British Imperialism in India: Cotton and the Creation of a Core and Periphery.

British Imperialism in India:

Cotton and the Creation of a

Core and Periphery

Cotton

• Where was most cotton produced before the U.S. Civil War?

• Who purchased most of that cotton?

• What was it used for?

• During the Civil War (1861-1865), the South couldn’t export cotton to Great Britain.

• The factory owners in Great Britain were desperate to obtain cotton.

• How did the British government respond to this situation?

Question 2: What does this graph show?

Table 1: Cotton Exports from India, Egypt, and Brazil, 1860–1866, in Million Pounds. Sources: Government of India, Annual Statement of the Trade and Navigation of British India and Forign Countries vol. 5 (Calcutta, 1872); vol. 9 (Calcutta, 1876); Roger Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 1820–1914 (Oxford, 1969), 90; Estatisticas historica do Brasil (Rio de Jeneiro, 1990), 346.

• Subsistence farming vs. cash crop

• More cotton = less food

• What might be the consequences of this shift?

Drop in food production + El Niño weather patterns = Famine

Estimated Famine Deaths in India

Year Number of deaths

1876-1879 6.1-10.3 million

1896-1902 6.1-19.0 million

Total 12.2-29.3 million

Statistics from Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), p. 7.

De-Industrialization in India

India’s Share of World Manufacturing Output

Statistics from Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), p. 294.

1750 1830 1900

24.5% 17.6% 1.7%

• Core – industrialized nations like Great Britain, America, Germany, and Japan

• Periphery (Peripheral) – countries that provided raw materials to the industrialized nations; very slow to begin industrializing themselves

Periphery(India, Egypt)

Core (Great Britain)

Core Edge Periphery

Were these countries core, edge or periphery by 1910?

• Germany• France• Austria• India• United States• Great Britain• Japan• Egypt• China

• Russia

• Mexico

• South Africa

• Nigeria

• Others?

Where are the core countries?

“Millions died, not outside the “modern world system,” but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures.”

- Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts