In one of his brief dispatches about British Rule in India, Karl Marx spoke of the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization” that marked its nature. It has “unveiled before our eyes,” he added, “turning from its home where it assumes respectable forms to the colonies where it goes naked.” ( The New York Daily Tribune , August 8, 1853). Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History is an attempt to tell the story of cotton, in the 250 years since the boll came to be spun and woven with machines, from the perspective that Marx formulated in his 1853 dispatch.
The book begins with a brief history of cotton; that it was cultivated, spun and woven by peasants for their own use as well as traded in the local market in Asia, Africa and Latin America but not in Europe; that the Europeans bought cotton goods from elsewhere and that things changed after Columbus ‘discovered’ America. The coming of the plantations and the slave trade, Beckert says, meant that cotton goods made in India were being used to purchase slaves from Africa who, in turn, would end up producing cotton in the fields of Southern United States. This was sent to Lancashire to be spun and to Manchester to be woven. Through time, such cloth flooded the Indian market and destroyed the weaving industry in India and elsewhere in Asia.
This part of history, certainly, has been told many times by economic historians. The de-industrialisation debate is now elementary knowledge among historians; in other words, the Cambridge School — who argued that the British rule did India good and contested the view that it was marked by deindustrialisation of India and the consequent misery — no longer dominate the discourse. There are some, Tirtankar Roy for instance, who argue that while the cotton manufacturing sector suffered due to colonial rule, there were some other sectors that compensated for the loss in employment; or that the market for Indian cotton goods did not collapse entirely and there were segments in the market where they survived. Beckert is not distracted by any of this.
Like Marx’s critique of Ricardo that the so-called primary accumulation was the original sin, Beckert holds ‘war capitalism’ as the basis of the empire of cotton. The untrammelled expansion of land for cotton plantations along with slave labour and expropriation of land from the native Americans, Beckert argues, laid the foundations for the British cotton industry. “With slave-grown cotton pouring in from the United States, the cost of finished cotton declined, making cloths and sheets affordable for a rapidly expanding market,” he stresses while narrating the story of the changing nature of global cotton trade and how the cotton manufacture industry in the Asian continent was destroyed.
Beckert’s treatment of the dynamics of the campaign for abolition of slavery in the South, since 1860, is interesting. He holds that “the great irony of this rapacious cycle of war capitalism... is that its success laid the foundation for its own demise.” The empire of cotton rested on two very different forms of labour: cotton cultivated by slaves and manufactured by wage labour. Beckert tells us that, notwithstanding the distinct forms, the two forms matched each other insofar as the extent of exploitation and physical coercion were concerned. The book then shifts to the post-slavery (since the 1860s) phase and the hundred years since then when wage labour, through its organised strength, managed to wrest better living standards.
The importance of universal adult franchise in the post-World War I phase, Beckert establishes, led to the nation-state having to legislate labour welfare laws in Europe and the U.S. This trend was more pronounced in the post-World War II years rendering cotton production and manufacture expensive. Industrial capitalism that flourished essentially under a patronising nation-state began to decline in the North in the post-war world even while the newly independent nations — India, China and Turkey — emerged as centres of a new empire of cotton. The author emphasises the role of cotton in the making of anti-imperialist battles in these countries, which were incidentally the centres of production and manufacture in the pre-1780 period, in their re-emergence as centres of the empire in the post-1960 period.
The significant point that Beckert makes — even while explaining the resurgence of the East in the empire of cotton — is the shift away from a regime where industrial capitalism depended on the nation-state and where capital was territorialised. The neo-liberal context, Beckert stresses, is marked by a regime where capital is de-territorialised and where capital manages to goad nation-states into a state of desperation to seek investments and retain manufacturing activities in their shores. This resurgence of the global south, Beckert stresses, is once again concentrated in the pre-1780 heartlands of cotton industry — China, India, Pakistan and Turkey. The power of finance capital to dictate terms to the nation-states and the threat of capital flight from one nation to another have rendered a new dimension to the empire of cotton.
Beckert does not hesitate to join issues with Eric Hobsbawm in the course of his arguments. Referring to Hobsbawm’s characterisation of the 19th century as an age of ‘bourgeois civilization’ and the 20th as the ‘age of catastrophe,’ Beckert holds that this indeed is an assessment “derived from a vision of the world that focuses its moral judgments on Europe” and adds that “from the perspective of much of Asia, Africa and the Americas, one can argue just the opposite — that the 19th century was an age of barbarity and catastrophe, as slavery and imperialism devastated first one pocket of the globe and then another.” While Beckert leaves this argument at that, it is pertinent to note another recent work —Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (Penguin, 2012).
In such times when History is sought to be confused with mythology and modernity is peddled as the fountainhead of civilisation and development, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History is certainly a must-read for specialists as well as the lay reader. The lucid style and the wide canvas, both in time and space, make the book riveting.
Empire of Cotton: A Global History,Sven Beckert, Alfred A.Knopf, $35.
