Ghost-Notes of the Whipping-Machine
"I mean, these are camps [Southern 'plantations'] that could have impressed the Nazis" said Noam Chomsky in a recent interview in discussion of American racism and the legacy of slavery. He referred to Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told several times and referred to it several times as "shocking". Here we should take a pause. Noam Chomsky has authored more than 100 books and is as rigorous of a scholar as it is humanly possible to be. In his 80 years, no scholar has collected and documented as many facts on the evils of American foreign policy. Regarding America's domestic history, he's certainly no slouch (he's been alive for much of it!), so the very fact that Baptist's book shocked even Chomsky should give us pause. Given the health statistics and rampant cruelty that he documents, Baptist was certainly being generous when he said American slavery: "probably killed hundreds of thousands of people". We could certainly calculate the death toll at one million or even several million when we look at the effect of 80 years of brutal slavery on a whole people. For a long time, slavery had been identified, along with the extermination of the indigenous population, as America's "founding crime", or rather, it's original sin. But it is a crime so enormous that it must continually be erased or dressed up in the American imagination. In fact, Americans have an easier time imagining the true nature of their forebears extermination of the Indians then they do conceptualizing that slavery may have been something other than brutal yet benevolent care.
As the Baltimore riots raged, I felt a strange compulsion to go through the end notes of Baptist's book, to reread the economic sections and recheck the data. I paid particular attention to Baptist's claim that the American Revolution caused a profound rupture in the structure of Early Modern slavery which resulted in an unprecedented rise in labor productivity. Early Modern slaveries, or "War Capitalism" as Beckert might call it, rested on a structure of continually acquiring new acres of land and clearing it to plant sugar, tobacco and placing more slaves on it. It would appear that Baptist is correct to assert that it hadn't changed so much since the sugar slavery of Portuguese/Dutch Brazil, with labor productivity rising slowly, if at all, over several centuries. Another feature of older slaveries is the practice of manumission (which was practiced all over the Americas) and stratification of labor (i.e. skilled artisans etc.) within slave labor forces. As Baptist's book demonstrates, these factors were conspicuously absent in the American experience of slavery.Labor in the cotton fields was notoriously despecialized and deskilled; it resembled a modern sweatshop far more than it resembled any other agricultural sector of its age. In comparison, to the viciously avant-garde and modern organization of labor in the Southern slave labor camp, the modern cotton mill, often seemed antique. Recent decades have brought more focus on the 400 year Atlantic Slave Trade and its contribution to Western progress. But such wide focus has a tendency to obscure specific facts or uniqueness of experience; it can be said that there is an omission by inclusion. If it sounds contradictory, it's really not. If everyone was involved in and benefited from the slave trade then everyone is guilty. And that actually makes Uncle Sam look awfully good. By concentrating on slave ships and the number of slaves imported to this or that particular colony, we leave to one side the conditions under which slaves actually worked. So only 6% of the slaves who crossed the Atlantic made their way to North American shores, thus Uncle Sam comes off looking good comparatively, to slave-labor sinkholes such as Brazil. Even American complicity in the heyday of the 19th century slave-trade can be used to cast its own slavery practices at home in a favorable light. Since, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and French slavers were also involved there's plenty of parties for the blame to be spread around.
