Empire of Cotton

As Beckert continues his exploration of the relationship between violence and commerce, it becomes clear that war capitalism was more than a mere precursor or prototype for industrial capitalism. Rather, the two fed off one another to an enormous degree. Nowhere is this clearer than in the dramatic rise in American plantations to meet the demand for raw cotton from Britain’s industrial cotton mills. In fact, despite the extent to which slavery and cotton are connected in the popular imagination, slavery only stepped in to meet these demands after industrialization had already begun in earnest in Britain: “As late as 1791, most of the cotton grown for manufacturing purposes around the world was produced by small farmers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and consumed locally” (84). Thus, slavery—arguably the most pernicious form of war capitalism—was less a holdover from a pre-industrial era, and more a necessary feature of industrial capitalism that grew along with it. Beckert writes, “In the process, a new kind of slavery (what historians have called ‘second slavery’) emerged that was tightly linked to the intensity and profits of industrial capitalism” (92). This new form of slavery would also influence how non-slaveholding states would organize their own labor force. Beckert writes, “The all-encompassing control of workers—a core characteristic of capitalism—experienced its first great success on the cotton plantations of the American South” (115).

If slavery was not an immediately apparent solution to Britain’s demand for raw cotton, American slavery was even less so. Beckert writes that as late as 1785, “It was all but unimaginable to Liverpool customs officials that cotton could be imported from the United States” (98). The migration of cotton from Caribbean and South American plantations to the United States is an example of how political, social, environmental, and engineering factors all conspired to create a context in which America would become the top supplier of cotton to Europe’s industrialized societies. The interplay between these pressures is dizzying. For example, one of the most significant factors that led Britain to look to the United States as an ally in the cotton trade—despite having lost the American War of Independence to it in 1784—was the Haitian Revolution. In 1791, the enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue revolted in the largest successful rebellion of its kind in history. In addition to the immediate effect of cutting off the colony’s raw cotton supply to Britain, the rebellion called into question the conditions under which slavery was a sustainable model for cultivating raw materials. Of this momentous event, Beckert writes, “War capitalism had its first major reversal at the hands of its seemingly least powerful actors: Saint-Domingue’s hundreds of thousands of slaves” (96). Two years later, another major blow wrecked Caribbean cotton exports to Britain. Beckert writes, “Once war broke out between France and Britain in 1793, moreover, the import of French West Indian cottons into the British Caribbean ports came to an end” (97).

Wars and social upheavals weren’t the only factors that led Britain to look to the United States for cotton grown via slavery. While the Sea Island cotton grown in Saint-Domingue thrived on the coasts of the United States, it failed to thrive inland. While so-called upland cotton could be grown further inland, cultivating it was prohibitively time- and effort-intensive to the point that few plantation owners could make a profit off it. That all changed in 1793 when the American inventor Whitney invented a new kind of cotton gin well-suited to upland cotton, the only species that could be grown in an inland climate: “Overnight, his machine increased ginning productivity by a factor of fifty” (102). So it was that a war in Europe, a rebellion in Haiti, a stubborn cotton plant, and an engineering marvel all conspired to create the conditions under which American slavery would become the key driver of the industrial cotton manufacturing industry.

The connection between Whitney’s cotton gin and the expansion of American slavery is but one example of the relationship between technology and war capitalism. As America’s “cotton rush” continued unabated, more and more Indigenous land was expropriated to make room for plantations where enslaved Africans would be forced to participate in backbreaking labor. This process, Beckert argues, was only intensified by the advent of new technologies and inventions. He writes, “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” (108). While technology is often framed as evidence of society’s progress, Beckert recasts these inventions of agents of suffering—after all, the more efficient cotton’s global commodity chains became, the greater appetite for expropriated Indigenous land and enslaved labor to meet the demand for raw cotton, the lifeblood of the entire system.

A virtually unlimited supply of land and labor, obtained through violence and coercion, was of course a crucial factor in America’s ascent to become the world’s leading cotton producer. Another, Beckert argues, was the political power of Southern elites. Perhaps the most significant example of Southern political power at work was the Three-Fifths Compromise, agreed to in 1787 at the United States Constitutional Convention. Because enslaved people were not initially given rights by the US Constitution, Northern delegates argued that they should not be counted as citizens for the purpose of determining the number of seats Southern states would receive in Congress. In the end, Southern delegates convinced their counterparts to count enslaved people as three-fifths of a person when tabulating state populations and allocating Congressional states. This gave Southerners, and in particular Southern enslavers, an outsized influence over national political affairs. Beckert writes, “Southern slaveholders had enshrined the basis of their power into the Constitution with its three-fifths clause. A whole series of slaveholding presidents, Supreme Court judges, and strong representation in both houses of Congress guaranteed seemingly never-ending political support for the institution of slavery” (111).

While slavery has been abolished in the United States since the American Civil War, debates over Southerners’ attempts to enshrine the institution of slavery in the US Constitution persist to this day. For example, Beckert points out that one of the reasons slavery seemed more durable in the United States than in Saint-Domingue was because of white militias. He writes, “Americans tried to explain to their European customers that slavery in the United States, unlike in Saint-Domingue, was safe—not least, as [American statesman] Tench Coxe put it, because of the presence of a powerful white militia and because slaves have ‘no artillery nor arms’” (122). Modern legal scholars like law professor Carl T. Bogus have argued that the Second Amendment was written specifically to empower white people in Southern states to arm themselves against potential revolts by the enslaved population (Bogus, Carl T. “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment.” U.C. Davis Law Review, vol. 31, 1998). While there is some evidence in the historical record supporting this claim, several contemporary American conservatives dispute it. Nevertheless, it reflects the extent to which the very specific debates between American statesmen and British industrialists in the 1800s over cotton are still relevant in American political culture today. Moreover, it reveals how deeply slavery is embedded into the economic, political, and social history of the United States.