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Notes on Chapter 5 of "Empire of Cotton" by Sven Beckert.
This chapter is concerned with that expansion of the plantation system in the U.S. and the unsuccessful British efforts to become less dependent on it.
The plantation system was developed in the Caribbean and South America before being adopted and dramatically expanded in the U.S. (p.97, 101). By the 1830s, American planters dominated the British, European, and American markets for cotton which they were able to produce in enormous quantities, at tremendous rates of profit, by seizing land and accelerating African enslavement (p. 118).
In 1786, American planters, responding to mechanization-driven prices increases in the cotton market, began cotton cultivation on Georgia's Sea Islands (p. 101).
U.S. production received a boost from the Saint-Domingue revolution, raising prices and attracting exiles to the U.S. south (p.102).
See Also: Notes on C.L.R James' book on the Saint-Domingue revolution, "The Black Jacobins"
Sea Island cotton did not grow well inland for climatic reasons. "Upland cotton" did, but its fibers clung to its seeds, making them labor intensive to separate. Eli Whitney's cotton gin opened this bottleneck, increasing labor productivity for the task by a factor of fifty (p.102), but damaged the fibers and produced lower quality fabric (p. 104). The value of land suitable for cotton cultivation tripled as a result of the gin (p. 102).
The enslaved population of Georgia roughly doubled over the 1790s, reaching sixty thousand. South Carolina saw similar increases (p.103).
All the way to the Civil War, cotton and slavery would expand in lockstep, as Great Britain and the United States had become the twin hubs of the emerging empire of cotton.
Soil exhaustion was a common occurrence, prompting moves west. Only a sixteenth of total output came from west of Georgia and South Carolina in 1811; by 1860 it was three quarters (p.105).
Why was all of this new productive capacity coming online in the U.S., rather than the Ottoman Empire, India, the West Indies, or Brazil, all of which had suitable climates? Unconstrained access to (formerly Native) land and (slave) labor.
The decimation of Native American populations by contagion and war gave the U.S. an unmatched expanse of "unencumbered" (Beckert) land (p.105).
By 1850, 67% of U.S. cotton grew on land that had not been part of the United States a half century earlier.
British state actors approved of the Louisiana purchase, recognizing that it would increase profits for British industry.
Land was taken from the Cherokee in Georgia, Seminoles in Florida, and Choctaw in Mississippi and converted into cotton plantations (p.107, 112)).
From the revolutionary war on slaves were shifted from the tobacco plantations of the upper south (Virginia, Maryland) to the cotton plantations of the lower south, and large numbers of slaves continued to be imported (p. 110).
Southern cotton planters had political hegemony that their counterparts in Brazil (e.g.) lacked. This allowed them to have railroad infrastructure built, amplifying the natural advantage of river systems ideal for cotton transport. In Brazil, by contrast, cotton planters were at odds with sugar cane planters on such questions (p. 111).
American independence redounded to the benefit of British industry, and solved a political problem for it, because it allowed slavery to continue unchecked in a separate polity dominated by slaveholders, even after the abolition of slavery in the empire in 1834 (p. 112).
Slavery allowed for the rapid allocation of money capital because slaves were often mortgaged (p. 114).
Cotton production increased much faster than the number of slaves. Some of this productivity increase can be attributed to superior strains of cotton, some to the intensification of work through reorganization. Little or none can be attributed to superior tools or machinery after Whitney's cotton gin (p. 115).
Baptist argues that torture was at the root of these productivity increases (p. 116).
Page 117:
To the great lament of the southern planters, the factor - a merchant who would sell a planter's cotton, supply him with goods, and provide credit - and with him the London money market, was a decisive source of their wealth and power. But the London money market and the Lancashire manufacturers depended just as much on the local experts in the violent expropriation of land and labor. The old paternalism of East Coast planters, shielded partially by the mercantilist logic of mutually beneficial and protected exchange between motherland and colony of the greater British imperial economy, had given way to a freer more competitive, and fluid social order mediated by merchant capital. The voracious appetite for accumulation sped the "social metabolism" of cotton production. The logic of war capitalism in fact now emanated from its industrial (wage labor) center in Lancashire. While in the eighteen century, slavery had enabled industrial takeoff, it now became integral to its continued expansion.
Page 120:
As early as the 1810s, British manufacturers in particular began to worry that they had become too dependent on a single supplier for their valuable raw materials.
They had three major concerns:
The precedent of the Saint-Domingue revolution loomed large in their minds. They feared an even worse "exterminating war of races" (p.122).
C.L.R. James - The Black Jacobins
France looked to cultivate cotton in Senegal without success.
British industrialists looked to "British India" for an alternative to cotton produce by U.S. slavery. Some Manchester employers' associations lobbied to give the British East India Company and mandate to export more cotton. The vision was of Indian peasants exporting raw cotton and importing the piece goods produced with it.
Page 127:
Indian cultivators, in effect, resisted giving up so-called waste lands, and they did not easily come to be persuaded to work for wages on farms, making a "plantation revolution" along the lines of the one occurring in the Americas unlikely.
Page 131:
British difficulties in India clarify the decisive differences from the United States. Though settler conflicts with Native Americans were costly, both in lives and treasure, the result left settlers in full control of the land and its resources. Indigenous ways of doing things were no longer. The local was simply obliterated. Indian peasants, like their counterparts in Anatolia, western Africa, and elsewhere, had shaped a world in which they could resist the onslaught of European merchant capital. Since Europeans were unable to transfer bodily coercion and all-encompassing expropriation of land to these regions of the world, and since they lacked the power to force some other alternative system of raw material production much to their lament, their dependence on the United States deepened.
Peasants continued to grow both food and cotton, to avoid becoming market dependent. There was no clear-cut private property in land, and British state capacity was insufficient to proletarianize these peasants (p.129). From the 1830s to 1850s, British imports of cotton from India never constituted 10% of the total (p.128).
Th pre-modern Egyptian state exported cotton produced by corvee labor in the first half of the 19th century (p.132).
This phrase due to Kaeren Wigen. The low cost of British manufactures would gradually undermine local production in what had previously been other poles of cotton production in Africa, Latin America, and throughout Asia (p.135)