Empire of Cotton

“When we think of capitalism, we think of wage workers, yet this prior phase of capitalism was based not on free labor but on slavery. 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. Latter-day capitalism rests upon the rule of law and powerful institutions backed by the state, but capitalism’s early phase, although ultimately requiring state power to create world-spanning empires, was frequently based on the unrestrained actions of private individuals—the domination of masters over slaves and of frontier capitalists over indigenous inhabitants.” 

Here and throughout the book, Beckert reminds readers that modern capitalism was built on a foundation of violence and lawlessness, a legacy which many modern proponents of free markets don’t always recognize.

“Unlike these commodities, cotton, however, has two labor-intensive stages—one in the fields, the other in factories. Sugar and tobacco did not create large industrial proletariats in Europe. Cotton did. Tobacco did not result in the rise of vast new manufacturing enterprises. Cotton did. Indigo growing and processing did not create huge new markets for European manufacturers. Cotton did. Rice cultivation in the Americas did not lead to an explosion of both slavery and wage labor. Cotton did.” 

This is one of the clearest arguments for why Beckert chose to focus his history of capitalism on cotton versus other industries. Because so much of this narrative focuses on the relationship between enslaved labor and wage labor—and the varying degrees of private and public coercion involved in each—it makes sense to focus the book on a trade that relied heavily on both forms of labor. 

“Some shrewd observers surely noted that the first European cotton producers, both the northern Italians and the southern Germans, failed at least in part because they had not subjugated those people who supplied them with cotton. It was a lesson that would not be forgotten.”

Beckert makes a strong argument that the biggest obstacle to building a successful European cotton market was not a lack of innovation or talent, but rather an unrealized ambition to subjugate and exert near total control over those individuals who supply the market with raw inputs.

“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.” 

Beckert throws cold water on the idea that Europe’s dominance of commodity chains was the result of anything other than the brute force of its state-sponsored private navies, underlining once again the importance of war capitalism to the ascent of modern capitalism.

“These networks were dominated by the joint venture of private capital and increasingly robust states. Together their commitment to armed trade, industrial espionage, prohibitions, restrictive trade regulations, domination of territories, capturing of labor, removal of indigenous inhabitants, and the state-sponsored creation of territories that were then left to the far-reaching domination of capitalists had created a new economic order.” 

Rather than paint an adversarial picture between capitalism and an interventionist state, Beckert details the extent to which the two work in concert with one another to build markets.

“Greg had deep roots in war capitalism, its violent appropriation of territory and slave labor, as well its reliance on the imperial state to secure new technologies and markets. He had secured his part of the family fortune through Hillsborough Estate, a profitable sugar plantation on the Caribbean Island of Dominica, where he held hundreds of enslaved Africans until the final abolition of slavery in British territories in 1834.” 

Even Greg, the entrepreneur whose ingenuity helped kick-start the Industrial Revolution, was deeply enmeshed in war capitalism, specifically slavery. This underlines how slavery and human misery cast a pall over the original “founder’s myth” of industrial capitalism.

“Slavery, in other words, was as essential to the new empire of cotton as proper climate and good soil.” 

In addition to once again emphasizing the importance of slavery to the cotton industry and capitalism in general, this quote establishes the two most important preconditions for a thriving global market in cotton: land and labor, both of which the United States had in abundance.

“The first steamboats appeared on the Mississippi in 1817, reducing transport costs, and by the 1830s, railroads connected the new hinterland to river and seaports. The most modern technologies thus made the most brutal exploitation of human labor possible.” 

While technology is often framed in capitalist narratives as an agent of progress, Beckert describes how technological advancements tended to fuel war capitalism’s most extreme edges. This idea is revisited when the telegraph allows cotton industrialists to vertically integrate cotton commodity chains, thus allowing for a more efficient exploitation of colonial labor in India.

“While brutal coercion weighed like a nightmare upon millions of American slaves, the potential end of such violence was a nightmare to those who gathered the fabulous profits of the empire of cotton.” 

Beckert emphasizes the appalling lack of humanity on the part of cotton industrialists who, fearing the loss of profits, felt victimized by abolitionist efforts while expending little empathy on the enslaved people who suffered as a result of the cotton trade.

“It was on the back of cotton, and thus on the backs of slaves, that the U.S. economy ascended in the world.” 

While the American experiment is often viewed as an unmitigated success in economic terms, Beckert reminds readers not to forget how essential the scourge of slavery was to facilitating that success.

“This was also the case in the slave territories within 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.” 

Most Western countries, like Britain and France, succeeded in the cotton industry because they effectively exported their war capitalism to faraway lands, while maintaining basic freedoms for individuals who lived within their countries’ borders. Not true for the United States, although this configuration was clearly not sustainable and ultimately led to the American Civil War.

