Empire of Cotton

In examining the terrible conditions facing many cotton mill workers, Beckert raises the question: Is industrial capitalism possible without the exploitation of workers? This issue will be revisited over the course of the book, but certainly during the first half of the 18th century, as extraordinary amount of coercion and suffering were fundamental components of the global cotton industry. Aside from slavery in the Americas, factory workers in Europe were frequently subject to inhumane working conditions, a reality addressed famously in William Blake’s 1808 poem, “And did those feet in ancient time,” which Beckert quotes. The poem imagines Jesus descending to England and creating a kind of heaven there, a stark contrast to what Blake refers to as “the dark satanic mills.” (Blake, William. “And did those feet in ancient time.” 1808). To Blake, the cotton mills where children like Hootton labored were akin to hell on earth, a characterization supported by Beckert’s research.

The poor working conditions of the factories were but one obstacle to mobilizing workers in cotton mills. Another was the fact that wage labor—despite being taken for granted in the modern world as the dominant form of employment—was still something of a novelty or aberration in the early 19th century. Beckert writes:

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 (181).

To men and women of the early 19th century, wage labor was not the natural order of things, particularly not the kind of backbreaking wage labor they would be subject to in the cotton mills.

In order to convince—or coerce—laborers to work in the factories, industrialists once again relied on the power of the state in yet another example of how capitalism may have never succeeded without government intervention. Perhaps the most significant of these state initiatives to mobilize labor was the 1823 Master and Servant Act, which “explicitly allowed ‘English employers to have their workmen sent to the house of correction and held at hard labor for up to three months for breaches of their labor agreement’” (182). The irony, however, was that by relying on the state to pass laws allowing for the better mobilization of labor, industrialists would ultimately lose its stranglehold on cheap, available workers. That’s because these very same workers, whose consent the state relied on to govern, would later demand that the government pass laws limiting work-hours, outlawing child labor, and establishing minimum wages. Again, the complicated balance of power and interests between capital, the state, and labor is laid bare, as Beckert writes, “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” (197).

In his discussion of mobilizing labor, Beckert also examines issues of gender as they relate to the cotton industry. Cotton was unique among rising industrial goods in that its manufacture was historically and culturally the domain of female spinners and weavers. This gave manufacturers a singular opportunity to mobilize labor in ways the steel or iron industries could not. Beckert writes, “One way manufacturers tried to circumvent the problem of attracting large numbers of people to work in factories was by recruiting the weakest members of society first, those with the fewest resources to resist. To do so, they built upon long-established relationships of power within households, especially a long history of paternalism that allowed the male head of household to deploy the labor of his wife and children as he saw fit” (187). Ironically, this same paternalism acted as an obstacle to industrialization in places like India, where social conventions dictated that women should only work inside the home and not in a public setting like a factory. On a final note on this subject, Beckert points out that the outsized role of women in European factories led somewhat to an erasure of the cotton industry in the historical record, writing, “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” (190).

The chief takeaway from all of these observations—the reliance on the state to mobilize labor, the role of coercion in filling the factories, and the importance of rigid pre-modern gender rules—underline for Beckert the ways in which 19th century capitalism was far from a free and fair marketplace of goods, ideas, and labor. He writes, “Employers understood that the ‘cheapness’ of their labor rested on the persistence of noncapitalist ways of securing subsistence—a lesson that would eventually also inform the transition to world market production in the cotton-growing countryside in India and elsewhere. The capitalist revolution succeeded because it remained incomplete” (188).

In Chapter 8, Beckert zooms out from the factory floor to examine the increasingly strong ties that united the global empire of cotton, ties that were largely maintained by an ascendant merchant class. This period during the first half of the 18th century saw merchants gain unprecedented importance in ensuring the success of the cotton industry. As merchants and bankers gained prominence in this system, most of the spoils of the cotton industry went not to people who made things or grew things, but to those who facilitated various transactions. Or, as Beckert puts it, “To be at the very beginning of the very end of a ‘commodity chain’ thus was usually a position of relative weakness” (203). In more ways than one, this rise of the merchant and banking class foreshadows the modern economies of the 20th and 21st centuries, in which fortunes are often made in finance or banking, rather than in agriculture or manufacturing.

This reality was reinforced by the increasing tendency to view cotton in abstract terms. Rather than pay for raw cotton as it arrived on the docks of Liverpool, financiers increasingly priced cotton that hadn’t even been grown yet, while advancing credit to those who would cultivate it. While factory owners used the enforcement of laws and social traditions as tools of coercion, financiers used credit. This put merchants like the Baring Brothers at a distinct advantage over farmers, whose plantations could be taken from them if they fail to meet agreed-upon crop yields. Moreover, these credit arrangements injected both more capital and more risk into the operations of enslavers, giving them the ability to buy a greater number of enslaved people and an incentive to work them even harder in the fields. Beckert writes, “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” (214). Indeed, these credit arrangements would become even more predatory in the post-Civil War era in places like India and Africa.