Cotton seed are believed to have been planted in Florida in and in Virginia in By , colonists were growing cotton along the James River in Virginia. Cotton was first spun by machinery in England in The industrial revolution in England and the invention of the cotton gin in the U.
Cotton became the first mass consumer commodity. Understanding both how extraordinarily profitable cotton was and how interconnected and overlapping were the economies of the cotton plantation, the Northern banking industry, New England textile factories and a huge proportion of the economy of Great Britain helps us to understand why it was something of a miracle that slavery was finally abolished in this country at all.
This resulted in dramatically higher profits for planters, which in turn led to a seemingly insatiable increase in the demand for more slaves, in a savage, brutal and vicious cycle. What did cotton production and slavery have to do with Great Britain?
The figures are astonishing. It spun yarn from between 20 and 30 spindles at one time, thus doing the work of several spinsters - a prospect that had made Hargreaves so unpopular in his neighborhood that a mob destroyed his spinning jennies and ran him out of town. In the s, the first newly planted cotton came from American plantations manned by slaves. The raw cotton had to be cleaned before it could be used by the fast-moving equipment, but it was taking a full day for one person to remove the seeds from one pound of cotton.
Eli Whitney, a New Englander, solved that problem with his cotton gin, which used a series of steel disks fitted with hooks to drag the cotton through slots in a grid, leaving the seeds behind. This invention both spurred the Industrial Revolution in Britain and induced Southern planters in America to grow more cotton. Britain not only had clean supplies of American cotton and an array of machines to handle every stage of making it into cloth, but it also had good power supplies.
Eighteenth-century machines typically used water power, hence the siting of early factories near the fast-flowing rivers of the Pennines. But after James Watt invented the steam engine in , coal became the main fuel. Serendipitously, England's richest mines were also near the Pennines in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, and Derbyshire.
Thus, these northern areas became the textile strongholds of the country. The new machinery ended the traditional domestic system of textile production. Machines had to be close to their power source; they could not be in cottages. Moreover, different machines sequenced to perform specific tasks required both a division of labor and specialized skills.
Workers, therefore, had to follow strict rules about work and punctuality. Some mills specialized in one textile-making process, but others, such as Quarry Bank Mill at Styal, established in , performed all the needed tasks to turn cotton fiber into cloth. At Quarry Bank Mill, nearly half the workers were children between the ages of 7 and 21, most from workhouses and orphanages who were contracted to work for a period of seven years as apprentices. By there were 90 children who lived and worked without pay at the mill, learning the trade as the reward for their work, although there was no significant effort to teach them the trade; mostly they were regarded as a source of cheap labor.
Records from Quarry Bank Mill contain details of nearly 1, children who worked there between and Their day began early. They typically rose at a. Through the day, they usually had three short breaks, when they were fed oatmeal, and then at p. On Sundays, they had reading lessons, church, and chores, such as tending the owner's vegetable gardens. Life was equally hard for adult factory workers. This global panic illuminated to peasants, workers, manufacturers, and merchants how closely intertwined developments all over the world had become.
A British observer was amazed at these new global links that the Civil War had brought to the fore. The world indeed had become smaller, and the way cotton held parts of it together had changed significantly. If the Civil War was a moment of crisis for the empire of cotton, it was also a rehearsal for its reconstruction.
Cotton capitalists were confident from their triumphs in recasting industrial production at home. As they surveyed the ashes of the South, they saw promising new levers that might move the mountain of free labor into cotton cultivation with new lands, new labor relations, and new connections between them.
But perhaps most important, cotton capitalists had learned that the lucrative global trade networks they had spun could only be protected and maintained by unprecedented state activism. Meanwhile, statesmen understood that these networks had become essential to the social order of their nations and hence a crucial bulwark of political legitimacy, resources, and power. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic.
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