Beyond America’s Borders: Cotton’s Global Empire
Long before T-shirts and jeans became our everyday wear, cotton had already changed the world. Before cotton, people wore wool and linen, materials that were expensive, scratchy, and—because they were nearly unwashable—smelly. The world welcomed cotton because it was cheap, comfortable, and washable. But before the world could dress in cotton, planters in the American South, merchants on both sides of the Atlantic, and manufacturers in Britain had to link the plantations of the South with the textile factories of Great Britain. Once they did, the world was never the same.
Before 1793, when Eli Whitney devised a new machine to clean raw cotton, no North American cotton whatsoever reached Britain. Following Whitney’s invention, American cotton production exploded almost overnight, and a “cotton rush” carried cotton, cotton gins, plantations, and slaves westward across land taken from the Indians. U.S. cotton began to arrive in Liverpool in 1795. By 1802, the United States had become the single most important supplier of cotton to Britain, and Britain had become the world’s dominant manufacturer of cotton cloth. By the 1850s, the South supplied 77 percent of the 800 million pounds that fed Britain’s cotton-hungry textile factories.
Although wool had previously been at the core of late-eighteenth-century English manufacturing and trade, cotton quickly displaced wool in northwestern England’s manufacturing districts. Because cotton could not be grown in the cold, rainy climate of Europe, manufacturers had to import every pound. Traders bought the American cotton crop and brought it across the Atlantic to English mills, where it was spun into yarn, woven into cloth, and shipped to customers around the world. The production of cotton cloth became the world’s first mechanized and industrialized business. New machines, new sources of power, and a new labor system revolutionized the making of cotton cloth and made mass production possible.
Cotton was grown by slaves, but it was made into cloth by a new army of wage laborers. The explosion of textile factories in Britain meant that people from the countryside crowded into the cities of Manchester and Liverpool, into housing that was “offensive, dark, damp, and incommodious.” For at least twelve hours a day, six days a week, textile workers operated and repaired the machines that turned raw cotton into cloth. The insatiable demand for labor swept up huge numbers of women and children. The degree of exploitation was revealed in 1833 when Parliament barred children from working in the spinning mills before the age of nine and required that those between nine and thirteen could work only nine hours a day. An 1833 report observed, “The consequence of this excess of toil is that the growth of the body is checked, and the limbs become weak, and sometimes horribly distorted.”
Cotton manufacturing became the center of the British economy and caused extraordinary changes in British society. British factories produced two-thirds of the world’s cotton cloth, and Manchester became the most industrialized city in the world. By 1860, nearly 500,000 laborers worked in Britain’s cotton industry, where they experienced radically new ways of working and living as well as unprecedented poverty and misery.
Manufacturers elsewhere tried to follow the path that Manchester had blazed. Cotton mills sprang up in France, Germany, Russia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Belgium, each hoping to reproduce the success achieved in Britain. In each case, the American South’s slave-grown cotton fed the mills. For example, 90 percent of the 192 million pounds used in France came from the United States. Beginning in the 1810s, the United States began building its own cotton factories, and those factories depended entirely on southern cotton. By 1860, cotton textiles were the most important manufacturing industry in the United States in terms of capital invested and workers employed.
Cotton stood at the center of the first modern manufacturing industry and the world’s first global economy. When cotton linked two major nineteenth-century developments—the westward expansion of plantation slavery in the United States and the rise of the factory and wage labor in Europe—it created a global web of agriculture, trade, and industrial production. The repercussions from the industrialization of cotton resonated across nations and continents. Mass production put cotton clothes within reach of common people. Because the industrialization of British cotton manufacturing proved to be the first step of what is called the industrial revolution, raw cotton—grown by American slaves—played an essential role in international industrialization.
Analyze the Evidence: What evidence supports the contention that American cotton played an essential role in the industrialization of cotton cloth?
Consider the Context: Why did cotton cloth quickly supplant wool? What were cotton’s advantages?
Recognize Viewpoints: How might cotton manufacturers and cotton workers—on both sides of the Atlantic—have viewed the industrialization of cotton cloth differently? Would they have considered it a success? Why or why not?