Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert

Author:Sven Beckert
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-12-01T14:00:00+00:00

Famine victims, probably 1899, India (Credit 11.12)

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Experiencing a new kind of uncertainty thanks to world market integration, and squeezed by moneylenders, cotton growers in India, Brazil, Mexico, and the southern United States took a desperate and dangerous step: They rebelled. In Egypt, agricultural workers led by Ahmed al-Shaqi had revolted as early as 1865. In India, the Deccan Riots of May and June 1875 targeted moneylenders and merchants—figures who symbolized the recasting of the countryside. During the 1873–74 Quebra Quilos revolt, Brazilian peasants, many of whom had just a few years earlier switched to cotton production, destroyed land records and refused to pay taxes they could no longer afford in the wake of the global fall of cotton prices. In 1899, widespread grain riots occurred again, often drawing in hundreds of people even in small villages. At the same time, cotton farmers in the southern United States also organized. They formed the Farmers Alliance and launched a political movement, Populism, demanding that the state relieve them of some of the economic pressures that had wreaked havoc in their lives, a movement that reared its head again during the first decade of the twentieth century when several hundred thousand farmers joined the Southern Cotton Association and the National Farmers’ Union. Cotton populism spread as far as Egypt, where Wady E. Medawar in 1900 formulated a program of agrarian reform much like the one advanced by cotton farmers in the United States, including cooperative societies, agricultural improvement associations, mechanisms to provide cheap credit to farmers, and an organization of rural cultivators that would interweave private and public initiative. Around the same time, Mexican cotton workers in La Laguna deployed “insubordination, theft, banditry” and other forms of collective action to improve their situation. Food shortages led to grain riots, brutally repressed by private armies backed by federal troops. Strategies of resistance varied according to political regime, ranging from creating cooperatives and running for political office in Texas to murdering moneylenders in India.44

The rebellion of cotton cultivators at times had a significant impact on national politics, as in the United States, where Populists influenced the critical presidential election of 1896 and forced a greater presence of the state in the cotton trade, but also in Mexico, where they played an important role in the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s. But the integration of many areas of the world into the global cotton empire also made “cotton nationalism” a major theme in twentieth-century anticolonial struggles. Most prominently, Indian nationalists invoked their country’s recast role in the global cotton economy as one of the most damaging effects of colonialism, and envisaged a postcolonial economy in which India would become again a major cotton power.45

In future decades, these movements would revolutionize the empire of cotton once again. But before this happened, the powerful new combination of manufacturers and imperial statesmen who had emerged after the American Civil War furthered the integration of the global cotton-producing countryside in ever more parts of the world, including Korea, Central Asia, and Africa.

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