Empire of Cotton - The Atlantic

Cotton is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, yet understanding its history is key to understanding the origins of
modern capitalism.

Jianan Yu/Reuters
By the time shots were fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, cotton was the core ingredient of the world’s most important
manufacturing industry. The manufacture of cotton yarn and cloth had grown into “the greatest industry that ever had
or could by possibility have ever existed in any age or country,” according to the self-congratulatory but essentially
accurate account of British cotton merchant John Benjamin Smith. By multiple measures—the sheer numbers
employed, the value of output, profitability—the cotton empire had no parallel.
One author boldly estimated that in 1862, fully 20 million people worldwide—one out of every 65 people alive—were
involved in the cultivation of cotton or the production of cotton cloth. In England alone, which still counted two-thirds of
the world’s mechanical spindles in its factories, the livelihood of between one-fifth and one-fourth of the population
was based on the industry; one-tenth of all British capital was invested in it, and close to one-half of all exports
consisted of cotton yarn and cloth. Whole regions of Europe and the United States had come to depend on a
predictable supply of cheap cotton. Except for wheat, no “raw product,” so the Journal of the Statistical Society of
London declared, had “so complete a hold upon the wants of the race.”
The reason for America’s quick ascent to market dominance was simple. The United States more than any other
country had elastic supplies of the three crucial ingredients that went into the production of raw cotton: labor, land, and
credit.
The industry that brought great wealth to European manufacturers and merchants, and bleak employment to

hundreds of thousands of mill workers, had also catapulted the United States onto center stage of the world economy,
building “the most successful agricultural industry in the States of America which has been ever contemplated or
realized.” Cotton exports alone put the United States on the world economic map. On the eve of the Civil War, raw
cotton constituted 61 percent of the value of all U.S. products shipped abroad. Before the beginnings of the cotton
boom in the 1780s, North America had been a promising but marginal player in the global economy.
Now, in 1861, the flagship of global capitalism, Great Britain, found itself dangerously dependent on the white gold
shipped out of New York, New Orleans, Charleston, and other American ports. By the late 1850s, cotton grown in the
United States accounted for 77 percent of the 800 million pounds of cotton consumed in Britain. It also accounted for
90 percent of the 192 million pounds used in France, 60 percent of the 115 million pounds spun in the Zollverein, and
92 percent of the 102 million pounds manufactured in Russia.
The reason for America’s quick ascent to market dominance was simple. The United States more than any other
country had elastic supplies of the three crucial ingredients that went into the production of raw cotton: labor, land, and
credit. As The Economist put it in 1861, the United States had become so successful in the world’s cotton markets
because the planter's “soil is marvelously fertile and costs him nothing; his labor has hitherto been abundant,
unremitting and on the increase; the arrangements and mercantile organizations for cleaning and forwarding the
cotton are all there." By midcentury, cotton had become central to the prosperity of the Atlantic world. Poet John
Greenleaf Whittier called it the “Hashish of the West,” a drug that was creating powerful hallucinatory dreams of