But the enormous internal slave-trade of one million people must not be talked about. All efforts must be made to make Brazilian or Jamaican plantations look comparatively worse. If caribbean plantations were the height of cruelty and exploitation then why did Eric Williams think they were in decline circa the late 18th century? And why did Britain and France give them up? The frequency of slave-revolts and constant need for new labor imports are cited as the proof that conditions were worse. But the former can only be proof that it was easier for slaves to rebel, not that conditions were easier. In the first place, non-North American colonies usually had a gender imbalance owing to the fact that slave-traders often preferred young men and boys for plantation labor. The fact that the American slaves who built the Empire of liberty had an equitable gender-balance and had generally resigned in the colonies for several generations can explain a lot about why labor imports were required in Haiti but not in say Virginia. The data also shows that the fertility of American slave women was much higher than in Jamaica, and the slave-rape/breeding culture must play a significant part in this, but the facts are that infant mortality was much higher than present day Haiti and similar to Caribbean plantation islands and West Africa. What does this say when the United States has a temperate climate? Most slaves died young. They were shorter than their white counter-parts and according to some sources slave women often did not achieve menarche until their early to mid-twenties. Johnson has documented that starvation and undernourishment were pervasive on slave-planations and this quite counter to popular notions that slave-owners had an interest in keeping their slaves healthy in order to extract value from them. Raising yields and attaining profits this season often overshadowed the long-run. In addition to the brutal combination of torture and modern management, when slaves weren't picking cotton they were doing plenty of other work that often underwrote the costs of the labor camps. Whether its growing food to sustain themselves or mending clothes. Baptist notes that the rare times that slaves were paid, it was for 'overtime' usually for night-work on Sundays, because they couldn't ask it of them for religious reasons. Wages don't make US slavery any nicer than any other American slavery, because in fact slaves received wages all over the Americas for certain kinds of work.
The skeptic might sit back and think that even if all this information proves that American slavery was far from benign, it doesn't prove it was worse then elsewhere. But consider this: the explosion in labor productivity that US slavery produced was unprecedented, in fact it is so great that on its own terms it could explain the Great Divergence. Is this a shocking claim? Not when you consider that when US cotton production hit its height in 1860, 4 million slaves were producing more cotton than 200 million Indian peasants. Suddenly, the West had capitalized, monetized, and securitized an enormous cotton crop that outdistance that produced by the vast and prosperous peasant economies of Asia. It was a massive source of wealth and capital. Production for export did not fully recover until 1875. We can also point out that the entire cotton export cotton crop of the African continent surpassed America's 1860 output--in 1930! European colonialism in Africa was never renowned for its benevolence, so we can infer that the brutality that American slaves experienced must have been extreme, if the colonialists of the Livingstone-Rhodes generation took so long in squeezing a similar sized crop out of the continent. We should also note that it was not a foreign crop, Africans were skilled cotton weavers and agriculturalists. Johnson pointed out that Jefferson and others hoped that by allowing slavery to spread into newly seized southwest territories that the African population of the seaboard would be 'diffused' and that their labor would help aid in building a white yeoman republic, and they would themselves die out. Few have even broached the issue of whether American slavery could be described as ethnic cleansing or genocidal. In part it must be said that its because the enslaved population in absolute numbers rose and also because by the early 1820s slavery was a dominant and dynamic institution. Whatever the intent, America had a larger slave economy than any other place on the planet in the 19th century. It held the majority of the 6 million slaves that powered the Atlantic Market Revolution of the 19th century as Grandin refers to it. Baptist is correct to say that slavery financed the occupation of the North American continent. The entire British Empire and its domains were also completely dependent on the wealth extracted from the blood of American slaves. It would seem that US slavery presages the worst episodes of capitalist brutality such as the Belgian Congo. Baptist has pointed to the indelible imprint that both the slaves and the enslavers left on modernity. So, many "free" workers would suffer from the scientific system of labor management that was developed inside those labor camps. The "scientific" racism of the confederacy and the antebellum South would presage the horrors of Nazi Germany, but would also serve as a justification for the repression and extermination of many other peoples. The confederacy itself, and its fearsome spawn, the Ku Klux Klan would in many ways serve as a template for the construction of classical fascism globally. Likewise, the slaves too, remade the world from the many strains of global protestantism reaching out from America influenced by African American slave preachers and beliefs, to the very soundtrack of the 20th century. The language of African American abolitionists, served as a template for the construction of human rights discourse and influenced the anti-colonial movement.
