Nature's Evil

FIVE

Fibres

Unlike metals or fossil fuels, fibres are a product of organic life which has grown on the earth very recently. Some animals and plants produce long, sturdy filaments as part of their bodies. These can be harvested and then mechanically processed – cleaned, stretched, interwoven – to make smooth, pliable cloth. These processes don’t change the individual fibres but combine them with thousands of similar ones. So the processing of fibres – spinning, weaving, tailoring – requires the repetition of an enormous number of single, consecutive movements. This had been predominantly women’s work, but then inventors designed machines which could reproduce these small movements more quickly and precisely than human hands. From the time of the Great Silk Road and up until the era of oil and plastic, industry and capitalism consisted for the most part in the processing of fibre and the trading in goods made from fibre.

Unlike grain, which is relatively easy to process, fibre requires two different tasks – first the production of the raw material, which includes its preliminary processing, and then a very elaborate secondary processing. The cultivation of the raw material needs plenty of land, water, sunlight and unskilled labour; on the other hand, the processing requires little land and an abundance of skilled work. For this reason it isn’t practical to cultivate and process fibre in the same place. Mercantile empires would solve this problem by using the land of their distant colonies to produce the fibre and the labour of their metropolitan centres to process it. Transportation was the task of merchant and armed fleets. Fiscal-military states were fibre-producing states; more than anything else they depended on wool and cotton, but their fate was also defined by hemp, flax and silk. Until the advent of railways, the textile industry was ‘the main driving force’ of civilisations, wrote Braudel. 1

Many technologies were common to all fibres. The plant or animal had to be nurtured and the fibre collected; all that was required for this was land, time and labour. The harvested fibre was cleaned – combed, pulled, washed, dried. Once the moisture had been removed from it, it was softened and straightened. This heavy, mostly manual work transformed a damp, dirty raw material into a tradable commodity – a dry material which would keep well and was light to transport. On arrival in the metropole, this material underwent secondary processing. Short filaments had to be twisted together to form one long thread, and the thread had to be wound into balls or hanks and then woven into cloth. It was then sent on to other craftsmen who cut the fabric and stitched it into garments, bedclothes, sails, cables or sacks. In the era of the Silk Road the cost of transporting the material made up almost all of the price of the finished goods. Sea transport lowered the trading outlay; but even during the period of the Industrial Revolution, cotton in Virginia cost 20 per cent less than in Manchester.

Fibre demonstrates the fortuitous link between human needs and nature’s variety. Living creatures are made up of cells; a minute number of these cells elongate into fibres. In order to make thread, these fibres have to be joined to one another – a process that doesn’t happen in nature. An individual cotton fibre is one long cell, which develops in the coating of the cotton seed. The cell twists itself into a microscopic tubule that is hollow inside, which explains why it holds heat so well. But there is more to it. The cell walls that allow it to roll itself into a hollow tube also allow it to curl together with another cell. Joined along their length, these micro-tubules make a flexible and robust thread in which the individual fibres are inseparable – their bonds are just as strong as the individual filaments. 2 These threads can be further rolled together or interwoven to produce cloth. The cloth can be dyed using a complex chemical process requiring different raw materials – natural dyes. The hollow tubules of cotton absorb these dyes better than any other fibre except for silk. But these dyes – violet purple, blue indigo, red cochineal – are also by-products of nature, which evolved them for quite other purposes. In nature, these organic substances would never be anywhere near the cells of silk or cotton.

Silk

In order to obtain 200 grams of silk thread for a shirt, producers had to rear a thousand silkworms and feed them 36 kilograms of mulberry leaves. Then they spent many long hours unravelling the silk cocoons of the larvae into long, unbroken filaments, washing and drying, scutching and combing them before twisting individual filaments into a thread, weaving the thread into cloth and finally sewing a shirt. At first people gathered cocoons from the forest. When the moths hatched, the chemical structure of the cocoon changed and the fibres shortened. It was crucial to unravel the cocoons before that, so people kept them close to the house. About 1600 bce the ancient Eurasians began to plant mulberry and cultivate silkworms in their gardens. This was how the symbiotic trinity of man, mulberry and moth started. The caterpillars eat the mulberry’s leaves but the adult moths pollinate its flowers; the fertilised flowers produce sweet fruits which are eaten by humans, who disperse the seeds; the mulberry grows and needs pollination by moths. Using the silk fibres, humans cocooned themselves from heat, moisture and insects. In due course, this material became an inexhaustible source of beauty, wealth and power. In exchange for these favours, silk required labour, warmth and loyalty and led to the development of settled life, private ownership and global trade.

