Interestingly enough - to me at any rate - at one time prior to the ACW, India had a booming cotton industry. Unlike the Opium Wars which encouraged the Brits to introduce and raise tea in India to break the Chinese monopoly, cotton has a long history on the sub-continent...
Indian cotton threads have been found that dated to the Neolithic period. Indian cultivation is dated to the Indus Valley Civilization, between 3300 and 1300 BC. The sub-continent cotton industry was well-developed and some methods used in cotton spinning and fabrication continued to be used until the industrialization of India. Between 2000 and 1000 BC cotton became widespread across much of India. Handheld roller cotton gins had been used in India since the 6th century. Between the 12th and 14th centuries, dual-roller gins appeared. The Indian version of the dual-roller gin was prevalent throughout the Mediterranean cotton trade by the 16th century. This mechanical device could be driven by water power. The spinning wheel was invented in India, between 500 and 1000 AD.
During the Mughal Empire, Indian production of both raw cotton and cotton textiles increased. The Mughals instituted agrarian reforms such as an incentive system that was leaned in favor of high value cash crops such as cotton and indigo, providing official incentives to grow them, in addition to rising market demand. The largest manufacturing industry in the Mughal Empire was cotton textiles, which included the production of piece goods, calicos, and muslins, available unbleached and in a variety of colors. The cotton textile industry was responsible for a large part of the empire's international trade. ( this sound familiar? ) India had a 25% share of the global textile trade in the early 18th century. Indian textiles were the most important manufactured goods in world trade in the 18th century. ( this sound familiar? ) The epicenter of cotton production was the Bengal Subah province. The worm gear roller cotton gin, which was invented in India during the early Delhi Sultanate era of the 13th–14th centuries, came into use in the Mughal Empire some time around the 16th century. Another innovation, the incorporation of the crank handle in the cotton gin, first appeared in India some time during the late Delhi Sultanate or the early Mughal Empire. The production of cotton was advanced by the diffusion of the spinning wheel across India shortly before the Mughal era, lowering the costs of yarn and helping to increase demand for cotton.
And then, the EIC showed up...
The English East India Company introduced Britain to cheap calico and chintz cloth. The cheap colorful cloth proved popular and overtook the EIC's spice trade by value in the late 17th century. The EIC jumped on this, particularly for calico, by expanding its factories in Asia and producing and importing cloth in bulk, creating competition for domestic woolen and linen textile producers. The displaced weavers, spinners, dyers, shepherds and farmers objected and the calico question became one of the major issues of National politics between the 1680s and the 1730s. Parliament began to see a decline in domestic textile sales, and an increase in imported textiles from places like China and India. Seeing the East India Company and their textile importation as a threat to domestic textile businesses, Parliament passed the 1700 Calico Act, blocking the importation of cotton cloth. In 1721, dissatisfied with the results of the first act, Parliament passed a stricter addition, this time prohibiting the sale of most cottons, imported and domestic, exempting only thread Fustian and raw cotton. The exemption of raw cotton from the prohibition initially saw 2 thousand bales of cotton imported annually, to become the basis of a new indigenous industry, initially producing Fustian for the domestic market, though more importantly triggering the development of a series of mechanized spinning and weaving technologies, to process the material. The mechanized production was concentrated in new cotton mills, which slowly expanded, till by the beginning of the 1770s seven thousand bales of cotton were imported annually, and pressure was put on Parliament, by the new mill owners, to remove the prohibition on the production and sale of pure cotton cloth, since they could then easily compete with anything the EIC could import. The acts were repealed in 1774, triggering a wave of investment in mill based cotton spinning and production, doubling the demand for raw cotton within a couple of years, and doubling it again every decade, into the 1840s.
Indian cotton textiles continued to maintain a competitive advantage up until the 19th century. In order to compete with India, Britain invested in labor-saving technical progress, while implementing protectionist policies such as bans and tariffs to restrict Indian imports. At the same time, the East India Company's rule in India contributed to its deindustrialization, opening up a new market for British goods, while the capital amassed from Bengal after its 1757 conquest was used to invest in British industries such as textile manufacturing and greatly increase British wealth. British colonization also forced open the large Indian market to British goods, which could be sold in India without tariffs or duties, compared to local Indian producers who were heavily taxed, while raw cotton was imported from India without tariffs to British factories which manufactured textiles from Indian cotton, giving Britain a monopoly over India's large market and cotton resources. India served as both a significant supplier of raw goods to British manufacturers and a large captive market for British manufactured goods. Britain surpassed India as the world's leading cotton textile manufacturer.
India's cotton-processing sector changed during EIC expansion in India, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, from focusing on supplying the British market to supplying raw cotton. As the Artisan produced textiles were no longer competitive with those produced Industrially, and Europe preferring the cheaper slave produced, long staple American, and Egyptian cottons, for its own materials.
During the ACW, cotton growing in the British Empire, especially Australia and India, greatly increased to replace the lost production of the American South. Through tariffs and other restrictions, the British government discouraged the production of cotton cloth in India; rather, the raw fiber was sent to England for processing. The Indian Mahatma Gandhi described the process:
- English people buy Indian cotton in the field, picked by Indian labor at seven cents a day, through an optional monopoly.
- This cotton is shipped on British ships, a three-week journey across the Indian Ocean, down the Red Sea, across the Mediterranean, through Gibraltar, across the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic Ocean to London. One hundred per cent profit on this freight is regarded as small.
- The cotton is turned into cloth in Lancashire. You pay shilling wages instead of Indian pennies to your workers. The English worker not only has the advantage of better wages, but the steel companies of England get the profit of building the factories and machines. Wages; profits; all these are spent in England.
- The finished product is sent back to India at European shipping rates, once again on British ships. The captains, officers, sailors of these ships, whose wages must be paid, are English. The only Indians who profit are a few lascars who do the dirty work on the boats for a few cents a day.
- The cloth is finally sold back to the kings and landlords of India who got the money to buy this expensive cloth out of the poor peasants of India who worked at seven cents a day.
I always thought that Indian cotton was a 'Johnny-come-lately' to the cotton game - the things I have to unlearn...(cross-thread reference!!!) The English mills were not set up for Indian cotton - different feed stock, different process...
Sources;
"First Evidence of Cotton at Neolithic Mehrgarh, Pakistan: Analysis of Mineralized Fibres from a Copper Bead". Journal of Archaeological Science.
A History of India.
"The spread of textile production and textile crops in India beyond the Harappan zone: an aspect of the emergence of craft specialization and systematic trade"
The Columbia Encyclopedia
Historical Geography of Crop Plants: A Select Roster
The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India
Cotton: Origin, History, Technology, and Production. 4. John Wiley & Sons.
Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History
An Atlas and Survey of South Asian History
Monitoring the World Economy, 1820-1992
Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850
The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760
Economic History of Medieval India, 1200-1500
"Machinery and Large-Scale Industry."
"Cotton textiles and the great divergence: Lancashire, India and shifting competitive advantage, 1600-1850"
Finance and Society in 21st Century China: Chinese Culture Versus Western Markets
The Islamic World: Past and Present Bengal Industries and the British Industrial Revolution (1757-1857)
The Process of Economic Development.
Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes.
The Definitive Glossary of British India.
"100 Years of Cotton Production, Harvesting, and Ginning Systems".
Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber.
276
Cheers,
USS ALASKA