How slavery laid the foundations of modern prosperity
Review of Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert
The cotton industry represented the first step in the development of the modern industrial economy, according to Beckert. Slavery and ever-more-efficient state coercion (in subservient cooperation with private capital) were integral to its development. Global in scale, this convergence of factors would re-fashion the everyday lives of a majority of people on the planet – subordinating their working days to the rhythms of machines that replaced human muscle labor, opening the way to unprecedented prosperity, and enabling decisionmakers far from their homes to control the lives of people they will never meet. The affluent of today owe a great debt to its success.
Beckert sees several steps in these developments. In the beginning, there was the development of “war capitalism”. In a nutshell, this was the forcible appropriation of land and labor, with the cooperation of a primitive form of the state. While cotton had been in use for millenia, it was limited to small, very local, networks. As demand grew and new forms of mechanized manufacturing began to appear, war capitalism vastly increased the scale of cotton cultivation, employing slaves to undertake the lethally backbreaking work of clearing the land and then the thankless task of harvesting the cotton – their utility was cheap labor that could be forced to work by any means necessary, often to the death.
Meanwhile, the state aided in the acquisition of land – because it exhausted the soil quickly, cotton cultivation required continual land appropriation – and the displacement or elimination of whomever was unfortunate enough to occupy that land, in most cases Amer-Indians.
For their part, capitalist traders emerged in Manchester, a mercantile capital that gained tremendous market influence and political power to bring the state into alignment with their interests.
The next phase opened with the invention of new means of production, in particular in the harnessing of chemical power in mills of ever-expanding scale and with elaborate forms of administrative innovation. At the same time, the state helped to establish and protect markets for their goods, both in supply but also for selling, i.e the distribution of goods. Industry was national and soon, nationalistic. The natural culmination of this was the colonial enterprise. This was the second great legacy of the cotton empire: the de-industrialization of traditional manufacturers as they took control of vast new territories.
For example, the skills required for the production of the fine muslin of India were completely and forever destroyed. The indigenous populations were subjugated to this order, fitting integrally into a hierarchy that exploited them while enriching captains of industry and politicians in colonial capitals.
Meanwhile, manufacturing facilities became a vital new source of employment, principally in the colonial powers, drawing people from the countryside to urban agglomerations that grew to then-incredible proportions. This represented a major step in the development of the modern industrial state, which had to create new institutions to manage their cities.
Furthermore, the state remained intimately involved in the development of the economy in the major colonial states, not only via investment and the construction of supporting infrastructure, but in the legal subjugation of workers, that is, to protect the owners of capital as they transformed industrial practices. This was the fundamental step that enabled the modern economy to enter the virtuous circle of self-reinforcing development, resulting in the far more intricate and complex industrial economy that emerged in the product cycles of related manufactures. It can only be described as a revolution that changed our lives so fundamentally that it is on a par with the neolithic revolution.
Of particular interest is the evolution of the political economy of slavery. Slavery was seen as a necessity for cotton production in the American South and Caribbean – a phenomenally profitable enterprise that created capital for industrial investment that benefited all free Americans regardless of location – and as a crucial basic resource for all the new national manufacturing powers. When the American Civil War began, the world economy was severely disrupted, based as it was on cotton, and the industrialized nations desperately sought to increase the supply of raw cotton. After that war, it was proven that low-wage sharecroppers could be counted on to produce cotton in a profitable way, as supported by state and private repression of the newly freed slaves. The colonial powers took note of this. In the US South, this arrangement was to survive for almost a full century, until automated cotton picking was finally perfected in the 1940s.
The most recent phase of the industry is its globalization, a shift of manufacturing to the former colonies. The real power gravitated to transnational corporations – predominantly retailers like Walmart or Gap – that were no longer subject to coherent national legal jurisdictions, hence largely disconnected from nationalistic considerations. While this caused the precipitous decline of once-prosperous cities like Liverpool, it is part of the ebb and flow of 21st century capitalism. Organizational innovation extended to the development of massive and intricate logistical networks to handle getting cotton to manufacturers, often performing stages of production in multiple countries, and then distributing their low-cost products in developed nations at a hefty profit. As this is so new, it is the least developed portion of the book. I suspect it tends to lock Third World producers and manufacturers into a lower-value added position, where design and brand generate greater profits for transnational corporations and their shareholders that no longer need to worry about employees in their home base of operation.
The implications of the book are of great relevancy to the present. First, it proves that the free classes all benefited directly and lastingly from slavery as an economic basis of the first phase of industrialization. Without slaves (and subsequently share croppers or colonial serfs), both investment capital and the expanding, inter-related product base of consumer capitalism would have accumulated far more slowly, perhaps over centuries rather than decades. This is the best argument for reparations that I have yet seen – the line from slavery and colonialism to prosperity for most of us is direct and self-evident, while the descendants of slaves and serfs remain exploited and oppressed underclasses. We could choose to compensate the losers of this historical process in some way - and we could certainly afford it.
Second, the state functioned as a crucial enabler for the development of private enterprise, from protecting nascent industries to enforcing laws that favored the manufacturing class. This flies in the face of neo-liberal ideology, which argues for a “free trade” and unfettered (read unregulated) markets that should allow capitalism to develop optimally. In the modern age, what lack of regulatory oversight does is to lock the underclass, whether in former colonies or at home, into inferior status.
This book is a wonderful intellectual adventure, its ideas are far more subtle than I could ever express here. You get a description of how the modern industrial economy was born: heavy in detail, clear in analysis, if somewhat dry at times. While much of the ground has been covered elsewhere, the synthesis, breadth, and grand themes that emerge are unavailable in a single volume, to my knowledge. For me, it was a seminal reading experience, a necessary perspective that brought things together in a way that will influence my view of modern society for the rest of my life.
Perhaps a bit too academic for my taste in its exhaustive detail, on the whole it is a page turner.