Post #5: “Consequences” (a continuation of #4: “The Weapons of Free Trade, Free Markets”—Please read first).
from Empire of Cotton, Beckert, 2014
In India alone, historian Tirthankar Roy concluded, “There is undeniable empirical evidence that the community of hand-spinners of cotton gave up spinning on a large scale, and this factor alone may account for a loss of manufacturing employment to the extent of 4-5 million persons.” Other historians have suggested that the loss of manufacturing between 1830 and 1860 amounted to between 2 and 6 million full-time jobs just in India.
Yet, most crucially, the radical recasting [by colonialism] of ever larger swaths of the world’s countryside undermined food security. During the American Civil War [when cotton production sank dramatically], British officials reported that [in Third World colonies] “the increasing area of land devoted to cultivation of articles of export, such as cotton, has led to a proportionate decrease in cultivation of articles of food.” As a result, food prices rose between 1861 and 1865 by more than 325 percent, and even Sir Charles Trevelyan had to admit that “at the present high prices of food, the body of the people, in several parts of India, is barely able to subsist.” [This soaring rise in prices is not a “natural” economic phenomenon, as we are taught, but a direct result of the nature of capitalism itself.]
In Egypt the situation was quite similar. Once a food-grain exporting country, it became dependent on imports of food crops as the result of its [forced] greater dedication to cotton during the American Civil War. When in the summer of 1863 disease killed nearly all of Egypt’s cattle, a food crisis emerged in which tens of thousands of felaheen [agricultural laborers] perished.
The increasing world market orientation of cotton cultivators also had significant effects on social structures. Throughout western India’s Maharashtra, for example, British efforts to increase revenue and encourage peasants to participate in distant markets led to the undermining of the collective nature of villages, making individual peasants instead of villages as a whole responsible for taxes, and handing judicial power to distant courts instead of village-based and peasant-dominated tribunals. The market now increasingly subsumed all aspects of society, not just in Lancashire or Alsace, but Berar [India] and Lower Egypt as well. In Egypt, the booming cotton export industry, according to historian Alan Richards, “destroyed the old quasi-communal forms of land tenure, broke up the protective web of village social relations, replaced them with private property in land and individual tax responsibility, and helped create four classes: large landowners, rich peasants, small peasant landowners, and a landless class.”
As early as the 1840s, the government had begun compelling peasants to grow specific crops, including cotton, and to “deliver them to government warehouses.” Peasants had responded to this pressure by leaving the land in droves, which the government took as a reason to deny any claims to the land by those who had “deserted” it. By 1862, anyone who left the land for more than two months lost his claim to the property. The most serious impact on cotton farmers, however, emerged after the American Civil War. World market integration increased the economic uncertainty faced by people in remote corners of the world. What wage workers, tenants, and sharecroppers had in common was that they had lost access to subsistence agriculture—-basic production and consumption now depended on global markets. Their incomes, and quite literally their survival, were now linked to global price fluctuations over which they had no control. Between 1864 and 1873 the amount of cotton that a tenant or farmer had to produce to buy a a given quantity of Berar’s most important food grain, jowar, doubled, and then it doubled again by 1878. As the colonial government of India observed in1874, “The more the area’s food stocks is diminished in favor of fibers, the greater the danger from any failure of the monsoon becomes, and the greater appears to be the necessity of some security against the consequences of such failure.”
Indeed, cotton production for export typically produced a quagmire of poverty, debt, and underdevelopment well into the twentieth century. As the director of the Gharbieh Land Company in Cairo reminded his audience in a speech to an international federation of cotton manufacturers, “You have only to go to the villages and see the dwellings our people live in, their very small interest in life, their hard work from morning till evening without distractions would give you an idea as to how the Egyptian peasant lives his gloomy existence.”
In 1877 and again in the late 1890s, Berar, as well as northeastern Brazil, witnessed the starvation of millions of cultivators as cotton prices fell while food grain prices rose, putting food out of reach of many cotton producers. The 1870s famine was not caused by a lack of food (indeed, food grains continued to be exported from Berar), but by the inability of the poorest agricultural laborers to buy urgently needed food grains. In India alone, between 6 and 10 million people died in the famines of the late 1870s. Observed one gazetteer, “Had Berar been an isolated tract dependent on its own resources, it is possible that there would have been no famine.” High prices had made food unavailable to many peasants and agricultural laborers, and during the 1900 famine, another 8.5 percent of the population of Berar died.
The British medical journal The Lancet estimated that famine deaths during the 1890s totaled 19 million, with fatalities concentrated in the tracts of India that had recently been recast to produce cotton for export. In the town of Risod, a contemporary observed that people “died like flies.”
Please read Post #4, if you haven’t already.