The great economic booms would not have taken place were it not for a humble fibre. “Cotton is very important in the history of the Industrial Revolution, capitalism and modernity,” said historian Sven Beckert
, in an absorbing discussion with Patrick French, on day two of JLF 2019.
Beckert is author of ‘The Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism’, a book that blends research and insight to understand and analyse the role cotton
has played in global trade – for good and for bad.
Cotton, Beckert reminded, was a globally integrated industry as early as the middle of the 17th century, 100 years before those economic upheavals. And it was industrialised in Europe and the US much before coal or steel, playing a major part in their development. “Europeans had inserted themselves into the cotton network before they started manufacturing cotton,” Beckert pointed out.
And when slavery’s role in the empire of cotton came to an end with the American Civil War, an event that signalled a fundamental shift in global capitalism, Europe’s colonial powers trained their sights on India, in their search for raw cotton. “The abolition of slavery helped the ability of European capital and colonial states to insert themselves into the Indian cotton network, without resorting to slavery,” he explained.
But it shouldn’t be forgotten that without colonialism, and all its resultant evils – exploitation, coercion, slavery and violence – international capitalism would likely never have attained the dominance it ultimately did. “Capitalism, and how it unfolded, can only be understood from a historical perspective,” Beckert insisted.
Of course, cotton, and Gandhi’s championing of the charkha, was key in India’s fight for freedom. “Ideologically, a return to self-sufficiency was very important in the struggle for independence,” said Beckert. Depressingly, however, the conditions that slavery gave rise to in the United States remain. “The US produced cotton for world markets by using slave labour, then imprisoned labour.
“The legacy is still with us, in the inequality, racism, discrimination and mass incarceration.” And the history of cotton, Beckert concluded, isn’t over. “It still influences our politics.”