Abstract
Fraudulent practices in the Indian cotton trade had given the cotton exported from the subcontinent a bad reputation. Time after time, European officials and merchants lamented that Indian peasants and intermediaries mixed different cotton types before sowing, or watered the cotton bales and enclosed dirt, stones, cotton waste and lower-quality cotton in order to make higher profits.1 The British colonial government regularly attempted to counter these practices and to grow high-quality cotton in the subcontinent in order to break the Lancashire spinning mills dependency on American cotton imports. However, these endeavours failed, even after the opening of railway lines and the establishment of up-country buying agencies by major European firms after the 1860s.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-First Century (London: Penguin, 2006).
See Roland Robertson, ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity’, in Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (London: Sage, 1995), 25–44.
Peter Harnetty, Imperialism and Free Trade: Lancashire and India in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972).
P. Robb, ‘British Rule and Indian “Improvement”’, The Economic History Review. New Series 34 (1981): 507–23;
Kaoru Sugihara, ‘An Introduction’, in Japan, China, and the Growth of the Asian International Economy, 1850–1949, ed. Kaoru Sugihara (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1–19.
Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15ff.
Christof Dejung, Die Fäden des globalen Marktes: Eine Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte des Welthandels 1851–1999 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2013).
Laxman D. Satya, Cotton and Famine in Berar (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997).
David A. Washbrook, ‘Law, State and Society in Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies 15 (1981): 649–721;
Christopher Alan Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);
Rajat Kanta Ray, ‘Asian Capital in the Age of European Domination: The Rise of the Bazaar, 1800–1914’, Modern Asian Studies 29 (1995): 449–554.
Sven Beckert, ‘Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War’, American Historical Review 109 (2004): 1421.
James A. Mann, The Cotton Trade of India: A Paper before the Royal Asiatic Society (London: Harrison and Sons, 1860), 3–4.
John Forbes Royle, Culture and Commerce of Cotton in India and Elsewhere (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1851), 60.
Thomas Ellison, A Hand-Book of the Cotton Trade: Or a Glance at the Past History, Present Condition, and Future Prospects of the Cotton Commerce of the World (Liverpool: Whitney and Grimley, 1958), 37ff.
Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jaap A. de Moor, eds., European Expansion and Law: The Encounter of European and Indigenous Law in 19th- and 20th-Century Africa and Asia (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1992).
C. O. Remfry, Commercial Law in British India (Calcutta: Butterworth, 1912), 3–4.
Sheila Smith, ‘Fortune and Failure: The Survival of Family Firms in Eighteenth-Century India’, Business History 35 (1993): 44–65;
Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 3–6, 31, 239–42; Christof Dejung, ‘Bridges to the East. European Merchants and Business Practices in India and China’, in Commerce and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Business Elites, ed. Robert Lee (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 93–116.
John Forbes Watson, Report on Cotton Gins and on the Cleaning and Quality of Indian Cotton. Part I: Summary and Conclusion (London: William H. Allen, 1879), 162.
Samuel Smith, The Cotton Trade of India. Being a Series of Letters Written from Bombay in the Spring of 1863 (Liverpool: Geo, Smith, Watts and Co., 1863); Harnetty, Imperialism and Free Trade, 101–02;
Dietmar Rothermund, Government, Landlord, and Peasant in India: Agrarian Relations under British Rule, 1865–1935 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1978).
Harnetty, Imperialism and Free Trade; Charles W. MacAra, Trade Stability and How to Obtain It (Manchester: Sherratt & Hughes, 1925), 204–06.
Joseph P. Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800–1880 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 222–47.
John R. Killick, ‘The Transformation of Cotton Marketing in the Late Nineteenth Century: Alexander Sprunt and Son of Wilmington, N. C., 1884–1956’, Business History Review 55 (1981): 146–53.
Alston Hill Garside, Cotton Goes to Market: A Graphic Description of a Great Industry (New York: Stokes, 1935), 35; Watson, Report on Cotton Gins, 159–65;
Arno S. Pearse, The Cotton Industry of India Being the Report of the Journey to India (Manchester: Taylor, Garnett, Evans & Co., 1930), 31.
Marika Vicziany, ‘Bombay Merchants and Structural Changes in the Export Community 1850 to 1880’, in Economy and Society: Essays in Indian Economy and Social History, ed. Kirti N. Chaudhuri and Clive J. Dewey (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979), 163–96;
August F. Ammann, Reminiscences of an Old V. B. Partner (Winterthur: Volkart Bros., 1921), 8–10.
