Cotton: Integral part of modern life
Imagine for a second you were transposed into the karmic driven world of Earl. When you wake up in the morning, your bed is either made of animal skin or straw. You wear woolen clothes or linen or silk if you are rich. Your clothes are either very expensive or if you do it yourself it is very hard work, so you wash them occasionally. They smell and they bite. They have no color. Because unlike cotton, wool or other natural fibers are difficult to dye. And yes, you have sheep everywhere. Seven billion sheep are needed to replace the current cotton production. To feed these seven billion sheep, Pune needs two billion acres of pasture. This is 1.6 times the area of today's European Union.
This is difficult to imagine, but it has long been a reality in the western part of Eurasian land. This area belonged to Europe.
Cotton was scarce in Europe until the 19th century.Why is it that the region of the world where cotton was the least involved (Europe) created and dominated the cotton empire? An eighteenth-century scholar predicted that India or China would be the center of cotton production. And until 1780, these countries continued to produce more raw cotton and textiles than Europe or North America. But that is not the case. European states and capitalists came to the center of this business. The time of the Industrial Revolution was when Europe overtook the rest of the world, including China and India. And this revolution began with the cotton industry. It provided the platform that created other industries and ushered in a wider industrial revolution.
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Historians, social scientists, policy makers, and ideologues of all kinds have been working to unravel the mystery of its beginnings. The most difficult question has been why, after thousands of years of slow economic growth, some groups of human beings began to prosper rapidly in the late eighteenth century. Scholars now call these decades great divergence. This gulf formed at that time extends to today's world.
There has been a lot of discussion on this. And a variety of arguments can easily be made. Many despair, many despair and many optimism. We will step closer to all these arguments and look only at the industry that has tarnished this great divergence.
Paying attention to cotton will cast doubt on many simple explanations that are generally accepted to be true.
There are simple explanations, for example, that Europe's rapid development is due to the loosening of the grip of the religious class on society. Or the advent of the Enlightenment. Or from the climate and weather of the area. Or by the rule of law. Or from institutions like the Bank of England.
They may have a role to play, but they cannot explain the cotton empire, which was the starting point of this revolution. And many of them are wrong.
The world's first industrialized nation, Britain, was not exactly as it is often portrayed. It was not a liberal state with neutral and vibrant institutions. It was an imperial state with a huge military budget. She was constantly at war. There was a powerful bureaucracy. Taxes were high. Government debt was skyrocketing. There was no free trade environment. And there was no democracy.
Similarly, the explanations of history that describe history from the point of view of class conflict in regions or countries are similarly flawed.
Europe harmonized the power of the state and capital. It was a global production complex set up by force. There was capital, there was expertise, there was network and there was business. He created the technology and wealth of the modern world.
And it can only be understood when viewed from a global perspective. Movement in the world of capital, labor, people, products, raw materials. Connecting remote parts of the world. This was behind the great transformation that took place in that era. Its main character was the cotton flower and this system was war capitalism.
Today we know industrial capitalism in the form of contracts and markets that liberate people, but early capitalism also had oppression and violence. In the modern economic system, property rights are important with the help of law, but in the early system they were snatched away. Today, it is characterized by influential state-run institutions and the rule of law, but the early system was characterized by powerful individuals. From war capitalism to industrial capitalism evolved. It also had an institution of slavery and occupied lands. Over time, concepts such as wages and property rights became stronger.
When this system emerged in the world, the cotton trade was more than anything else. It was the product of factories and fields.
The concept of "factory" is an invention of the cotton industry itself. And in almost every country in the world, whether it's the United States or Egypt, Mexico or Brazil, Japan or China, that's where the industry started.
Industrial capitalism meant that the state was the most powerful institution. It also increased the size and power of the working class. The capitalist depended on the state. The state depends on the people, the people on the industry. And the result of this triangle was that in the second half of the nineteenth century, the idea of organizing the common people came into being. Political parties began to form unions. They gradually improved wages and working conditions over the decades. This increased the cost of production. This has created opportunities for countries with lower production costs. It is industrial Introduced capitalism in new countries. At the same time, the cotton industry left Europe and the Northeast America and moved back to the south of the world.
The question here is why this is the case with cotton? Why not with other commodities?
After all, other commodities such as sugar, rice, rubber, indigo, etc. were also traded. Cotton is one of them. There are two separate stages, both of which require wages. The first stage is in the field, the second in the factory. Tobacco or sugar did not form the major industrial groups in Europe, which cotton did. Rice production did not increase slavery and wages at the same time, cotton did. Indigo production and processing did not open new markets, cotton did. The way cotton made the whole world and the different continents into one web, no one else did. For this reason, its history is key to understanding the political and economic history of the modern world. It changed both villages and cities.
World capitalism liberated mankind from the feudal system. It is an integral part of modern life. That is why we are involved not only financially but also emotionally. But the beginning was not romantic or pleasant...
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