The ability of the silk moth to overcome the chemical defence of the mulberry tree and the ability of man to clear land to grow this tree created a new ecological niche for all three of them – man, moth and mulberry. But the tree and the moth were more sensitive to climate than man. Outside particular areas in China, India, Japan, Central Asia, Persia and, by the early modern period, Southern Europe, silk proved very difficult to produce. Because of this, silk had always been a monopoly of remote, exotic places. Light to transport, easy to dye, not prone to rotting, silk came from a great distance, was therefore extremely expensive, and proved to be an ideal product for early European trade.

The first silk moth farms appeared round contemporary Peking long before our era. Only the higher echelons of society had the right to wear silk garments; a peasant who dared to wear silk could pay with his life. Silk was used as a currency. The salary of civil servants, and later of army personnel, was calculated in rolls of silk, and commoners paid their taxes in silk. Thus silk products became the embodiment of luxury throughout the civilised world. There were many producers but very few carriers who could lead their caravans across the deserts. The regional monopoly meant that prices could be maintained, producing high profits even with low volumes and extremely long cycles of trade. Hardly anything had more impact on world affairs than this substance secreted by the grubs of a strange insect which ate the leaves of the mulberry tree.

Legend has it that Europeans first encountered silk during Alexander the Great’s campaign; he may even have wanted to conquer India because of silk. Rolls of silk travelled from the East; sacks of silver and bales of wool went from the West. Pack camels travelled for months, covering about 10,000 kilometres. In the mountains the bales were transferred onto horses. For the camels and merchants this was more often than not a one-way journey; many perished on the road. But for those who survived the profits could be colossal. Dozens of books have been written about the Great Silk Road, but some researchers doubt if it ever existed. Up until the Industrial Revolution, Asia was a more capacious market than Europe. But trading in Asia was quite different from carrying a cargo across an ocean on a ship that sailed to its destination without calling in at any ports on the way. It was more a case of the slow diffusion of goods from one transit point to another. Whatever the merchants couldn’t sell locally, they sent on further towards the West.

Silk was popular in ancient Rome just at the time when the severe Romans began to acquire the taste for luxury. ‘Wretched flocks of maids labour so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife’s body,’ fumed Seneca. 3 The Romans used this airy fabric for every style of tunic and cloak, but they didn’t know the secret of its origins; this was a mystery which travellers, scholars and missionaries tried to solve. Warm fur and water-repellent silk were often worn together. The Roman custom was to wear a silk cloak with a fur lining. The Renaissance fashion was the opposite – a fur coat with a silk lining. The contrast between the fine silk, which fitted the body like a second skin, and the coarse animal skins or wool garments of peasants and paupers built an image of the noble body that was characteristic for Western man. Followers of ascetic traditions chose wool in preference to silk and fur; Franciscan monks still wear a brown wool robe tied with a white girdle, also made from wool. In Central Asia there was a useful myth that the Koran forbade Muslims to wear silk, so people there wore a mixture of cotton and silk while pure silk was exported.

Later, silk dressed the walls of the elegant rooms of the wealthy – the house was compared to a human body and took on the same kind of class distinctions. Carriages and gondolas were upholstered in silk and decorated with pennants and standards – the symbolic bodies of Western states. During the Renaissance the global demand for oriental silk was so high that Europe was constantly in a trade deficit with China and Japan, paying them with silver from the Spanish mines in Mexico. In this global trade one primary commodity was exchanged for another – silk for silver; but the proportion of paid work invested in silk was much higher than that invested in silver, and thus China prospered while Europe lagged behind.

Sericulture remained a Chinese secret until two Christian monks brought back some silk moth eggs and seeds of the mulberry tree; according to legend, on the journey to Constantinople they hid them in a bamboo stem, just as Prometheus had hidden fire in a hollow reed. In any case, sericulture flourished in the coastal towns of Italy, and particularly in thirteenth-century Venice. There was a boom in farms growing mulberry trees in Veneto, Tuscany and Lombardy. However, in Italy the spring frosts prevented the cocoons of the silkworms maturing on the mulberry leaves, as they did in China and Persia. The larvae had to be reared indoors, spread out on special tables, fed with chopped mulberry leaves and kept at room temperature. The maturing of the cocoons was stimulated by particular flowers which had to be brought indoors. At the right moment, the cocoon had to be soaked in hot water, killing the larva inside it, and then unravelled. The process required the cleanliness of a lab and the exact control of temperature and timing – hardly typical conditions for peasant work.

