We all know there was an industrial revolution. And if we know nothing else, we have a sense that it involved steam engines and manufacturing and was at first centered in Great Britain. But there is a prevailing view that the Industrial Revolution happened somewhat spontaneously. There were some people in Britain tinkering with gadgets and machines and before long there were lots of gadgets and machines.
But this explanation relies on a central misconception. The people who invented the machines were not aristocratic hobbyists. They were workers. Each machine addressed a specific job requirement.They were not doing abstract research. They were looking to make money. Another key requirement is that the machines would not only produce something that could be sold for profit, but this would be a product that could be manufactured and sold on a scale more vast and immense than had previously existed.
The amazing thing is that, above all else, virtually all of the key industrial inventions were intended for the processing of a single substance that was the driving impetus of this world-changing sequence of events. It is somewhat shocking then to consider that the essential raw material of this industrial expansion was something so small and insubstantial as cotton.
Cotton is now plentiful and inexpensive, but in the past it was a luxury good. Cotton textiles were so costly that they were not worn as clothing but were used as wall hangings in the homes of the wealthy.
The Empire of Cotton follows the story of cotton from small-scale home production to the world’s first gigantic factories powered by steam engines and employing hundreds or thousands of workers–many of them young children–laboring 12 hours a day, six days a week. We also consider the ways in which the factories’ insatiable hunger for raw cotton created an empire of slavery across the New World the consequences of which we still must face.
See the Empire of Cotton Bibliography post for a list of books read in preparing this course.
