The Fibre That Changed the World: The Cotton Industry in International Perspective, 1600-1990s (review)

This volume sets a new yardstick for future research on the cotton industry, from early modern times to the present. The editors have brought an international perspective to a research area too long dominated by national or regional studies. There have been excellent comparative studies in the past, but this volume is distinguished by its unwavering commitment to study the volume and means of exchanges and technology transfer across borders and oceans. With the exception of Latin America, the coverage is as extensive as it is deep. The editors, in addition to their introduction, have contributed six of the seventeen chapters, which gives this collected volume more unity than often is the case.

The larger issue, which many of the contributors seek to address, is the tension between distinctive national policies and practices, such as tariffs or local business structures, and international forces, such as the movement of capital and the free access to state-of-the-art technology. Technology transfer, abetted by the mobility of skilled artisans, was a continuous thread in the industry's international expansion, although the chapters by J. K. Thomson on the Catalan industry and Stuart Thompstone on Russia expand on the inevitable difficulties in the process. David Jeremy shows that the publication and diffusion of standardized spinning and weaving manuals, which quickly became the bibles of engineers and employers over the world, redressed but never solved completely the problems associated with technology transfer.

The industry, it appears, had many religions. Gary Saxonhouse and Gavin Wright show the great variability in the adoption of new technology around 1900. Some countries opted for a strategy of skilled labor and a craft-based operating system built around the self-acting spinning mule; others chose the road of unskilled labor and a more expansive system based on ring spinning. Depending on local conditions, the two strategies were equally likely to succeed or fail. Tariffs did ensure success in some cases, as the chapters by Takeshi Abe and Tetsya Kuwahara on Japan make reference to. But the causality is often blurred. In the case of the United States, Joshua Rosenbloom finds that the direction of the industry was set in the earlier period of protection offered by the Franco-British hostilities and not, as commonly held, in the years following the higher rates enacted in the 1820s.

International politics seems to have gotten in the way of market forces, at least in the short run. These relations were complex and multilateral, as Kaoru Sugihara shows for the case of Japan after World War II. The Japanese were forced to diversify because of the revival of inter-Asian competition, which was provoked by the success of Indian goods pushing out British products in the ever-shrinking Commonwealth market, a political outcome of the postwar settlement. Protectionist measures, according to Alfons van der Kraan, permitted the Dutch industry in the 1830s to gradually increase their share of the Java cotton goods market, despite the Netherlands's historical attachment to free trade. John Singleton—whose chapter on the British Empire and the cotton industry I would not hesitate to give to my undergraduate class on globalization and history—gives a nuanced picture of the relation between politics and development. He concludes, "There was a close connection between the rise and fall of the Lancashire cotton industry and of British naval and imperial power ... but these benefits were gifts of the gods, in the sense that Lancashire had little influence over imperial policy, which was controlled by the gentlemanly capitalists of south east England" (p. 82). Douglas Farnie examines this thesis from an Indian perspective. His observation that the effect of Lancashire competition on the fate of Indian handloom weavers has been "misunderstood and grossly exaggerated" (p. 414) certainly will generate more research of this old chestnut.

Notwithstanding the intrusion of local...