The domestic part of this work, when the larvae needed warmth and care, was carried out by women. In spring, when the mulberry trees came into leaf, the Italian women collected silk moth eggs in little bags and carried them against their breasts. Their body heat made the larvae hatch. In Samarkand there was a belief that if a man looked at the larvae they stopped spinning their cocoons. A source of female employment and family prosperity, silk saved many regions of Southern Europe and Central Asia from economic stagnation. The farmers kept no larvae or grubs after they unravelled the cocoons – no seed corn for the following year’s crop. The supply of quality larvae to a farm was a separate business. These specialists ensured the continuity of sericulture; they were also the commercial agents, who benefited from the silk business more than anybody else. In manufacturing and selling finished goods, these people are usually called entrepreneurs; but, when it comes to the extraction and distribution of raw materials, I prefer to call them curators . In Italy, these silk curators supplied the larvae, collected the fibre, placed orders for spinning and weaving, and then sent the finished silk to the end user. Organised in a guild or cartel, these curators had a group monopoly on the whole industry. It is not clear why the farmers themselves could not have kept a small number of cocoons and allowed a new cycle of moths to hatch – this was, after all, what they did every year with seed corn. But if the curators had given up control over the silk moth eggs they would have lost control over the whole silk industry. These curators dominated the silk business just like the merchants who traded across the Atlantic dominated the production of tobacco. But, in the silk trade, the producer and the buyer might live only a few miles apart from each other. 4

The elaborate processing of the silk filament was concentrated in towns; the lion’s share of the profits also remained there. Mulberry trees are nice and shady, and the people of Verona planted them in disused moats. The more expensive sorts of silk were spun in Venice, Florence and Pisa. Bologna catered for the mass end of the market. In the mid-fifteenth century, every third Florentine family depended on sericulture. The first water-powered machines appeared in the silk factories of Bologna as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century. The number of hand looms could be counted in their thousands. Patent rights furthered technical progress; in Venice, inventions had been legally protected since the fifteenth century. In 1410 the Silk Guild achieved a complete ban on importing ready-made silk into Venice, but the import of the raw material for processing received every encouragement. This was an early version of mercantilism. Venice had a monopoly on the import of raw silk from Persia and Syria; processed in the city, the manufactured goods were exported by sea or across the Alps at great profit. In the sixteenth century this profitable business collapsed because of the Turkish wars and competition from other European countries; having set up their own silk manufacturing, they drove up the price of raw silk. Still, it remained a diffused raw material with a high production cost, which made up more than half the price of the finished goods. The secret of this rare success was the easy transportation by multiple routes that could not be monopolised by a handful of curators. As happened with other luxury commodities, the use of silk underwent top-down democratisation. Silk garments, stockings and hats became standard wear for doctors, lawyers and prostitutes. It helped that the guilds relaxed their regulations that prohibited the blending of different sorts of silk. Moreover, silk was now blended with wool or cotton to create a warm, cheap fabric. Whole towns in Flanders and southern Italy specialised in creating these blends. Italian craftsmen established sericulture in Spain, the American South and Crimea. But attempts to establish sericulture north of the Alps failed.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, an epidemic of the ‘pepper disease’ killed silkworms all over Europe and Central Asia; Louis Pasteur intervened, but science was powerless to help. Monoculture, a result of the breeders’ selection to create a homogeneous kind of silk moth, was one of the causes of the disease. But, in Japan, the breeders had crossed the local silk moth with the Chinese species, and these Japanese hybrids were not susceptible to the disease. On the eve of Japanese industrialisation, silk became the country’s main export commodity. During the Soviet era sericulture was successfully established in Uzbekistan and Crimea – silk was produced for military parachutes and for export. But the technology of sericulture had hardly changed since the Middle Ages. A woman who worked in Soviet sericulture in the 1960s describes the intricacies of the process which have eluded written history:

Whole plantations of mulberry were grown nearby. We cut great armfuls and brought them to feed the larvae. They munched the leaves so loudly that it sounded as if the place was full of horses, not insects. When the larvae became dormant we filled the whole room with thistles from the steppe – this plant is also called ‘tumbleweed’. After dormancy the caterpillars became a transparent yellow colour and transformed into pupae. They crawled onto the thistle stems and began to ‘cast their spell’, swaying as if they were dancing as they spun their cocoons. 5

Hemp and flax

Hemp and flax – the plant from which linen is produced – are unfussy plants and can grow anywhere except in deserts and the tropics. Their need for sun, water and soil is no more than any weed requires; hemp easily grows unattended. Linen and hemp do not absorb dyes, and their natural hues are yellowish or grey. Although more expensive, cotton and silk are much more attractive. But linen sailcloth is as durable as cotton cloth, and hemp fabric is much stronger, though coarser. There were tasks that only these tough fibres could perform.

