Early cotton industries in Southern Germany and Northern Italy collapse after the Ottoman Empire restricts its raw cotton exports.

European merchants found the British East India Company, deploying armed fleets to seize control of global cotton trade routes.

A triangular trade network takes shape, exchanging Indian cotton textiles for enslaved Africans who are sent to American plantations.

Samuel Greg opens the first water-powered yarn-spinning factory at Quarry Bank Mill near Manchester, transforming cotton manufacturing forever.

Caribbean cotton plantations boom rapidly, supplied by hundreds of thousands of newly imported enslaved Africans.

Enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue revolt, cutting off the island's raw cotton exports permanently.

Eli Whitney invents a cotton gin suited to upland cotton, increasing ginning productivity fifty-fold overnight.

American cotton production and plantation slavery expand dramatically into the deep interior of the Southern United States.

Confederate troops attack the federal garrison at Fort Sumter, triggering the American Civil War.

Britain launches a major effort to transform India's countryside into a reliable supplier of raw cotton for European mills.

Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, reframing the American Civil War as a fight to end slavery.

Freed enslaved people are coerced into sharecropping arrangements under black codes and vagrancy laws across the American South.

British colonial policies force Indian farmers to grow cotton rather than food, leading to catastrophic famines killing millions.

Anti-colonial independence movements in India and elsewhere steadily erode Great Britain's dominance over global cotton production.

The Liverpool Cotton Association sells off the furniture of its Cotton Exchange building, marking the end of Britain's cotton empire.

Empire of Cotton traces how Europe rose to dominate global cotton and how that dominance eventually collapsed. Beginning with the failure of early cotton industries in Germany and Italy, the story moves through Britain's founding of the East India Company, the construction of the first cotton mills, and the explosive expansion of American slavery to feed them. The American Civil War shattered the cotton supply chain, prompting Britain to forcibly recast colonial India as a cotton-growing machine. The era that followed—freed people pushed into exploitative sharecropping, colonial famines in India, and the rise of anti-colonial movements—slowly eroded British control. By the mid-twentieth century the empire was finished, symbolized by the quiet sale of the Liverpool Cotton Exchange's own furniture.

The key events that built and destroyed Europe's cotton empire.

Christopher Columbus encounters vast quantities of cotton in the Caribbean and interprets it as evidence that he has reached India.

Vasco da Gama sails around the southern tip of Africa, establishing the first oceanic trade route between Europe and India.

Britain imposes protectionist tariffs on Indian fabric imports, using state power to shelter its domestic cotton weaving industry.

Samuel Greg finances his cotton mill largely from wealth accumulated through the Hillsborough sugar plantation in Dominica.

British cotton mills become so productive that their yarn grows cheaper to buy than yarn spun by Indian hand workers.

Southern slaveholders secure the Three-Fifths Compromise at the Constitutional Convention, giving enslavers outsized political power in Congress.

The Louisiana Purchase nearly doubles US territory overnight, opening vast new lands for cotton plantation expansion.

Egypt's ruler Muhammad Ali launches an ambitious cotton industrialization program, but Britain forces open Egyptian markets and undermines it.

The 1823 Master and Servant Act empowers British employers to imprison factory workers who attempt to leave their jobs.

Ten-year-old Ellen Hootton testifies before a government inquiry about being beaten by her mill overseer twice a week.

The Confederacy bans all cotton exports, hoping to pressure Britain into formally recognizing the Confederate government.

The first transatlantic telegraph cable transforms cotton markets, letting buyers bypass the merchant networks that once dominated trade.

American cotton production surpasses its pre-Civil War record as the sharecropping system spreads across the South.

Japan, China, and India rapidly expand their cotton mill capacity as workers in Europe and America win higher wages.

Multinational retailers like Walmart displace merchant families as the dominant force shaping the global cotton commodity chain.

Behind the main arc of the cotton empire lay a web of explorers, industrialists, politicians, and workers whose actions shaped its rise and fall. Voyages by Columbus and da Gama opened the routes that made intercontinental cotton commerce possible, while protectionist tariffs and political maneuvers like the Three-Fifths Compromise gave certain players structural advantages. The industrial revolution's human cost was exposed by child workers like Ellen Hootton, while failed experiments like Egypt's industrialization revealed the limits of applying war capitalism at home. The Civil War's diplomatic dimensions, the transformative laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable, and eventually the dominance of multinational retailers all mark the evolution of the cotton world across centuries. Each of these events deepened the commodity chains that kept cotton flowing from fields to factories to consumers worldwide.

The supporting mechanisms and players that powered the cotton world.

European soldier-traders deploy armed warships to dominate ocean trade lanes and force Indian cotton producers to accept their terms.

British East India Company agents publicly flog Indian weavers who dare to sell their cloth to competing merchants.

The cotton industry grows to represent seventeen percent of Britain's entire economy, surpassing iron, coal, and woolens combined.

France's declaration of war against Britain cuts off all imports of cotton from French Caribbean colonies.

Whitney's cotton gin makes profitable inland cotton farming possible, unleashing a massive cotton rush across the American South.

The US government violently expels the Seminoles and other Indigenous nations from fertile cotton-growing territories through prolonged military campaigns.

Home-based spinners and weavers, unable to compete with factory machines, are forced to abandon their trades and enter cotton mills.

Cotton merchants pioneer a futures market in which cotton is bought and sold before it has even been grown.

Worker riots erupt across several British cotton towns as the Civil War cuts off the supply of American cotton.

Enslaved people desert plantations, pass intelligence to Union troops, and take up arms as soldiers, helping force emancipation.

President Johnson rescinds the land grant to freedpeople and restores confiscated Confederate plantations to their former owners.

KKK violence and legal repression prevent Black sharecroppers from organizing politically, leaving them in grinding poverty with no voice.

Colonial powers including Germany use corporal punishment and forced labor to compel African farmers to grow cotton for export.

Gandhi adopts the hand-spinning wheel as the defining symbol of India's non-violent resistance to British cotton imperialism.

A garment factory collapses in Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing over 1,100 workers manufacturing clothes for global retail giants.

Beneath the surface of the cotton empire's history lie moments of coercion, revelation, and resistance that repeatedly changed its direction. The violent methods of the East India Company, the emergence of the cotton futures market, and the transformation of home workers into factory laborers reveal how industrial capitalism depended on force as much as ingenuity. Emancipatory turning points, like enslaved people taking up arms during the Civil War, were swiftly countered by Johnson's betrayal of freedpeople and the terror of the Ku Klux Klan. Colonial powers then pushed the violence outward, compelling African farmers to grow cotton under threat of corporal punishment. Gandhi's spinning wheel symbolized a new era of resistance, while the collapse of a garment factory in Dhaka revealed that the suffering woven into cotton's history had not yet ended.

The pivotal decisions, discoveries, and acts of resistance that reshaped cotton's world.