Empire of Cotton summary

In the year 1784, Samuel Greg made history when he opened the first mechanized cotton mill outside of Manchester, England. The mill, which sat on the banks of the river Bollin, was powered by the flow of the river’s waters.

From that point, mechanization only improved and spread, and the world of cotton was transformed. In fact, mechanization had a major economic impact for British manufacturers as it enabled them to undercut the weavers of India.

So manufacturing changed the world and, as it did, the demand for raw cotton steadily grew. By 1790, Britain was spinning six times more cotton than it had been in 1781. But where did all this cotton come from?

Well, a huge amount originated in the European colonies, but, eventually, even they couldn’t produce enough to meet demand. Here’s what happened:

Histories of the industrial revolution tend to focus on inventors like James Watt, whose steam engine transformed the face of the earth. Without a doubt, bright minds and groundbreaking inventions made progress possible. However, the real fuel of industrialization was the millions of workers whose stories didn’t make it into the textbooks.

In the United Kingdom, the first industrialized nation, working conditions were atrocious. Ellen Hooton, a woman who, as a child, worked in a cotton factory in Wigan, England, is one of the few workers whose story has reached us. In 1833, she testified during a Manchester Commission investigation into child factory labor.

So industrialization was a major boon to cotton production and by the mid-nineteenth century, millions of people were working in the newly built factories that produced cotton goods. But that’s not the only way the cotton industry was evolving.

Merchants were also transforming the way business was done. This emergent merchant class of middlemen was increasingly necessary in the early nineteenth century, as the cotton industry became ever more global.

Around the same time that the cotton industry was kicking into high gear, two groups of US capitalists were also coming into heated conflict. A new class of American industrial capitalists – merchants, to be exact – were employing wage labor and wanted to expand their operations to cotton-plantation rich lands around the world.

But the old Southern planter elite wasn’t about to part with its slaves without a fight. They wanted to maintain slavery and even extend it west. Both sides worked hard to sway the government and, soon enough, the mounting domestic tensions resulted in a civil war that shook the global cotton industry to its foundations.

As slavery ended, the American cotton workforce shrank dramatically. But the demand for cotton was rising as fast as ever. In fact, between 1860 and 1890, global consumption of cotton doubled. Who was going to toil in the fields to meet this demand?

Well, it wouldn’t be long before a new work relationship replaced slavery. Here’s what happened:

Around the turn of the twentieth century, new world powers – namely, Russia and Japan – had begun entering the cotton game. Both of these nations grew cotton in their colonies and, for Japan in particular, cotton demand soared in the first years of the twentieth century.

For instance, in 1893, the country imported just 125 million pounds of raw cotton. By 1902 that number had increased to 446 million, the majority of it coming from India and the United States. This trend continued and, by 1920, Japan was importing over 1 billion pounds of cotton a year.

The twentieth century was a time of sweeping changes and the cotton industry was no exception. In large part, that’s because during this time conditions became favorable for newly industrializing nations.

After all, old industrial countries like Britain and Germany had powerful labor unions that increased the rights and wages of workers. For instance, in Germany, spinners took home 53 percent more in 1913 than they had in 1865.