The spine of American Imperialism was forged in the age of slavery, its most vile inhumanities and the most dynamic features of its character took shape in that time. The ghost-notes of the whipping machine have continued to pervade the rhythm of the American imperialist machine long after the former's dissolution. We can only speculate that it is the great unnamed, and that it will continue to dog the consciousness of Americans weighing like a nightmare upon the living until its full shadow is reckoned with and exposed. If foreigners want to know "who are the Americans?" in the most intimate and raw sense possible, then there is hardly a better starting place then Baptist's book.
Industrial Labor, Cotton Imperialism, and Globalization
The perfect complement to the revolutionary historiography of Baptist and Johnson respectively is Sven Beckert's book Empire of Cotton: A Global History. All three historians are meticulous and are aware of each other's work and even cite each other sometimes. What is remarkable about Beckert's book is that it's not about some isolated field of study, such as US slavery but is rather a comprehensive history of the global capitalism from the perspective of the cotton industry. It is one of the most comprehensive, readable and erudite histories of global capitalism yet written. While most histories of global capitalism tend to either become too wide and lose focus or too narrow and unreadable, Beckert's book avoids these pitfalls by focusing on capitalism's leading edge: the cotton industry. According to Beckert cotton was the world's premier industry from 1000 CE-1900 and what he narrates is the dramatic story of how the region in the world poorest in cotton production and technology came to seize control of that world industry. In a marked blow to Eurocentrism, Beckert points out that while peasants in the Americas, Africa and Asia all grew and wove cotton, for most of European history the region was impoverished in terms of cotton cloth and cotton textile industries. While cotton textiles had been making its way to Europe from Asia since the Middle Ages, its importation was a drain on European national economies and it was only available for the rich. But not long after the dawn of the Early Modern Age something strange began to happen. Raw cotton in limited quantities began to stream in through European merchant networks in a slapdash and inconstant manner during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Here, merchants possessed one advantage over local spinners and weavers that elites elsewhere did not-- the artisans were completely dependent on them; they could not grow their own supply of cotton. As cotton made its way into Europe through informal trade networks and suppliers in Africa, the Ottoman Empire, elsewhere in Asia, it was paid for either with the pillage of the New World or in the few trade goods Europeans were relatively advantaged in. But it was often paid for at a premium and non-European merchants and suppliers often showed little interest in selling raw cotton when finished cloth goods would fetch far better prices. Few peasant economies were set up for a massive export of raw cotton to Europe in any case.
The Early Modern state, particularly in Britain, responded by placing prohibitive tariffs on foreign textiles, enforced by the death penalty in the British case. State coercion plays a much larger role in Beckert's analysis of the rise of cotton capitalism than it probably does for most historians. He choses to emphasize the statist, monopolistic, anti-democratic and protectionist aspect of this era of capitalism. Certainly Marx thought that the public debt, high taxes and tariffs that arose throughout Early Modern Europe was "forcing house" for capitalism aimed at looting the public. Of particular interest is Beckert's analysis of the Caribean cotton revolution and the industrial revolution. As Williams, Inikori, Marx and others, have pointed out, slavery and the slave trade was integral to the economy of Northern Britain where the world's first industrial revolution occurred. Beckert keeps with traditional historiography emphasizing how decentralized, seemingly spontaneous, and entrepreneurial, the initial industrial revolution was. Starting with the water-frame, the mule and the spinning jenny, these innovations to traditional textile industries in the second half of the late 18th century, gradually raised the productivity of labor manyfold. The effect was that by the end of the 18th century, a British worker could outproduce an Indian textile worker on the open-market in spite of higher labor costs. But an important factor in this story that Beckert emphasizes is that this revolution in productivity would never have been possible without new steady and constant sources of raw cotton coming online at the same time. While much more renowned for their sugar, the Caribean had been the site of the first boom in white gold. It put control of a steady and expanding source of cotton in the hands of European merchants for the first time. Needless to say it was a statist endeavor that was built upon slavery. Haiti was the single largest source of white gold in the Americas. Beckert points out that half of Haiti's plantations were cotton plantations which puts new light on the Haitian Revolution and the British/French invasions of Haiti. The desire of British cotton manufacturers to trade with the French cotton isles by itself can explain why British cotton capitalists embraced free trade. Beckert has little use for an abstraction like free trade except other then to deconstruct the free trade of that era as being less than ideal. This is somewhat like "the theory of force" promoted by Eugene Duhring which is often restated in a veiled form by anarchist theorists and historians influenced by anarchist epistemology. It also leaves aside that in 19th century economic thought a "free market" had a very specific meaning, it was never meant to be "free" in an anarchistic sense but rather meant "free" in a social sense of eliminating cost and the remnants of feudalism that were still a significant factor in the Western economy. That latter project of eliminating or marginalizing the landlord class which many notable bourgeois economists demanded was bound to be a "statist" endeavor as they themselves recognized. And secondly, to decry 19th century free trade deficient merely due to the fact that there was protectionism obscures the fact that great progress towards that ideal was made--it has only been in recent history that Europe has made gains in economic integration beyond what had been achieved in that era.
