Academic literature on the topic 'Cotton family History'

One-fourth of all workers in southern cotton mills in 1899 were under 16 years of age. Why did so many children work in cotton mills and other factories during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Many millworkers believed that “if the employers would give their hands better wages, . . . the help could then support themselves better and be able to school their children” (North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics 1892:172). As it was, “at the present rate of wages paid, large families are compelled to put all their children in the mills in order to support the family” (ibid.: 287). Child labor would be reduced or eliminated if parents could “demand wages sufficient to keep [their children in school] and take care of the family without the help of the little ones” (ibid.: 351). Turn-of-the-century labor reformers agreed that low wages forced many families to send their children to work. Alexander McKelway (1913), for example, southern secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, called low cotton mill wages “our modern feudalism,” while Edith Abbott (1908: 36) suggested that child labor was the result of an “insufficiency of the man’s wages.”

Cotton growing and textile production in the northern regions of newly independent Argentina, as in many other parts of Latin America still relatively unaffected by the industrial revolution, were linked to the gender division of labor and the type of landholdings found in agrarian societies. As early as 1970 Ester Boserup pointed out the divergent roles that women and children would play in societies based upon extensive properties farmed or ranched by slave or hired help as compared with smaller, more intensive farms and ranches. She, like many others, however, presumed that wage labor, large scale agriculture, and ranching dominated the Latin American landscape, and she emphasized the role of women compared to other family members in rural production.

Here, Alan Rice offers examples of a black presence in Lancaster, the fourth largest slave port in England. These findings, often in the form of archival fragments, expose a hidden history and puncture the narrative of the city’s success based on myths of mercantile glory. Examples include a rediscovered pamphlet by ex-slave James Johnson recounting his wanderings throughout the region in search of employment during the Cotton Famine; the memorialization of Sambo, a young slave who died during a brief visit; the day-book of merchant Henry Tindall noting the arrival of a slave chaperoning two young white boys; unearthed baptismal records and runaway slave ads; and a macabre family heirloom—the mummified hand of a favored slave—eventually buried by a descendant of the slave-owning merchant family. Finally, Rice offers the finances of three prosperous Lancashire merchants (Thomas Hodgson, James Sawrey and Thomas Hinde)—all prominent in the slave trade—to show how the money they invested in the region’s economy which helped drive the industrial revolution, were funded by profits of the slave trade. Rice suggests that these evidentiary snippets of a black presence in Lancaster can be a pathway to uncovering even more and serve to illuminate the connection between the city’s development and the forced labor of enslaved people.

This chapter presents a picture of the British cotton trade on the eve of the American Civil War, describing both the pre-eminence of that trade and how it had been attained over the previous century and a half. The relative merits of three major recent studies of the history of cotton, notably Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, are discussed. This is followed by a consideration of how the issue of slavery, and the threat to its survival, influenced the British trade before the war. There is a detailed description of how the Liverpool brokerage system controlled the trade in raw cotton and how it was intended to operate.

