Emancipation and the Empire: Sven Beckert

The American Civil War accelerated the transformation of the world cotton economy from one centered between the United States and merchant cities in England to a worldwide enterprise. States, rather than a small caste of merchants and factory owners, set the structure of the economy and enabled local merchants in Brazil, India, and Egypt to exert indirect control over an emerging class of laborers and sharecroppers whose traditional sustenance societies and economies were transformed by the incentives of the global market and the power of the state to enforce contracts and private property laws. For Beckert, the de jure liberation of four million North American slaves led to the de facto bondage of millions more spread across continents.

The American Civil War provoked all of this by creating a shortage of cotton on the world market. The cotton produced through slave labor had catapulted the United States onto the world stage in the early nineteenth century. Cotton exports to Great Britain and other nations in Europe tapered to insignificance in 1862, hurting the textile industry and prompting unemployment and violent riots. Fearing for the social order, the British government exercised its power to open Indian land to foreign investment in cotton, where the crop had previously failed to catch on due to the backward Indian social structure, American predominance in the export industry, a lack of state support for investors, and the difficulties of transporting the crop back to Europe. With the closing of the American market from 1861-65, Indian entrepeneurs jumped at the opportunity to grow and export the suddenly scarce cash crop. A modernizing sultan in Egypt also took advanatage of European demand as did Brazilians. The cotton industry linked areas of the world in manners previously unthinkable as the state interest in preserving social order forced it to ally with capitalists eager to exploit labor on the periphery, thus ending the reign of Anglo-American slave holders and merchants over cotton.

The scarcity of cotton during the Civil War on the world economy did not stop the industry from expanding. New sources flourished at the high prices of cotton, but even after American production began exceeding its antebellum output in the early 1870s, India, Egypt, and Brazil maintained a steady level of exports well above their pre 1860 levels. The Civil War imparted on cotton experts the knowledge that labor, rather than land, constrained production. While some worried the chaos of the post-war South would damage the market for decades to come, the transition from plantation labor to free was made easier by the system of sharecropping. Advances in railways and shipping, to say nothing of the telegraph, lowered transaction costs while individual farmers of cotton incurred debts due to start-up costs and the fluctuations of the world market that made a transition away from producing cash-crops improbable. The British government and local merchants pushed people into producing cotton and much of traditional rural Indian culture and economics died away in the face of the complete transformation of the countryside where local elites lost power to urban merchants who used agricultural debt and methods of extra-economic and political coercion to maintain efficiency.

Given the scope of the textile industry in European nations, the government needed to expand its range in the economic sector to guarantee order at home. In devoting more energy and resources to consolidating empires, the construction of infrastructure, and securing property rights abroad, the European powers overran traditional common land practices and left the livelihoods of millions of people across the globe tied directly to the rising and falling of cotton prices. The Civil War accelerated this process.