Empire of Cotton: Prompt question #3 Response

Answer to question 3:

I took this question to be one about raw cotton rather than cotton products.  Raw cotton itself did not have much economic value in the 16^th century in Europe, but cotton products had tremendous value.  In fact, raw cotton didn’t even have much value up through the 17^th and 18^th centuries, either.  Beckert writes, “The modest demand for raw cotton among European manufacturers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before they heyday of the new machines that would by 1780 revolutionize cotton manufacturing, was largely met through established and diversified trade channels.” (40). Raw cotton was in only “modest” demand because manufacturers of cotton could not compete with Asian manufacturers, in large part, as Beckert argues, because of wage costs.  While raw cotton was in modest demands during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, it seems that the same was true for the 16^th century as well.  Cotton industry had begun to sprout in northern Italy and southern Germany, but at this time “within Europe, the industry was not yet particularly prominent.  Europeans still largely dressed in linen and woolens, not cottons” (27).  Later, while Great Britain had begun to establish its dominance throughout the global markets through what Beckert describes as “war capitalism,” Indian cotton products were still of a higher quality and cheaper than British cotton products.  It was not until manufacturing took off at the end of the 17^th century that Britain was able to compete with Indian products by drastically reducing the hours needed to spin cotton.  War capitalism had been able to both, ironically, make trading in Indian products profitable by dominating global markets and protecting domestic cotton products at home.  However, it was only when, in 1790, British manufacturing gained the ability to spin a hundred pounds of raw cotton in just 1,000 hours (compared to the 50,000 hours it took Indian workers, 66) that cotton itself began to have real value in Europe.  Even beyond the economic value of the increase in the rate of productivity, industrial capitalism was a revolution in that “workers were neither enslaved nor populations murdered,” (79) making war capitalism irrelevant in the progression of what “Hegel would call the ‘spirit of history’” (79).