This final chapter opens with Toussaint Louverture in Santo Domingo in 1802, preoccupied with the possibility of a new French invasion. In February, General Leclerc invaded Cape Haitian in the north; Toussaint was captured by French troops and taken to France as prisoner. Although his demise occurred for various reasons, most problematic are the tactics he embraced during the period of 1793-1799, wherein he neglected the interests of the former enslaved people and instead allied himself with the upper class and military interests. The rallying cry of “freedom for all” for the population of the former French colony did not imply that formerly enslaved masses could enjoy autonomy or freely cultivate edible crops on their own properties. While not all rebel leaders fit into the same social category, they did have different interests than the former slaves. Trouillot reminds readers that a true revolution produces profound social changes, inverting the old social order; and thus formerly-enslaved people should have all become property owners. However, the competing revolutionary leaders (including Rigaud, Beauvais, and Toussaint) stunted this possibility, neglecting the needs of the poor majority. It was chiefly the economic aspect of independence that divided Toussaint from the masses. After taking control of the former colony, Toussaint imposed import and export taxes that benefited European countries and the United States instead of Haitians; U.S.-built warehouses popped up on the capital’s wharf, and Saint-Domingue remained economically dependent. The former slaves benefited in no way from growing the sugar, coffee or cotton that they were required to produce during Toussaint’s reign; they were punished for planting food crops. Worse still, Toussaint required that the ex-slaves “respect” the integrity of former plantations by staying and working on them, while he distributed free land to rebel officers. The idea of “freedom” thus lost its resonance amongst the masses. Although members of the State of Saint-Domingue and the ruling class gained economically, it was at the expense of the former enslaved workers. From this point, the behavior of the Haitian State was that of sitting heavily upon the new nation, since their economic and political interests were at odds with one another. A host of contradictions emerged: Dependence/ Independence, Plantations/Small Farms, Commodity/Food crops, White/Black, Mulatto/Black, Mulatto/White, Catholic/Vodou, and French/Creole. Although the Constitution of 1801 abolished slavery and supposedly “guaranteed freedom” to all, it reinforced these fundamental contradictions. The “Moyse Affair” in late 1801 illustrates Trouillot’s understanding of Toussaint’s betrayal of the Haitian people. Moyse, Toussaint’s adopted nephew, had populist political ideas that attracted the black masses. Fearing his potentially subversive ambitions, Toussaint had Moyse judged by a military commission that included Christophe, Vernet, and Pageaux. Moyse was condemned to death and executed, effectively crushing the interests of the masses. Throughout the Revolution Toussaint maintained power by crafting coalitions amongst a wide variety of social classes and competing interests. The dominance of the new military class was a social contradiction that had to be masked, and Toussaint’s actions showed a will to conceal it. Aspects of this problematic behavior and ideology have reappeared in Haiti under Dessalines, Christophe, Salomon, Estimé, Duvalier and others. Official discourse is grounded in several central notions that are easily manipulated by Haitian leaders: first, the notion of “family,” allowing the concealed dominance of one group and the privileging the organized Catholic religion; second, the idea that Haitians should “respect property”; and, the myth of nèg kapab (“capable people”) who possess an inherent right to govern and oppress the people. The political concept of “family,” common throughout Africa and countries with African descendants, was employed by Toussaint as a form of social control: throughout the revolution Toussaint refers to the new Haitian society as a family in order to advance his own “paternal” political objectives and conceal its many contradictions. The state—which his ideology came to epitomize—began to take advantage of the people; it was akin to a vèvè, a matrix holding society together, and a Gordian knot, where complex and twisted socio-economic contradictions favoring a certain class were inscribed. Although Toussaint was kidnapped by the invasion of Leclerc in 1802, this motivated the Haitian masses to stand up and fight for independence from France, which ultimately led to freedom. Thus, living up to the surname of “Louverture” that was given him, Toussaint indeed opened the barrier to independence and warrants appreciation for that. When one revisits the ideology of Toussaint Louverture, and concurrently that of the state of Saint-Domingue, one must not forget that, in spite of all its weaknesses, libèté jénéral (“freedom for all”, or “universal freedom” in today’s terms) was originally a powerful unifying factor, which merits recognition: it helped Toussaint’s troops defeat the British, crush Hédouville, etc. Toussaint was betrayed by plantation owners and French and American commissioners alike, and he always maintained some faith in France, even if the masses did not. Trouillot implies that Toussaint understood the direction in which he wanted to go, but he got lost on the way. To his credit, Toussaint’s experience demonstrated that liberty without political independence was a senseless notion, and others (such as Dessalines) were able to break with his approach and capitalize on this lesson. The book closes with Grinn Prominnin declaring that he is exhausted and that everyone must return to discuss the situation tomorrow to reach a conclusion. The scene remains peaceful, the people complacent. Trouillot suggests that, more than 170 years after the revolution, the task of bringing about real social change in Haiti—and seeing the ambitions of the Revolution fulfilled—remains starkly inert. Readers easily infer that Haiti’s stagnant socio-economic and political situation (in 1977) is due not only to the as yet unfulfilled promises of the Revolution and War for Independence, but also to the escalating damages wreaked upon the Haitian nation by the Duvalier regime and its manipulative cronyism coupled with its totalitarian indigenist ideology.

Himid teases out cotton’s multiple implications as a priceless commodity in the global economy to tell stories that rebound backwards and forwards across time and geographies implicating populations from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe in local spaces and global networks that promote complex narratives around race, ethnicity, gender, class and nation. Her installation connects workers in Manchester to slaves in South Carolina to tell their interconnected stories through black and white patterns that mimic both historical and contemporary communication modes from ballads to mobile phone texts and computer communications. The specific history of the Lancaster Cotton Famine and its link to the American Civil War is key to the message of solidarity told through Cotton.com. Himid’s message of Transatlantic solidarity is discussed in terms of Michael Rothberg’s theoretical frame of multi-dimensional memory as a counterpoint to the limitations of Pierre Nora’s theories of memory and history. In spite of an inadequate material archive, she conjures through her work new ways to articulate forgotten histories that traditional historians elide.