last highlighted date: 2024-10-22
Highlights
- Embark on a voyage that takes you from ancient cotton weaving practices to the multi-continent
- By the 1500s, cotton had made its way to Mexico, where it was used to pay tributes to Aztec rulers, as well as India, the west coast of Africa, and 15th-century China, where it served as a tax currency.
- In 1784, Samuel Greg forever changed the cotton industry by opening the first mechanized cotton The mill in Englan
- n 1784, a monumental shift occurred in the world of textiles when Samuel Greg established the first mechanized cotton mill near Manchester, England. Powered by the river Bollin, the mill marked the beginning of a new era in cotton production.
- For example, 18th-century Indian spinners took 50,000 hours to spin 100 pounds of cotton.
- However, by 1825, British workers using machines needed only 135 hours to achieve the same output.
- Amidst colonial chaos, including the Haitian Revolution in 1791, the Southern United States emerged as the ideal cotton supplier.
- With manufacturers relying on brokers instead of dealers, trust-based networks became essential for success in the high-risk cotton trading market.
- The Rothschild family exemplifies how leveraging such networks enabled rapid investment returns in this globalized, modern capitalist wor
- When Nathan Mayer Rothschild ventured into the cotton business in Manchester in 1799, he leaned on his connections with fellow Jews from his hometown of Frankfurt.
- As the cotton industry grew rapidly, a clash emerged between the new class of American industrial capitalists, who employed wage labor and sought global expansion, and the old Southern planter elite, determined to maintain slavery. This conflict culminated in the American Civil War, significantly disrupting the global cotton industry. British imports from the United States dropped 96% by 1862, prompting European manufacturers to secure new sources, like India, where British colonial officials had built new infrastructure. With reduced import taxes, India emerged as the dominant supplier of cotton globally.
- Suddenly, Indian farmers individually owned smaller plots of land and could retain all the crops they grew. Unfortunately, a critical issue arose: these individual farmers lacked the funds to purchase seeds and tools for cultivation. Consequently, they found themselves reliant on costly loans from sowkars, or moneylenders, often pledging their newly acquired land as collateral. Farmers
- Cotton’s global power shift occurred during the early twentieth century, as emerging world powers like Russia and Japan entered the cotton industry, with Japan’s cotton demand skyrocketing. To achieve “raw material independence,”
- Between 1860 and 1920, at least 55 million acres of land in Africa, Asia, and the Americas transformed into cotton fields. However, such expansion required the colonial powers to dismantle pre-existing industries in these regions. This process, known as deindustrialization, employed tactics such as imposing tariffs and duties on colonies, consequently crushing local production of cotton goods. The deindustrialization process