Empire of Cotton

In the wake of Britain’s successful efforts to colonize India and parts of Africa, other nations like Russia and Japan followed suit, the former in what is now Uzbekistan and the latter in Korea and parts of occupied China. They all adhered to the calculus that to bolster manufacturing, a nation must mobilize labor in other lands. Beckert writes, “Sovereignty over labor, they all understood, became linked to territorial control. By the late nineteenth century contemporary observers treated as commonplace that the transition to cotton production for world markets rested most fundamentally on that domination of territory by newly empowered imperial states” (343).

Even in the United States, cotton manufacturers like Edward Atkinson urged the government to expel indigenous peoples from all points West so that land might be used for cotton production. By 1920, US cotton production had increased two and a half times over its pre-Civil War heyday in 1860: “Most of these new cotton-growing territories had been captured from Mexico in 1848, and without their acquisition, Mexico, not the United States, might have been the world’s premier cotton producer by the early twentieth century” (353).

While it was relatively simple for these imperial giants to secure land, mobilizing labor to grow cotton on it was a much more challenging proposition.