But for Beckert, the sudden rise of a pan-West European textile manufacturing industry has its roots in both the priorities of national security between competing European states and the blockade of the Napoleonic Wars. Continenal cotton capitalists took advantage of the exclusion of British textiles from the European market to develop their own national industries. Once this occurred, the textile bourgeoisie of the respective European countries became an increasingly activist group demanding tariffs on low-grade cloth for the purposes of national security. Which meant Britain could still dominate the market for high-grade cloth, but slowly as these industries developed they also became competitors in this field. It would seem that most Europeans were not sold on the idea that off-shoring is free-trade, an idea in vogue with modern neo-liberals. The inability of London to persuade European and American neighbours on the benefit of this kind of "free-trade" meant that they did most of their business with India and China. Beckert points out that other scholars have legitimately pointed out that this "free trade" with India and China had a more imperialist aggressive character then that of more legitimate business. The unrestrained dumping of British textiles on the Indian market resulted in Beckert calls "perhaps the greatest de-industrialization in history" with 2-6 million "industrial" jobs lost in colonial india. Similar, imperialist free-trade treaties and practices were forced on China and the Ottoman Empire. But again we have the resurgence of "theory of force" which while certainly playing its role, was not sufficient by itself to magically make British textiles cheaper than Indian or Chinese textiles. Nor could it make Chinese or Indian consumers buy them--especially when local handmade textiles were renowned for better quality and were much closer to local tastes. Some work remains to be done here, especially when Baptist is bold enough to claim that slave-made cotton benefited the entire world in some ways. It's a plausible claim as Chinese and Indian consumers found that buying European textiles which were made with slave-cotton left extra cash in their pocket books--even if it did do a great deal to ruin their national industries.
As far as the issue of "industrialization" goes, it should be said that most textile production was based in the households of the peasantry. In this sense, there was no real difference between England, India and China until the late 18th century. But as we've seen merchants had more power over the conditions of labor in Europe and were also better able to realize profits from the embodied labor of slave-produced raw cotton. This allowed entrepreneurs to build large workshops and factories that allowed manufacturers to more effectively exploit the labor of workers. What is fascinating is the dual character of cotton industrialization: one the one-hand it destroyed old industries and patterns of life and on the other it was completely dependent upon them. Industrialization in Northern England, Catalonia, Northern Italy, Switzerland, the Rhineland, Austria and Russia all had one factor in common: a large established textile trade and culture prior to industrialization. Above all histories from the bourgeois point of view usually tell of sharp entrepreneurs whose singular brilliance allows them to do away with old and inefficient ways of doing things. In reality, the skills and talents of textile workers continued to be essential even as industrialization and deskilling advanced ever more rapidly. Beckert is correct to say that in comparison to the work style and regimen of an American slave, textile workers managed to preserve much more of the traditions, rhythm and workplace organization inherited from feudalism. For this reason, young women and children were highly preferred as workers since they could be hired cheaply and would more readily accede to brutal discipline and demands. But unlike the brutal overseer system that gave birth to modern management, it was mainly adult male business owners and skilled workers that did the job of "minding" the work of child and female workers. In Beckert's words, this capitalist revolution could only be successful because it was not complete. In other words, the cutting edge modern world of the cotton mill was dependent precisely on the fact that the world outside of the mill was not as modern. The persistence of feudal and semi-feudal relations in the European countryside, patriarchy, as well as limited electoral suffrage, combined to create a world where a mill-owner could be a King himself on his own property. In fact, a great many cotton capitalists from Manchester to Moscow started their organizations with child laborers that had been lent to them from State orphanages. Marx often compared the trade that English mill-owners conducted in child laborers with that of American slaves across the Atlantic.