It was simple to grow flax and hemp, but processing them needed more steps and skills than were involved in the processing of wool or cotton. Flax had to be plucked by hand so that the whole stem, right down to the roots, was taken; it was dried, cleaned, braked and scutched to separate the fibre from the woody stems, heckled with combs of different gauges, pounded, sorted, then steeped in water and dried again, and finally drawn out into threads and spun. The coarser hemp went through roughly the same cycle, repeated over long periods of time. The male and female hemp plants have different characteristics; the fibre from the male plants is finer, so the grading of plants needed special skills. While most of these operations were mechanical processes, retting (the practice of dissolving or decomposing extra cellulose from the fibres) was a chain of biochemical reactions that required very particular conditions. All in all, the processing of flax and hemp was a dirty and laborious task, which involved shifting huge masses of the raw crop from the field to the barn and then from the barn to the river and back. The sheaves of hemp needed constant attention but the work was not continuous; there were long breaks which might last weeks or months. While the fibre was drying or soaking, the peasant could get on with other tasks. As the processing involved chemical changes, it could not be hurried up or intensified. These slow, uneven cycles led not to the division of labour but, on the contrary, to multitasking – combining different occupations and shifting from one to another. For this reason the forced labour of slaves, which was suited to tobacco and cotton, was ineffective for hemp.

Although both plants grow on dry land, they were profoundly important for maritime civilisations. Sails were made from linen, and ropes, sacks and cables from hemp. The toughest of natural fibres, hemp is not affected by seawater. This is one of the numerous contingencies that underlie the raw materials economy. A plant which in nature never comes into contact with seawater turns out to be uniquely adapted to function in this hostile environment. All maritime empires, from the Roman to the British, needed vast quantities of hemp, and there was simply no substitute for it. But the Catholic empires – the Portuguese, the Spanish, the French – and Orthodox Russia managed hemp better than the Protestant and Puritan ones.

In Venice there was a Hemp Guild which controlled both the quality of hemp produced and the middlemen who traded in it. Having founded the English Royal Navy, Henry VIII in 1533 laid every farmer under the obligation to set aside some land for hemp production. Elizabeth I raised this hemp tax and increased the punishment for non-payment. In 1611 London asked the colonists in Jamestown to sow hemp alongside their tobacco crop. The obedient deputies of the colonial assemblies in Virginia, then Maryland and Pennsylvania, copied these decisions. The British government offered a subsidy for every acre sown with hemp. Ten of the thirteen American colonies followed suit. In Virginia, if a household couldn’t manage the required consignment of hemp, it paid a fine of 1,000 lb of tobacco. Clearly, the farmers preferred growing wool and tobacco for the mass market to growing hemp for the government’s benefit. Then a myth arose that the English climate was unsuitable for hemp growing. In 1808 the government asked the East India Company to implement the production of hemp in India. The empire was permanently short of hemp and its by-products. The reasons had little to do with climate: hemp grew everywhere, and it grew in England. It was the processing that needed certain environmental conditions. There was no similar problem with any other raw material – with grain or wool or cotton; if there was a shortage of them, prices rose and then production increased, even though with delay. 6

Unable to impose hemp on their farmers, the British Empire and its American colonies depended on Russian hemp. The eminent historian Alfred Crosby wrote his first book about America’s resource dependence on imperial Russia. Hundreds of American ships plied back and forth across the Atlantic and the Great Lakes. Each vessel had sails, ropes and rigging lines, and nearly all of them were made out of North European, for the most part Russian, hemp and linen; a mere 2 per cent of the hemp which they used in ships’ rigging was home-grown in America. For example, the three-masted, 44-cannon frigate Constitution , which left the Boston shipyard in 1794 and is still afloat today, had about a hundred tons of rigging; every rope was made out of imported hemp. Such a frigate needed two sets of sails, each containing about an acre of linen canvas, and this too had been sourced from the ports of Northern Europe. Every few years the rigging and sails had to be replaced. ‘Russian hemp’ was considered the most robust and reliable. Linen from Silesian flax was finer than Russian, and this quality was prized for underwear and clothes. But Russian linen made the best sails and Russian hemp made the best ropes.

The unusual processing shaped the history of hemp: turning plants into a commodity needed competent, honest and prolonged labour. The long filaments of the hemp plant are joined together by a sticky tar which has to be removed before the splitting and cleaning process can begin. The Americans used natural ventilation to do this. After the harvest, the hemp stalks were left lying on the ground for about a month and occasionally turned over. This got rid of the unwanted tar but damaged the fibres, which became coarse and partly lost their ability to curl up. These fibres were suitable for making sacks but made poor-quality ropes; the American sailors refused to use them, even though they were cheap. The Russian method began by drying the stalks in sheaves, but then the stalks were strewn in water and pressed under wooden frames. The purer the water, preferably running water, the better the fibre produced. Depending on its intended use, the hemp was soaked for anything from two weeks to three years. In some cases the water was heated up. Then the fibre was dried, and only after this was it scutched and combed. As a result, commercial hemp, suitable for rigging, was only ready for sale two years after the crop had been cut in the fields. This method of retting never lent itself to mechanisation or to slave labour; the production process needed knowledge, experience and patience. Much of this work was done by women, and probably by children too.

