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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of History, 2010.
This dissertation examines the end of the wave of globalization that connected the Atlantic world and then the rest of the globe over the course of the nineteenth century. It focuses on the cotton industry, one of the main engines of the unprecedented growth witnessed in that period. While conventional accounts of the cotton industry convey the image of an “Indian summer” for the cotton trade and the global system in the decade before 1914, this dissertation shows that the period was in fact marked by crisis.
Cotton brokers cornered the American supply of cotton between 1902 and 1904, paralyzing the world’s textile manufacturers. In Lancashire, the biggest cotton textile center in the world, capitalists and workers turned to the British Empire for a new source of cotton. The British Cotton Growing Association promised to bring economic development to Britain’s African colonies and stability to Lancashire’s cotton industry, but its free-market model collapsed in the face of apathy in Lancashire, resistance to cotton growing in Africa, and fluctuating world prices for cotton. The British colonial state discarded the BCGA’s for-profit development model after the First World War, but colonial officials kept many of the association’s coercive tools and techniques, paving the way for a century of failed colonial and postcolonial development policies.
On the other side of the Atlantic, American farmers used the cotton crisis to organize, reviving the populist campaigns of the last century. Hoping to permanently tilt the terms of trade in favor of cotton growers, these cotton populists proposed a range of ambitious reforms and initiatives. Their programs also failed, and like the BCGA, government moved in to play the central role in agrarian development.
Caught between the farmers and the colonial cotton campaign was the International Cotton Federation, a trade group formed in response to the initial cotton supply crisis. The ICF tried to bring international governance to the cotton industry, and while its leaders successfully reformed several key institutions of the cotton trade, they failed to establish a binding, international framework to regulate the flow of cotton growing and cotton textile manufacturing.
The First World War emphatically demonstrated the need for change in the cotton industry while showing the shortcomings of all three of these private-sector indicatives. By the 1920s, all three efforts to change the structure of the global cotton industry had failed, and leaders in the cotton industry embraced state solutions to solve the same lingering international problems.
