Globalizing the Cotton Industry's Agro-Environments in the Late-Nineteenth Century US South and India

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Abstract

This paper examines changes in land use, environmental change, social resource control, and distribution of hazards and benefits of production within the cotton textile industry’s global agricultural hinterland in sections of the American South and colonial India. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain’s (and to a lesser extent, Western Europe’s and the Northeastern United States’) industrial revolutions were fueled by an expanding cotton commodity frontier that incorporated and transformed chattel slavery in the US South and a variety of structures of land-labor organization in colonial India such as the ryotwari system. The American Civil War threatened the industrializing core’s access to the cotton cultivars that industrial machinery could spin into yarn. Emancipation further disrupted the plantation system that had sustained settler capitalism and industrial capitalism on both sides of the Atlantic. In the old regime’s wake, a globalized agrarian hinterland emerged in many regions, chiefly the US South and large portions of colonial India, to furnish the cotton cultivars an expanding textile industry needed between the 1860s and 1890s. Rural cultivators faced increasingly similar and precarious positions: debt peonage, loss of control over crop choice and means of subsistence, and the need to push down on declining and degrading soil resources under their control. This capitalization and adaptation of the capitalist plantation regime to new forms of semi-free labor kept factor prices low and the flow of cotton more reliable to the industrial core. This was made possible by transferring the ecological load to systematically impoverished rural producers and the agro-environments on which they depended, a model that remains intact in the global countryside to this day.

Author

• William Ippen, Loyola University Chicago