The main buyers of Russian and Baltic linen and hemp were the English, who needed them for sails, ropes, fishing nets, underwear, tablecloths and cheap clothing. The Admiralty established the production of canvas and hemp in Scotland and Ireland, but the British fleet still depended on supplies from abroad. The prices for hemp and canvas constantly increased, especially during times of war, but the production of hemp and linen in England declined. It was a paradox of mercantilism that, while the British economy made its profits by processing American cotton, which was used largely for decorative purposes, the Royal Navy sourced its vitally important fibres from continental Europe and distant Russia – independent and frequently hostile countries.

Throughout two centuries, Russian hemp was more expensive than American. There was plenty of sunshine and water in Kentucky and Connecticut, where hemp was planted, but production there could not keep up with demand. It was a large-scale market failure. The invisible hand of the market worked for silk, wool and cotton, but with regard to hemp no commercial stimulus was enough. In his excellent book, Crosby asks why the American hemp growers didn’t use the Russian ‘secrets’, which everybody knew. 7 The explanation should be sought in the natural characteristics of hemp, the operations required for its processing, and the economic rules and political events which underwrote these operations. The mass production of linen and hemp developed on estates in Brittany, Silesia and parts of Russia, where serfdom had either been recently abolished or still existed. But the best hemp was made in those lands of northern Russia where serfdom was unknown. Serfdom does not explain the Russian success with hemp. My explanation comes from outside the realm of economics.

Today industrial hemp contains almost no narcotic resin; but this is the result of scientific breeding in the twentieth century. Before this every hemp plant contained narcotic substances. These properties of hemp, also known as cannabis, had been commented on since the time of Herodotus: the Scythians strewed hemp seeds over the scorching hot stones in the bath house, where they inhaled the fumes and conducted orgies. Historians and ethnographers have documented the use of hemp seeds by shamans, priests and pleasure-seekers. There is a theory that the ancient Israelites used these seeds for preparing anointing oil. Hashish – the crushed and pressed leaves and flower heads of the hemp plant, rich in narcotic resin – had its origins in China and the Middle East. But Europeans started smoking hashish only after Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. Living among jungles of hemp, the farmers of the Russian and European North made use of the unusual properties of the seeds and resin of this plant. They used hemp seeds in cooking, ground them into flour, pressed them to extract oil. Medical manuals prescribed hemp seeds as a painkiller, a sedative, a diuretic and even a contraceptive. Anyone who had a field of hemp was susceptible to the temptation. And this is my hypothetical explanation for the stubborn resistance to hemp production in the Protestant and Puritan contexts: those who wanted to avoid temptation shunned hemp, sacrificing the profits.

The fact that hemp was a useful plant and yet had unusual psychoactive properties defined its later fate. Its production was repeatedly banned, either by royal decree or by Acts of Parliament. The US Congress considered any hemp plant, even scientifically bred, as a source of drugs and in 1937 introduced a prohibitive tax which undermined its production; the industry had to be urgently re-established during the war. For similar reasons, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Protestant farmers didn’t wish to cultivate a source of easy pleasure in their fields. As a result, the Protestant states had to buy processed hemp from other countries. It isn’t clear, however, why this logic didn’t prevent the Anglo-Saxons and the Dutch from cultivating hops and tobacco.

Hemp and the Oprichnina

While the Spanish and Portuguese empires were directing their ships to the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, England was preoccupied with the North. In the sixteenth century, the Venetian navigator Sebastian Cabot made his base in Bristol; from there he searched for a northern route to China. His interests chimed with the dreams of another trailblazer, the alchemist and astrologer John Dee. Having drawn up horoscopes for the royal houses of Europe and maps for the Muscovy Company, Dee was the first person to formulate the concept of the British Empire. Mixing legalese, mysticism and history, Dee asserted British rights to all northern lands, great and small, from Greenland to the possessions of the duke of Muscovy: according to Dee, this exclusive right of the English crown came down from King Arthur. In 1555 Dee and Cabot formed the Muscovy Company – the first joint stock corporation registered in England. Elizabeth I took an interest and commissioned Dee to work on a book, The Limits of the British Empire . 8

