into the life of freedpeople after the war was far from smooth. Indeed, Beckert writes of a struggle over labor in America’s cotton fields, a struggle that “began the moment the fighting ended, when plantation owners, devastated by the economic and political effects of defeat in war, sought to restore a plantation world as close to slavery as possible” (282). These efforts were enabled in large part by President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor and a Democrat who sympathized far more with ex-Confederates than Lincoln or the so-called Radical Republican abolitionists in Congress did. For example, Beckert points out that “Freedpeople believed, for good reasons, that only access to land would secure their newfound freedom” (283). As such, they were eager to reap the benefits of Special Field Orders No. 15, a post-war promise that freedpeople would receive a parcel of land no larger than 40 acres along with access to mules seized by the Union Army during the Civil War.
President Johnson, however, rescinded this order while working to restore much of the Confederate land confiscated by the Union Army to its original owners. With no land on which to settle, many freedpeople were forced into a life of mobility which in turn made them subject to the same kind of vagrancy laws Britain used to force factory workers to sign restrictive labor contracts. Once again, Beckert underlines the extent to which coercion—even in the absence of outright slavery—is a key component of mobilizing labor in the age of industrial capitalism. The use of legal and political apparatuses to all but force freedpeople into poverty-inducing sharecropping arrangements reflects another of Beckert’s themes: the importance of the state in perpetuating industrial capitalism.
While America grappled with the Civil War and the end of slavery, Britain pursued a set of objectives it had long sought to complete: recasting the Indian subcontinent to suit the needs of its empire of cotton. Here, Beckert explores how the bona fides of free market capitalists in European are largely situational and subject to their own prejudices and biases. The author identifies The Economist as particularly brazen in its abandonment of its own laissez-faire policies in regards to India. (Laissez-faire is French for “let do” and refers to a capitalism system in which the state does not intervene in private markets or transactions). Beckert writes:
Even The Economist, the world’s leading publicist for the benefits of laissez-faire capitalism, eventually endorsed state involvement in securing cotton, especially from India. It was hard to justify these steps in terms of the ‘laws of supply and demand,’ but eventually The Economist—and with it may others—found a way: ‘The answer, at least a great part of the answer is, that there appears to exist in many important parts of Indian society very peculiar difficulties, which to some extent impede and counteract the action of the primary motives upon which political economy depends for its efficacy.’ In India, it continued, ‘The primitive prerequisites of the common political economy are not satisfied. You have a good-demanding Englishman, but, in plain English, not a good-supplying Indian.’ For that reason, ‘There is no relaxation of the rules of the political economy in the interference of Government in a state of facts like this. Government does not interfere to prevent the effect and operation of ‘supply and demand,’ but to create that operation to ensure that effect. There is no greater anomaly in recommending an unusual policy for a State destitute of the ordinary economical capacities, than in recommending an unusual method of education for a child both blind and deaf (254).
Considering The Economist’s willingness to betray its own free market bona fides to suit the needs of its home country—and to do so under a ghastly pall of racism—examples like the one cited above may hold relevance to modern debates over libertarianism and other forms of free market capitalism. Moreover, India’s unwillingness to subjugate itself to European capitalists was not a result of it being “destitute of ordinary economical capacities” (254). Rather, it was because India’s fertile land and access to Asian markets gave it little incentive to place its labor and land resources under European control. As is made clear by the millions who died in famines around the turn of the century—at least in part the result of British intervention in India’s subsistence farming and an outpouring of credit from Western bankers—the subcontinent had a great deal to lose in partnering so closely with European industrialists.
