Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

In the name of efficiency, slave-owning plantations specialised in monoculture – they produced nothing but cotton. The harvested cotton had to be cleaned, pressed into bales and delivered to the docks. The cleaning process caused a bottleneck in the system – it was tedious to separate each fibre from the seed coat. By inventing the ‘cotton gin’, a mechanical gadget that made cleaning fifty times quicker, Eli Whitney enabled the rapid burgeoning of cotton plantations in the American South. Whitney patented his invention but never made any money from it; after many unsuccessful lawsuits he switched to designing muskets. Like sugar cane, cotton rapidly depleted the soil. But, unlike sugar, cotton would grow in Louisiana – a vast and boundless territory compared with the small islands of the West Indies. Labour was in short supply there, but the volume of the cotton trade doubled nearly every decade. Little else in history can compare with the explosive growth of the cotton trade; only sugar before it, and petroleum after it, grew as fast.

‘King Cotton’ led to the catastrophically rapid deforestation of the new continent. New plantations in Louisiana needed canals, which dried out the boggy soil. Supplies reached the plantations via these canals – slaves, grain, dried or salted fish, hemp ropes and bales, linen shirts for the slaves, and luxury items for the plantation owners. The work went on all year round; in December the third cotton crop of the year was harvested, and then it had to be cleaned and pressed into bales. The life of a slave was nothing like the life of a peasant with its complicated tasks and periods of creative idleness. Focused on nothing but profit, the cotton plantation became the first capitalist enterprise, while slaves were the first industrial workers. It was not for nothing that factory workers were later compared to slaves.

Proto-industry

On the other side of the ocean, in England, the village processing of cotton expanded and became more specialised. Even in 1833 the majority of the wool and cotton in England was processed by hand, in rural workshops. But, as had earlier happened in Italy, the mills gravitated towards cities. Bales of cotton were brought straight from the ports and distributed to individual houses; the peasants spun it by hand or wove it on hand looms, sometimes adding wool or linen that they themselves had produced. Much more than wool, the processing of cotton depended on middlemen. It was they who delivered the bales of raw material to the villages, and they who collected the rolls of finished cloth and delivered them to tailoring workshops. As always happened, these curators took the greatest share of the profits. Servicing a cluster of neighbouring villages, they paid for the cotton out of their own pockets. Their business was simple, risky and profitable. The spinners, knitters and weavers earned a wage in a free labour market without leaving home. While women were working the looms, their husbands worked the land, as subsistence farmers. But it was this industry that led the villages onto the hard road of trade and growth. Peasant families were able to spend the cash they earned on sugar and tea, rum and gin, horses and harness, and, finally, silver and decoration. Many, though not all, of the goods introduced into the countryside came from the colonies; from sugar and tobacco to fashionable calico prints, these addictive commodities engendered habit and dependency. These led to the ‘decomposition of the peasantry’, a process that Lenin and other critics of capitalism wrote about. In fact it was exactly the same thing they called ‘progress’. The development of the fibre proto-industry in different parts of the world engaged in global trade – in England, India, New England, and on the shores of the White Sea in Russia – played a key role in the change in gender relations and the development of mass consumption. Characteristic of textiles, fashion became a universal tool for accelerating the market. 30

Invented for wool, spinning and weaving technologies were easily adapted for cotton. Water-powered machines gave cotton its decisive advantage, which was later amplified by the power of coal and steam. In 1780, ten times more woollen textiles were produced in the British Isles than cotton goods. In 1850, six times more cotton textiles were produced than woollen. By this time, in order to replace the output of British cotton factories with woollen textiles, it would have required 168 million sheep, which would have grazed 50 million acres of pastureland, twice the area of all the agricultural land in the British Isles. The intensive cultivation on the American plantations, and the mills of the first Industrial Revolution, gave England millions of ‘ghost acres’. 31 The balance of trade also gained by this massive switch from wool to cotton. During the eighteenth century, the deliveries of raw cotton to the British Isles increased threefold, while the export of manufactured cotton goods increased by a factor of fifteen.