Dietmar Rothermund, Government, Landlord, and Peasant in India: Agrarian Relations under British Rule, 1865–1935 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1978), 17;
Brian Roger Tomlinson, The Economy of Modern India, 1860–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 55–6.
Kagotani Naoto, ‘Up-country Purchase Activities of Indian Raw Cotton by Toyo Menka’s Bombay Branch, 1896–1935’, in Commercial Networks in Modern Asia, ed. Shinya Sugiyama and Linda Grove (Richmond: Curzon, 2001), 205–08;
Rajat Kanta Ray, ‘The Bazaar: Changing Structural Characteristics of the Indigenous Section of the Indian Economy Before and After the Great Depression’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 25 (1988): 286.
Volkart Bros., Calculationstabellen Gebrüder Volkart (Winterthur: Volkart Bros., 1873), 14.
Report of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce, 1898; Volkart Bros., The V. B. News, Published by Volkart Brothers, Winterthur, and Devoted to the Interests of Their Employees (No. 9, December 1923), 14–16.
Nigel Hall, ‘The Liverpool Cotton Market: Britain’s First Futures Market’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 149 (1999): 99–117;
Alston Hill Garside, Cotton Goes to Market: A Graphic Description of a Great Industry (New York: Stokes, 1935), 208–75, 307–14.
Vicziany, ‘Bombay Merchants’, 163–96; Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 45–52, 61.
M. L. Dantwala, Marketing of Raw Cotton in India (Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co., 1937), 31.
Indian Cotton Committee. Minutes of Evidence, Volumes IV and V (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1920).
David Hardiman, ‘Usury, Dearth and Famine in Western India’, Past and Present 152 (1996): 113–56.
Neil Charlesworth, Peasants and Imperial Rule: Agriculture and Agrarian Society in the Bombay Presidency, 1850–1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 83–4, 89.
Gary Saxonhouse and Yukihiko Kiyokawa, ’supply and Demand for Quality Workers in Cotton Spinning in Japan and India’, in The Textile Industry and the Rise of the Japanese Economy, ed. Michael Smitka (New York and London: Garland, 1988), 183, 217.
Jakob Anderegg, Volkart Brothers 1851–1976: A Chronicle (Winterthur: Volkart Bros., 1976), 195–7.
Barnard Ellinger and Hugh Ellinger, ‘Japanese Competition in the Cotton Trade’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 18 (1930): 195–201; Naoto, ‘Up-country Purchase Activities of Indian Raw Cotton’, 199–200.
East India Cotton Association, Bombay Cotton Annual No. 17 (Bombay: F. F. Wadeson, 1935/1936), 95.
Rajat Kanta Ray, Industrialization in India: Growth and Conflict in the Private Corporate Sector, 1919–47 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979), 61.
Ellen Clayton Garwood, Will Clayton: A Short Biography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958), 78–95; Killick, ‘The Transformation of Cotton Marketing’, 154–68.
For more detail on this, see Christof Dejung and Niels P. Petersson, ‘Introduction: Power, Institutions, and Global Markets-Actors, Mechanisms and Foundations of World-Wide Economic Integration, 1850s–1930s’, in Foundations of World Wide Economic Integration: Power, Institutions and Global Markets, 1850–1930, ed. Christof Dejung and Niels P. Petersson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–17.
Hermann Levy, ‘Die Enteuropäisierung der Welthandelsbilanz’, Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv 23 (1926): 329.
H. L. Dholakia, Futures Trading and Futures Markets in Cotton with Special Reference to India (Bombay: New Book, 1949), 15–16.
Dorabjee B. Contractor, A Handbook of Indian Cotton for Merchants, Shippers, Mills, Factory-Owners and Others Interested in the Cotton Trade (Bombay: Toya Menka Kaisha, 1928), 33; Marketing of Raw Cotton in India, 47–8.
B. L. Sethi, ‘History of Cotton’, in Cotton in India: A Monograph, ed. Indian Central Cotton Committee (Bombay: Indian Central Cotton Committee, 1960), 16.
Thos. Peters, Modern Bombay and Indian States (Bombay: Who’s Who, 1942), 50; Ray, Industrialization in India, 61–3.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Christof Dejung
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dejung, C. (2015). Transcending the Empire: Western Merchant Houses and Local Capital in the Indian Cotton Trade (1850s–1930s). In: Bosma, U., Webster, A. (eds) Commodities, Ports and Asian Maritime Trade Since 1750. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463920_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463920_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-55653-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-46392-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)