This was the era of travel without maps, the hasty colonisation of distant lands, and well-thought-out ‘alliances’ with neighbouring countries. In 1553 three English ships, watched by the boy king Edward VI, set off from Greenwich to seek a new route to China through the northern seas. The ships were locked in the ice of the White Sea; one of the captains, Richard Chancellor, was saved by the Pomors, a northern people who had long been under the rule of Moscow. Chancellor managed to reach Moscow, conducted successful talks with Ivan IV (the Terrible), and took back to England a present of furs. More importantly, the tsar granted him a monopoly on trade in the White Sea. A year later Chancellor set off back to Russia, taking presents from the new English queen, Mary Tudor, to Tsar Ivan. He drowned on this voyage, but the English equated his discovery of Russia with the Spanish discovery of America. Another heroic Englishman, Anthony Jenkinson, sailed across the White Sea four times and reached Persia this way. All the same, he didn’t succeed in finding a new route to India; having entered Khwarazm in present-day Uzbekistan, he realised that he was on the old Silk Road. But Ivan the Terrible granted the English the right to trade freely and without duties, wholesale and retail, on the White Sea and throughout Russia; from there they could trade with third parties such as Persia or India. Most important was the English monopoly on trade on the White Sea; other foreigners, for example the Dutch, were forbidden to land on its shores or islands. The English were granted other unusual privileges – e.g., they were not subject to the Russian courts, and if they committed a crime on Russian territory they had to answer only to the Muscovy Company in London. They were also presented with a house in Moscow (now a museum, the Old English Court, not far from the Kremlin). They were given the right to establish trading posts in the north. The most important trading post was at Kholmogory, and there the English started a factory, making rope from local hemp. Customs officials and local governors did not have the right to interfere in Muscovy Company business. 9

What Ivan and his English partners created was a political regime intended to benefit traders and enrich the ruler. Today this would be called a special economic zone. Ivan called it ‘oprichnina ’. History textbooks use it untranslated, as if it were a proper name. In fact, the word comes from ‘oprich ’, which means ‘except’, ‘out-of-this’, ‘exceptional’, combined with the usual ending ‘nina ’ which means a domain or condition. The best translation of this Russian word is ‘the state of exception’. * Under the direct rule of Ivan, this state-within-the-state existed on the Russian land from 1565 to 1572.

Fighting endless wars, Ivan the Terrible needed allies and funds. He knew that he could no longer rely on the old source of revenue for the Moscow exchequer – fur: the tsar’s agents in Siberia reported difficulty in finding decent pelts. When the English adventurers expressed interest in the abundant hemp and pine trees in the estuary of the Dvina, it seemed like a miraculous solution to Ivan’s problems. English trade gave a boost to the White Sea coast at the very moment when Russian troops were losing their battle for access to the Baltic Sea.

Ivan’s new State of Exception controlled the convenient harbours of the White Sea, the upper course of the Volga, which the English had hoped to use as the route to Persia, and the profitable salt deposits on the Kama River. It had twenty cities, where about 6,000 special troops – oprichniki , ‘the exceptional ones’ – were stationed. The new capital assigned for this internal colony, Vologda, was the starting point of the river route to the White Sea and also the point of departure for long overland routes to Siberia. The construction of a new Kremlin in Vologda began, and a wharf and a rope factory were built. Later a new seaport, Arkhangelsk, was fortified. Expanding his State of Exception, Ivan destroyed the rival commercial centres, Novgorod and Pskov. His old capital, Moscow, had to send him enormous sums of money when he was not there. Initiated by the new authorities, pogroms resettled thousands of commoners from the old to the new commercial centres.

Engendered by despair, avarice and calculation, Ivan’s project entailed a root and branch reform of the Muscovy tsardom. The tsar divided his country into two domains with different political-economic regimes – the exceptional domain under the direct rule of the sovereign, where old laws and customs were abolished, and the boyar-owned domain which preserved its traditional ways of life and property rights. Geographically, the northern State of Exception (Oprichnina ) was oriented towards the White Sea; economically, it focused on the new trade with England, and it depended on hemp and a few other commercial products of the north. In contrast, the southern Land Domain (Zemshchina ) relied on grain. Deprived of access to northern rivers, it was condemned to subsistence farming and barely paid duties to the crown. If it had a function in Ivan’s geopolitics, it was to defend the zone of exception from possible raids from the south. Economically, this project seemed beneficial to Ivan; politically, it gave rise to opposition from all those whom the tsar deprived of an exit to the wider world.

