The turbulent reign of King Cotton: the dark history of one of the world’s most important commodities

If not for cotton, we would still be wearing wool. To equal current cotton production, we would need seven billion sheep, and a field 1.6 times the area of the EU. Capitalism has spared us this itching, bleating nightmare. But capitalism, Sven Beckert writes in his hair-shirted history, Empire of Cotton, has wrought other horrors.

For medieval Europeans, cotton was a luxury import. Prices fell as Europe’s maritime empires bypassed the Ottoman middleman. They fell further after the 1780s, when the East India Company increased its imports, and British inventors developed water-powered spinning machines. Cotton became the first global commodity, woven into the ‘triangular trade’ that shuttled African slaves to New World plantations, New World materials to Europe, and finished goods from Europe to imperial markets.

These exchanges drew the cotton economy away from the coasts of south Asia and towards the Atlantic. In Britain, they turned Manchester into ‘Cottonopolis’, and created a class of ‘cotton capitalists’ who reinvested their profits in the Industrial Revolution. Their business also fuelled the growth of state power. In mercantilist style, government and private capital collaborated: Royal Navy ships escorted the private fleets of the East India Company.

When it comes to washing capitalism’s dirty laundry, nothing bloodies the water like ‘white gold’. Beckert calls mercantilism ‘war capitalism’, and violence the ‘fundamental characteristic’ of its ‘project’. This is polemical, and woolly. The 18th-century British state grew by war, and its economy by cotton, but the interests of ministers and merchants were not identical, and rarely formed a coherent ‘project’. Most of Britain’s wars were against France, not for cotton. Many of Britain’s clients in African slavery and Indian cotton were willing partners. Between 1780 and 1815, as Britain took control of the global cotton market, the state acted repeatedly against the cotton interest and its political connections: in the India Act of 1784, in the impeachment in 1788 of Warren Hastings, and, in 1807, by abolishing slave trading in the British empire.