“Turning people into factory workers meant turning them into wage workers as well. For most people in Europe and elsewhere, however, wages had not been central to their livelihood. Many who lived off the land or made artisan crafts, not surprisingly, had little incentive to become factory workers. A farmer grew his own sustenance; an artisan created goods he could sell or barter. A factory worker, by contrast, possessed nothing but the power of labor.” 

While many modern workers take wage labor for granted—or, more recently, a desirable state of affairs compared to the gig economy or tips-based employment—this was not the natural state of affairs for most of capitalism’s history. While the transition from subsistence farming to wage labor is viewed as evidence of progress by some, it resulted in the impoverishment and even starvation for millions, especially in India around the turn of the 20th century.

“Such preponderance of women workers resulted all too often in the invisibility of the cotton industry, overshadowed by the male-dominated coal-mining, iron-making, and railroading industries.” 

Beckert offers another reason why he focuses his narrative on the cotton industry: It has been too often ignored or downplayed by historians because women made up most of its factory workers. This is but one example where the accomplishments of women have been fully or partially erased from the historical record. 

“A recent analysis of the life expectancy and heights of workers determined that ‘no increase in food consumption, no increase in longevity or nutritional status, and no improvement in housing’ resulted from the Industrial Revolution.” 

While the Industrial Revolution created wild profits for merchants, bankers, and factory owners, very little of the spoils went to the untold millions performing backbreaking labor in Europe’s factories. This statistic calls into question once again the premise that the Industrial Revolution symbolized progress over the old subsistence and putting-out economic models.

“Once the control and mobilization of labor were ‘nationalized’ within powerful states, and indeed became matters of state, workers also gained new opportunities to improve their situation by appealing to the state itself and mobilizing within national political spaces.” 

Beckert identifies one of the grand ironies of the industrial revolution. By relying on state intervention to help them mobilize workers, industrialists were eventually forced to cede their tight controls over labor after these workers appealed to the very same levers of state in order to gain reforms like eight-hour workdays and weekends.

“Funds for both advances and purchases were provided by drafts on Baring Brothers & Company. It was this credit, wielded by merchants like the Barings, that made the brutality of war capitalism more and more efficient, and thus made industrial capitalism more and more profitable.”

In addition to technology, credit was a great enabler of war capitalism’s bleeding edge. This practice finds its most brutal expression in the modern era in India, where hundreds of highly indebted farmers commit suicide each year.

“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.” 

In addition to emphasizing the extent to which America’s ascent on the world stage was made possible by slavery, this passage also underlines Britain’s dependence on the inhumane institution, despite outlawing it in its own borders.

“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.” 

This quote calls into question the faith of free market capitalists, suggesting that for many of them their adherence to laissez-faire principles is merely opportunistic and situational.

“That struggle 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.” 

While the end of American slavery was a great success for African-Americans and humanity in general, this quote emphasizes how capitalists continued to use coercion and violence to mobilize African-American agricultural workers long after the Civil War ended.

“Sovereignty over labor, they all understood, became linked to territorial control. By the late nineteenth century contemporary observers treated as commonplace that the transition to cotton production for world markets rested most fundamentally on that domination of territory by newly empowered imperial states.” 

With American slavery at its end, the cotton industry needed a new source of cheap labor to fill the void. With the help of powerful states, European cotton industrialists found their answer with varying degrees of success, in the as-yet unindustrialized worlds in India, Africa, and South America.

“The regime of violence was so terrifying that as late as the 1970s, the word ‘cotton’ still evoked, according to two historians, ‘an almost automatic response: suffering.’” 

While the book has no shortage of instances where cotton industrialists resort to the brutal toolbox of war capitalism to mobilize workers, this is a particularly striking example, both for its visceral nature and its relatively recent timeframe.

“Workers’ successes in improving their conditions almost always lead to the reallocation of capital. For the last several decades, Walmart and other retail giants have continually moved their production from one poor country to a slightly poorer one, lured by the promise of workers even more eager and even more inexpensive. Even Chinese production is now threatened by lower-wage producers.” 

While labor reforms represent progress for the specific workers who win them, Beckert argues that on a global scale these victories can have the opposite effect, leading corporations to search the world over for ever-more exploitable and vulnerable workforces.

“Slavery, colonialism, and forced labor, among other forms of violence, were not aberrations in the history of capitalism, but were at its very core. The violence of market making—forcing people to labor in certain locations and in certain ways—has been a constant throughout the history of the empire of cotton.” 

While violence is often viewed as a tool of primitive capitalists, abandoned with the expansion of modern capitalism, Beckert argues that this brutality is a core feature of market-making that persists to this day in many industries, particularly cotton and other textiles.