Cotton: The Fabric of Death

Through the prism of the cultivation of the cotton plant and the conversion of its fiber to yarn, cloth and garments, Sven Beckert, in this magnificent book, actually compiles a history of the development of capitalism, a history of colonialism, slavery, expropriation, enclosure, industrialization, imperialism, and the eventual deindustrialization of the global North, all in one volume. In the process, he dismisses many of conventional myths about progress, industrialization, and the “civilizing” mission of Europeans and North Americans.

The book covers approximately 5,000 years history and the geographical itinerary of the growing of cotton and its conversion to cloth and garments. It provides an immense trove of information on all aspects of the cotton industry and on the political economy in which it was embedded. Thus, it is not only a history of cotton but also of the social history and the institutions to which the plant gave rise.

The book begins with the account of the early history of cotton spinning and weaving in India, China and Central and South America. These cultures developed the cotton plant and dominated the world market in the production of chintzes, calicos and other treasured kinds of cotton cloth for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The invasion of these cultures, East and West, changed all that through a process which Beckert calls ‘war capitalism’. He defines war capitalism as the imperial project of land expropriation from indigenous peoples and the enslavement of their populations through violence and war. It was nothing as anodyne as ‘discovery’ or scientific exploration but brutal force which took the land of native Americans, Indians and Chinese and transported masses of the population of Africa into slavery in the Americas.

Until the eighteenth century, India and China were clearly the most developed countries in the production of cotton and its manufactured byproducts. The combination of cheap slave labor supplied largely by Africans torn from their home and cultures and abundant land taken from native American people changed all that. The cheap cotton produced under these violent circumstances together with the harnessing of power enabled Lancashire in the UK to outcompete Indian cloth and eventually dominate the cotton cloth industry.

Yet another element in this development was the intervention of the British state through protectionist measures such as taxation of foreign cloth. Beckert’s narrative contradicts the conventional narrative of the emergence of industrial dominance in Europe through free market principles. Violence, slavery and land expropriation were the dominant characteristics of the new system of industrial production. After the independence of the United States in the 1770s, the domination of the UK in the production of cotton cloth exploded through the combination of expropriated land, slave labor in the cotton fields, and exploited wage labor in the UK.

The abolition of slavery in the US placed this entire system in crisis and endangered the entire enterprise, as the supply of raw cotton from the southern United States was decimated. The system was saved, so to speak, by the development of alternative sourcing of cotton in Anatolia, Egypt, China and especially India, together with the gradual reintegration of former slaves as sharecroppers and debt peonage workers.

A point that Beckert develops is the equally exploitative nature of ‘free wage labor’ in the so-called Satanic mills of Lancashire and Lowell, MA in the Northern United States. The early workers in the cotton mills were largely women, children and the homeless of the poor houses of Great Britain. In large part the poor/workhouse inmates had been the victims of enclosure, thrown off their small holdings by the landed aristocracy of Great Britain and elsewhere in Europe.

An essential point underlined by Beckert is the intimate connection between slavery and the industrial prosperity of Great Britain. Slave produced cotton gave Britain the competitive edge in the production of cotton cloth.

The penultimate phase in the development of the cotton empire that Beckert explores is the demise of Europe and the Northern United States as the dominant industrial producers of cotton cloth and products. The process began even before 1900 with the decentralization of cotton cloth production, as cotton capitalists sourced cheaper labor and the capitalist industrial bourgeoisie in the ‘Global South’ sought independence from Europe. This process has led to the return of cotton production to India, China, Bangladesh and other centers in the Global South, with an even more brutal system of exploitation of human labor.

The last phase of the development of the empire of cotton is the emergence of giant retail corporations as the dominant players. Companies such as Walmart scour the globe in search of the cheapest product and they now exert a dominant role in where, how and when cotton products are produced. Walmart and its likes determine the location of production at every stage, from the cotton fields to the final garment, pushing wages at every stage to the minimum and profits to the maximum.

Michael Drohan is a member of the Editorial Collective and of the Board of the Thomas Merton Center

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