Beckert does great work in comparative industrialization, showing that the industrial revolution spread out from North England relatively rapidly even to non-European locales such as Mexico and Egypt. He focuses a great deal on the industrialization effort of Egypt but leaves aside the fact that the reason that state-led industrialization had failed by the mid-19th century was because Britain forced free-trade on the Ottoman Empire and its Egyptian dependency through military force. Prior to this, Egypt held the fifth place in the world of spindles per capita. In other words, Egypt in the 19th century was closer to Europe then it was apart from it in terms of industrialization and had it held that ground then it would have become a First World nation. In present times, Egypt is one of the poorest nations in the world and has to take up substantial unsustainable loans just to import fuel. Cotton industrialization and protectionism according to Beckert is the reason why Mexico has always held a unique position among Third World nations. What he means is that Mexico is a rich country among Third World nations even if it is poor nation in comparison with US, Japan, and Europe. In truth, Mexico is closer to South Korea, Taiwan, and the richer regions of China then it is to Bangladesh. Mexico has been on the "cusp" of becoming a wealthy developed nation for at least 100 years, or even longer if we go by Beckert's model of cotton driven industrialization. A slight diversion would be the case of Argentina and Uruguay which could be legitimately called "First World" nations in 1900 but have slipped into poverty, decay and neocolonial rule. Since cotton production or manufacturing wasn't strong in either of these countries (or indeed certain British settler-states) it would seem that cotton wasn't necessarily the only road to development in the 19th century.
Especially interesting is Beckert's ideas on cotton's relationship to reconstruction and the new imperialism of the late 19th century. Basically, the American Civil War caused a massive price explosion in cotton that forced a world-wide scramble on the part of European governments to secure alternative sources. For the first time since the late-1780s, the market price for cotton began to tilt in favor of producers in what is now called the Third World. Egypt was by far the biggest producer with the state taking the lead in squeezing the peasantry and importing thousands of slaves from the Sudan to keep up with the huge labor demand. Egypt would see a massive influx of European capital and take out massive loans which would later lead the nation into a debt spiral once cotton prices collapsed. The British made Egypt into an outright protectorate of the crown in 1884 due to its financial insolvency. The British and the Russians undertook major state-led projects to develop export-cotton production in Turkmenistan and India respectively during the Civil War. In the wake of the fall of U.S. slavery, these colonial cotton projects which had been on the minds of European rulers would be economically feasible for the first time in history. Earlier efforts at growing cotton for export by British colonial authorities had failed; post-Civil War nearly all of Europe and Japan would drink from the trough of Indian cotton, specifically in the state of Berar. The U.S. did retain its post-war cotton dominance until the 1930s but Beckert points out this was done through a strange witches brew of wage labor, small-farming, settler-expansion, and violent coercion.
