Empire of Cotton

As the new machines found in cotton mills boosted the productivity of the European cotton industry to unforeseen heights, the demand for raw cotton exploded in kind. At first, industrialists were at a loss as to where they would find the land and labor necessary to meet this demand. Despite the outsized role slaves in the Americas would soon play in supplying Europe with raw cotton, this solution was not immediately evident: “After all, in 1780 no cotton whatsoever arrived from North America” (85). The most obvious answer was to source raw cotton from India, but these plans were foiled by the East India Company which aggressively sought to protect its own manufacturing interests on the subcontinent.

Next, European industrialists looked to slave plantations in the Caribbean. Although these plantations traditionally focused on growing sugar, many smaller planters were easily convinced to grow cotton because it “drew on the labor of less than a fifth as many slaves as the average sugar plantation” (88). On British-controlled islands like Barbados, raw cotton exports quadrupled between 1781 and 1791. Similar gains were seen in French-controlled territories like Saint-Domingue. To supply the labor for these new plantations, a quarter million new African slaves were imported between 1784 and 1791 alone.