Abstract
Sven Beckert has produced a masterpiece of global historiography. His narrative spans the full circle from the Asian dominance of cotton textile manufacturing to the resurgence of Asia in recent times. In the intervening period of industrial capitalism Europe and North America captured the market and built a veritable empire of cotton. Beckert traces this process in great detail. He has drawn on archival material in many countries and also consulted the commercial correspondence of leading capitalists. His voluminous endnotes (119 pages) testify to this enormous effort of original research. Quotes from the correspondence of those who were building the empire of cotton provide glimpses of their lives in turbulent times. Beckert is good at capturing the contemporary atmosphere. He begins his book with a meeting of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce at the high tide of British domination of the empire of cotton, and towards the end of his book he reports about the sale by auction of the furniture of the office of the Liverpool Cotton Exchange in 1963. There was no business to transact any longer.
The central chapter of this book is devoted to the American Civil War (‘A War reverberates around the world’) which marks the demise of slavery which had so far supported the rise of the empire of cotton. The ‘cotton famine’ caused by this war then triggered a sudden spurt of new supplies of cotton, among them from India. The British–Indian government had made many attempts at promoting the cultivation of cotton for export, but due to the prevailing peasant agriculture and the lack of infrastructure this was of no avail. It then so happened that the Indian railways reached the cotton fields of India just in time to relieve the cotton famine caused by the Civil War. In 1860 the railway connected Solapur in southern Maharashtra, the heart of the cotton country, with Mumbai. Indian cotton reached the world market at a time when there had been serious discussions in Europe about recognising the Confederacy and even helping it to defend itself against the Union in order to restore the cotton supply. The arrival of Indian cotton put an end to those discussions. The Indian cotton boom did not last long. It collapsed with the end of the Civil War, but then the cheapness of the raw material and the capital accumulated during the boom helped to start the Indian cotton textile industry.
For Beckert the Civil War also marks the transition from ‘war capitalism’ to the triumph of industrial capitalism. Beckert’s definition of war capitalism remains somewhat elusive. At first sight one would identify war capitalism with the amazing ability of Great Britain to finance wars which finally led to its emergence as a global power. This ‘war capitalism’ was preceded by the ‘Financial Revolution’ in Great Britain which Beckert does not discuss. The British state could raise enormous amounts of money at low interest rates as its creditworthiness was guaranteed by parliament and not by individual monarchs. But this is not what Beckert means by war capitalism. He even asserts that it did not apply to Europe but only to the world outside. It is the essence of the spread of violent expansion overseas which is accompanied by land grabbing, eradication of native populations and their replacement by African slaves. ‘War capitalism’ becomes a synonym for coercive methods of investing capital and forcing labour. By contrast industrial capitalism rules the world by credit and contract, disciplining labour by means of debt bondage which is often not less brutal than slavery. Coercion remains the essence of capitalism, but it now works via the ‘market’ which the capitalists create and which is protected by the state.
Beckert highlights the rise of the nation state which, however, has a Janus face. It protects the capitalist but it also provides the political arena in which workers can assert their claims. In this way both the state and industrial capitalism change and appear in new forms. Enormous gains in productivity due to technological progress help to sustain the empire of cotton dominated by the West. But technology radiates globally and cannot be restricted to specific countries. In fact, inherent contradictions of industrial capitalism emerge in this way. In Great Britain, for instance, the interests of capitalists invested in cotton textile mills diverged from those who produced textile machinery. The latter eagerly supplied Indian capitalists building mills in Mumbai with machinery and know-how to the chagrin of their customers at home who feared Indian competition. Beckert has not highlighted this contradiction. In general, he has shown less interest in the technological aspects of the ‘empire of cotton’ and has concentrated on its commercial aspects and on the control of labour.
An interesting question concerning labour is touched by him only in passing in an endnote. Why was there no attempt at replacing slaves with indentured labourers in cotton production whereas it proved to be very successful in the sugar plantations? He surmises that this was due to the fact that sugar production was more capital intensive than cotton production. But after having shown in great detail how slaves were replaced by sharecroppers in cotton production, he could have pointed out that the harvesting of sugar which required a large labour force for the cutting of cane was unsuitable for sharecropping. Moreover, sugar needed much irrigation which could be organised only on a large scale. Sharecroppers could not have done that.
Beckert has marshalled a stupendous amount of literature for his magnificent work. It is surprising, however, that he missed Sergio Aiolfi’s pioneering study (Calicos und gedrucktes Zeug. Die Entwicklung der englischen Textilveredlung und der Tuchhandel der East India Company, 1650–1750, Stuttgart: Steiner, 1987) of the London cotton printers, who started the chain of import substitution which finally led to the industrial revolution. These printers owned major establishments, some of them employing 400 workers. They profited from the prohibition of the import of Indian printed piece goods which they then imitated. In addition they had the advantage of being close to the customers who were addicted to current fashions. Indian prints were of high quality but they did not vary their patterns. This the London printers did, expanding their market rapidly. In due course, they speeded up their printing work by introducing rotating cylinders. For the white cloth they depended on the East India Company which supplied them with Bengal cloth bleached to their specifications in India. For this the company had to hire workers in India and supervise the production of a semi-finished good for further processing in London. This happened in the early eighteenth century and does not fit in with Wallerstein’s theory that India remained an ‘external arena’ until 1750. The East India Company showed great resourcefulness in procuring white cloth even in the midst of local wars. But then this supply line became precarious and this stimulated the production of cotton cloth in England, the second stage in the process of import substitution. Taking note of the London cotton printers would have added an important element to Beckert’s story of the cotton empire.
The remarks on some gaps in Beckert’s narrative are not meant to detract from the great merit of his work. It provides a synthesis of a vast array of historical facts and can serve as a model for similar efforts in other fields. For those interested in current affairs, the demonstration of the resurgence of Asia in cotton production will be of special interest. A graph prepared by Beckert shows that nowadays 29 per cent of cotton is grown in China, another 29 per cent in South Asia (India and Pakistan) and only 14 per cent in the USA which was in the vanguard of this production in the nineteenth century. Moreover, the production in the USA is supported by enormous state subsidies, a perversion of capitalism. But whereas Asia has regained its leading position in cotton production and also in manufacturing cotton textiles, a new ‘empire of cotton’ has emerged in the retail sector. Beckert points out that nowadays giant retailers like Walmart dominate the market. They search for the countries with the lowest wages and encourage a chase to the bottom. As ‘a new history of capitalism’ Beckert’s book breaks new ground, it deserves to be widely read.