Nature's Evil

European garments were often made of a blend of cotton with wool or linen. This fabric was called ‘fustian’; the forerunner of denim, it was hard-wearing and relatively cheap. The warm, brightly coloured clothing we see in Brueghel’s winter scenes was made of this long-forgotten material; it was all made at home, using very simple equipment. In Southern Europe, light clothes made of coloured cotton displaced silk. For a long time, India had the monopoly on the art of dyeing cotton or printing a design on it. The price of coloured textiles doubled during the course of the eighteenth century. Silk panels decorated the bedchambers of kings and the altars of churches. Furniture, walls and windows, upholstered or curtained with cotton textiles, became a feature of middle-class households. Still, they were precious. In 1791 a mob of Anglican supporters attacked the house of Joseph Priestly in Birmingham – the celebrated chemist was a Dissenter. Priestly claimed compensation and listed among his losses the matrimonial bed with a cotton canopy and a set of bed linen. He valued them at £25, a quarter of his annual income. 28

Joint stock companies were created to trade in cotton and other Eastern goods, with royal households the main investors in these companies. The British East India Company specialised in importing cotton to Europe, while the Dutch East India Company concentrated on trade between the Asian powers. But the growth of the cotton trade undermined the traditional interests of the wool producers – the majority of British landowners and tenants who got their income from sheep and wool processing. To protect its sheep, weavers and landowners, the British Parliament in the early eighteenth century issued the Calico Acts (1700, 1721), which banned the import of printed textiles from India; for the same reason, France, Spain and Prussia banned any imports of cotton. India was impoverished; huge areas were deprived of their usual income. Then the American plantations entered the picture. The route from America to England was shorter than that from Asia, and the mercantilist system encouraged the import of raw materials from the colonies while limiting the import of manufactured textiles. All this gave a boost to cotton mills in England and plantations in the American South.

Tobacco, sugar and cotton: all three plant-based raw materials needed large plantations and cheap, repetitive labour. Economy of scale played an ever-increasing role: the bigger the enterprise, the cheaper the cost of production and, therefore, the greater the profit. For the sake of cotton, any gentleman got the right to trade in human beings (1698); moreover, the governors in the British West Indies received a bonus for every slave supplied. The risks of the slave trade were unparalleled. On the transatlantic crossing one in five ships was lost; but in Liverpool it was thought that, even if one in every two ships made it to port with its cargo, then the owner made a profit. Capital acquired from sugar, cotton and slaves went to shipbuilders, insurers, bankers and mill-owners. Barclays Bank was founded by a family of Quakers who worked as slave traders in the West Indies. Lloyd’s of London began by insuring deals in slaves, sugar and cotton. James Watt, inventor of the first steam engine, was financed by a bank that derived income from trade in the West Indies. 29

In the name of efficiency, slave-owning plantations specialised in monoculture – they produced nothing but cotton. The harvested cotton had to be cleaned, pressed into bales and delivered to the docks. The cleaning process caused a bottleneck in the system – it was tedious to separate each fibre from the seed coat. By inventing the ‘cotton gin’, a mechanical gadget that made cleaning fifty times quicker, Eli Whitney enabled the rapid burgeoning of cotton plantations in the American South. Whitney patented his invention but never made any money from it; after many unsuccessful lawsuits he switched to designing muskets. Like sugar cane, cotton rapidly depleted the soil. But, unlike sugar, cotton would grow in Louisiana – a vast and boundless territory compared with the small islands of the West Indies. Labour was in short supply there, but the volume of the cotton trade doubled nearly every decade. Little else in history can compare with the explosive growth of the cotton trade; only sugar before it, and petroleum after it, grew as fast.