Trying to understand Ivan’s project, Russian historians have seen it as a feudal conflict with hostile aristocrats: like medieval English kings, Ivan wished to smash their estates and castles. I suggest the Oprichnina should be seen as the establishment of a royal monopoly on the local natural resources, mainly hemp. In fact, this State of Exception worked as a big, specialised plantation with fertile fields and forests, a competent population and convenient delivery routes – an internal colony with a special regime of trade and power. The navigable rivers that crossed the territory guaranteed the export of hemp and a few other resources – flax, timber, wax, salt – to the White Sea and then around Scandinavia to England. Serviced by English vessels, the same route promised generous imports of weapons and luxury goods. Grain fields and cattle to the south ensured food and protection for this northern plantation. It was at exactly this time that Elizabeth I – now the main partner and model for Ivan – established colonial plantations in several parts of Ireland. Started in the 1550s, these royal initiatives led to the development of the plantation of Ulster – a later and much smaller project than the Oprichnina but also a very bloody colonial establishment. Giving sense to the extraordinary history of the Oprichnina , all these conceptions – northern plantation, internal colony, state of exception – were perfectly intelligible to Ivan as well as to his enemies. He worked on reforms to his tsardom at the same time as conducting talks about a military and nuptial alliance with the English throne. By cordoning off his exceptional state, he had created an internal India which would sell its raw materials to England, subsidising the tsar along with his northern nabobs and planters. A site of development, this zone of exception would become a model for admiration and worship by the country and the world – a Holy Land, as Ivan put it. As for the rest of the country, this landlocked domain would be left to feed and police itself, albeit contributing nothing to the crown.

In 1571 Ivan abolished his Oprichnina regime after his relations with England cooled severely. In a letter to Queen Elizabeth, dated October 1570, he complained about English merchants and acknowledged the futility of his hopes for a dynastic marriage. He took away from the English their right of free trade along the Volga and opened the White Sea ports to Dutch traders. Observing these changes, the Muscovy Company had its own agenda. It hadn’t found a northern route to China, but it opened up a northern route to Persia via the Dvina and the Volga. The English hoped to trade their broadcloth, calicos and weapons in exchange for northern furs and Persian silk. Few of their hopes were realised. Furs were no longer available around the White Sea, and the Volga was too long a route to go for silk. The Muscovy Company focused on hemp, which grew abundantly along the banks of the northern rivers. The Pomors had taken a great fancy to English wares, and they could be relied upon to process their hemp cheaply and expertly. There were no aristocratic landowners around, and the English traders could deal directly with the local producers. The English merchants’ transactions with the Pomors were quite similar to their interactions with villagers back home, whereas the French would have to invent new methods for their dealings with the Huron. As was their usual custom at home, the English distributed their orders among peasant households, collected the processed commodity, checked the quality and paid the suppliers. Having a monopoly on transportation, they kept the lion’s share of the profits for themselves. Bypassing the rapacious Muscovy state, they established their own cottage industry on the shores of the White Sea.

The trade was distant but simple: British ships sailed around Scandinavia and anchored in the Dvina, unloaded their holds, and exchanged processed hemp for their manufactured goods – broadcloth, ironmongery and guns, for which there was a steady demand in the Russian north. The Dvina Gulf was frozen for many months of the year, and work at sea came to a halt, as did work on land. But hemp processing carried on throughout the year. Russian trade on the White Sea was more of a stimulus to development than Polish trade on the Baltic: hemp promoted equitable development among northern smallholdings, whereas grain led to the enrichment of the nobility and to a second serfdom. 10 With hemp, the investment and quality of human labour was more important than who owned the land. The peasants had free time for other tasks and combined the hemp trade with their traditional economy. Along with hemp and ropes, the English ships filled their holds with seasonal products such as fatback, pelts, tar, beeswax and whale oil. For all its well-remembered sins, the Oprichnina had not established serfdom on its land. The underlying reason for the difference between the fates of the White Sea and the Baltic was the larger share of local labour in the price of hemp and the larger share of land in the price of grain.

Having never known serfdom, the Pomors and other peoples of the Russian north lived in individual farmsteads which were very different from the crowded villages of central Russia. Their fishing and whaling traditions made their way of life distinct from peasant husbandry. They owned spacious plots of land that often remained unfenced, and their extended families developed a non-monetary, non-specialised economy. They had rich resources – fish, grain, hemp, linen, timber – which they alternated as the seasons and custom dictated. They could not trade in these commodities because of the huge distances involved and also because everyone around had the same resources. Under English and later Dutch influences, the Pomors eagerly switched their smallholdings to commerce. Foreign merchants integrated into this cycle, monetising trade and introducing modern goods such as broadcloth and metals. Unusually, these curators changed the resource ecology of the local communities without disrupting their moral economy. Thanks to hemp, the river routes and free trade, the Pomors’ standard of living was higher than that of the most prosperous regions in central Russia.