The post-reconstruction South with its terrorist vigilante organizations and prison camps put major pressure on American blacks to produce cotton for export. As Baptist has pointed out even this could not match the efficiency of slavery which averaged 200 lbs of cotton per day and with labor productivity until the 1930s being half that. But quite legitimately the repressions of militarized cotton districts of Northern Mexico and colonial Africa and Asia come to mind in comparisons with the post-bellum South. There are some problems with considering the American South part of the global South as Beckert does. In the first place, the data on wages show that while Northern wages were more than twice as high as Southern wages. That's a major difference but hardly the 10-1 difference between the US and China at the turn of the century. It seems closer to the Central European countries which were hardly "global south". There was a major colonized population in the South--African Americans, which makes the comparison seem legitimate. For African Americans taken separately perhaps it is. But a large portion of cotton producing labor was done by small white farmers, white sharecroppers, or immigrant labor. The latter was probably closer to colonial conditions, but I have massive doubts about the former. If the South actually did become "colonized" and part of the Global South after the Civil War, then wouldn't that imply that southern white nationalism was some kind of anti-colonial rebellion? What seems more likely is that Southern whites retained major privileges from slavery and were willing to resort to terrorism to keep them from dissipating. Like with the oil industry, we shouldn't assume that just because cotton was a Third-World phenomenon that means conditions in the industry situated in the developed world are the same. But again, I'm not averse to viewing the situation with black labor as colonial. Since the US was the world's number one cotton producer until the 1930s, it would be helpful to keep in mind how the lynching tree not only benefited the ruling class in the US but also rising imperialist states like Germany and Japan. The former was almost completely dependent on American cotton, both before and after slavery, and the latter got at least half of its cotton from the US (the other major source being India).
For Beckert, cotton imperialism drove the late 19th century scramble to divide up the world. As cotton capitalists, assorted nationalists, and states bureaucrats began to see the importance of having a colonial supply of cotton to fall back on. Colonial cotton domination led to great misery and very often massive famines for the colonial peasantry that had now been enlisted in the world market. But it also contained the seeds of its own destruction. By the early 20th century, not only had the Western world diverged but it diverged to the point that the wages and labor standards of metropolitan workers were so high that textile manufacturing even on modern machinery was no longer very profitable. This was the original age of industrial globalization as textile manufacturing spread first to Japan where the countryside was ransacked in search of young women who would submit themselves to the dictatorship of factory life in hopes of earning a dowry. Manufacturers in Manchester and Massachusetts were unable to compete. Then came the first age of industrial development for colonial exploitation in China and India. The conditions that Chinese textile workers faced were perhaps the worst of all, female workers were literally kept under lock and key in Barracks and Beckert says that they were in a condition that approached bonded labor. Even Indian manufacturers couldn't beat China on labor costs. This led to a peculiar situation where the colonial British state stepped in to force labor standards on the Indian textile capitalists in order to preserve their own interests. This was furiously resisted by Indian capitalists who asserted the subhuman and instrumental existence of their laborers to the British authorities. There was also an almost worrying nascent sub-imperialist orientation among Indian textile manufacturers. The Indian industrialists oriented their export industry to British colonial Africa and strived to produce textiles that matched African tastes. Which makes one wonder if all the agitation on the part of the Indian bourgeoisie was simply about pushing off British rule in order to grab super-profits from African colonies. It was not very successful. But perhaps this explains why India ended up being far draconian and far more useful to global imperialism then it was even before independence.
As for today, China holds a near monopoly on both cotton production and manufacturing. The abuses familiar to the era of Industrialization continue, from the super-exploitation of workers in Bangladeshi factories to the 2 million child laborers in Uzbekistan who are forced to cultivate cotton underneath the repressive dictatorship there. However, synthetic fabrics have equaled or surpassed cotton fabrics starting in the 90s according to Beckert. So while the abuses continue, the potential for nations to develop on the cotton textile/cotton-producing model is very slight. Cotton may still be King but its power is more like that of a constitutional monarch in a small central european nation, not the power of a Roman Emperor that it once wielded in the mid-19th century.
