Abstract
As its subtitle indicates, this voluminous work (443 pages of text plus 139 pages of notes and an index running to 24 pages) is a history of world capitalism with the main thrust placed on cotton cultivation and manufacture. That cotton textile industry was the leading sector of the English Industrial Revolution has always been well recognised (cf. Paul Mantoux’s classic work, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, English transl., revised ed., New York, 1962, pp. 189–270). The fact that England where the industrial manufacture of cotton textiles originated did not produce cotton itself has also long aroused curiosity and its initial dependence on cotton obtained from the West Indian slave plantations has been much stressed. What Beckert in the present work emphasises is that from an early stage (the 1790s) Britain became dependent on cotton produced in the slave plantations of the United States. Again, this recalls a well-known fact of American history which is that Whitney’s cotton-gin (1793) made slave labour in US cotton plantations economically profitable and initiated a great expansion of slavery in that country. What Beckert does very well is to underline the connection between this development, making possible a huge increase in US cotton exports to England and the expansion of textile industry in Lancashire. In other words, the growth of slavery in US made possible the factory system (with its mass of free wage labour) in England, the first industrial country of the world. This relationship to him is simply part of what he calls ‘war capitalism’, which produced ‘colonialism, the embrace of slavery, the expropriation of lands’, throughout the world (p. 173).
Beckert shows how from England, mechanised cotton textiles industry spread to other countries, mainly in Europe and America, while he also discusses the limitations in the spread of both cotton cultivation for export and manufacture of machine spinning and weaving. He argues that until the American Civil War (1861–65) peasant production networks remained mainly tied to local hand-spinning and weaving. The Civil War, by drying up American supplies and forcing up cotton prices (Chapter 9), radically changed the situation in India (pp. 25–56, 264). He illustrates this with how cotton exports now changed the agricultural picture in Berar (pp. 294–97). In return for its large cotton exports, India now received increasing quantities of English yarn and cloth, which took away the livelihood of millions of Indian spinners and weavers (pp. 332–33).
While making this statement about the effects of English textile exports to India, Beckert has not given consideration to Morris D. Morris’s hypothesis of a shift to the right of the demand curve for cloth in India during this period, which allegedly allowed both the imports and indigenous manufacture to flourish together. It would have been good if he had explicitly contradicted this. Much to the point, still, is Beckert’s finding, especially with regard to Berar, that excessive cotton cultivation increased the intensity of famines in India during the later decades of the nineteenth century (pp. 535–39). This similarly contradicts Michelle B. Mc Alipin’s argument in her Subject to Famine, Princeton, 1983, that famines were simply acts of God, which had no connection with any change in cropping pattern.
Coming to the twentieth century Beckert traces the efforts of Asian and Latin American countries, along with Egypt, to build their own cotton manufactures on modern, capitalist lines. Here too the Indian capitalists and swadeshi movement figure noticeably (pp. 417–22). This account occurs in Chapter 13, which he titles, ‘The Return of the Global South’ (pp. 379–426). He ascribes this ‘return’ chiefly to the rise of wage-costs in the advanced industrial countries, which make their cotton products uncompetitive despite greater growth of labour productivity through technological and other improvements. Surprisingly here he makes no mention of the thesis of Arghiri Emmanuel, who, in his Unequal Exchange: A Study of Imperialism of Trade, English transl., New York, 1972, argued that industries with relatively higher wage-component, like, most consumption-goods industries (Marx’s ‘Department II’) were being transferred to the Third World countries, while those with higher technology and low wage-components, that is, mostly capital-goods industries (‘Department I’) are retained in the metropolis, which benefits from the ‘unequal exchange’ which thereby results. What has happened to the cotton-textile industry, as described by Beckert, fits well with Emmanuel’s thesis.
Beckert says rightly in his Epilogue that what he has described is largely a ‘story of domination and exploitation’, though within that ‘sits a parallel story of liberation and creativity’ (p. 442). He has painted a very large canvas in which almost every part of the world has its place; and one can only admire the immense scholarship and hard work that has gone into its making.
For Indian historians, it provides a good introduction to those world-wide developments in the context of which India’s own economic history in colonial and post-colonial times needs to be placed.