Elizabeth I’s successor, James I of England, was a passionate empire builder. He united Scotland and England, settled Protestants in Ireland and colonised Virginia. Colonial adventures needed the navy and the navy needed hemp and timber. Realising the global deficit of these commodities, James planned to colonise the White Sea by creating a ‘protectorate’ made up of Arkhangelsk, the Dvina Gulf and the Solovetsky Islands. In the winter of 1612–13 James discussed this project with the Muscovy Company. In Russia, this was the peak of the civil war which became known as the Time of Troubles. Ivan’s failed reforms led to chaos, and the state ran out of money for its mercenaries. James was particularly worried by the involvement of the Swedes, who were determined to occupy Novgorod and block the White Sea trade. In the summer of 1612 a band of English mercenaries landed in Arkhangelsk under the command of a Prussian officer, Adrian von Flodorf. After presenting a document signed by the English king, he travelled to Moscow. There he offered help to Prince Dmitry Pozharsky, one of the Russian leaders at the time. Some English mercenaries were stationed in Moscow, some in Arkhangelsk; they saw the hostilities developing all over the land. In the winter of 1613 John Meyrick, the head of the Muscovy Company, who doubled as the British ambassador to Russia, promised James that he would finance a military campaign to annex the White Sea. In April James took the decision to create the Russian protectorate. Realising the scale of the task, he decided to send 10,000 soldiers to the White Sea. That was a considerable military force – double the number of former Oprichnik guards and twenty times greater than the number of white settlers in Virginia. The English troops were supposed to seize the Solovetsky monastery – a powerful island fortress. Using it as a base for invasion, they would capture Arkhangelsk, advance upstream along the Dvina, and occupy the territory as far as the Upper Volga. From this position, the English would control Moscow’s communications with the White Sea. Geographically, James’s proposed Russian Protectorate closely resembled Ivan’s State of Exception, and its economic intentions were similar. This Russian Protectorate was also modelled on the Irish plantations, where English settlers had changed the system of land tenure and created substantial estates for themselves; not long before, in 1609, James had officially established the biggest plantation in Ulster. But the status of the White Sea domain would be higher: James was planning to send his younger son, Charles, there as viceroy. 11 Charles went on to inherit the English throne and was sent to the scaffold after the English Civil War. Things might have worked out better for him in the Russian north.

In June 1613, John Meyrick again sailed to Arkhangelsk, where he learnt about the coronation of Mikhail Romanov. The new tsar had found out about English intentions and begun a secret investigation of the conspiracy. But Meyrick skilfully mediated in talks with the powerful Swedes and helped to end the Russo-Swedish war by the Treaty of Stolbovo (1617). This reassured both the English and the Dutch: Russian resources would not be landlocked and the Swedes would not be able to stop or tax the White Sea trade. As a result, James abandoned his idea of colonising the Russian north; instead he placed his confidence in the ability of the new tsar to establish order in his tsardom. The English were never again granted a monopoly on the White Sea trade.

According to various estimates, the Muscovy Company at the turn of the seventeenth century guaranteed between a third and a half of the English Navy’s requirements for rigging. 12 But Dutch ships visited the Dvina more frequently, taking a large share of the hemp market. Trading on behalf of their German or Spanish customers, the Dutch were more flexible and paid in silver (the English preferred barter). There were years when the Dutch became so successful at the White Sea trade that they bought up all the hemp from the Pomors and then sold it to the English. All this changed when Peter the Great realised the centuries-old dream of Russian autocrats and captured several Baltic ports, opening them up to Russian commodities. The founding of St Petersburg led to a rapid decrease in White Sea commerce, not because of fair competition, but because Peter imposed prohibitive tariffs on Arkhangelsk to help develop St Petersburg. From now on, hemp from central Russia would go to St Petersburg by the new canal which Peter had built for supplying his capital, and then sail west across the Baltic.

Hemp and Napoleon

On the eve of the eighteenth century, hemp was the leading Russian export, linen was second and iron third, followed by fatback. Fabrics made out of hemp and linen – i.e., canvas and sailcloth – were counted separately; they occupied fifth and sixth place in Russian exports. Grain lagged behind these products. England was Russia’s biggest customer, with North America in second place. The British import of hemp doubled throughout the eighteenth century and 90 per cent of it was consistently supplied by Russia. Providing hard currency, hemp was now grown in the most productive estates of central Russia that belonged to the top nobility. For the first half of the nineteenth century the export of hemp and linen made up a third of Russian exports, a figure which did not diminish even during the Crimean War. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the significance of fibre in Russian exports had lessened dramatically – it made up just a tenth of it. Grain was now the main Russian commodity. 13

The history of the Romanovs is full of attempts to nationalise the export of raw materials. The list of export commodities that were under state monopoly lengthened considerably in Peter’s reign: items included hemp, linseed, pelts, potash, tar, fatback and caviar. Private firms had to supply these goods to the state at a fixed price, and then the exchequer sold the raw materials to foreign buyers at market prices. In 1719 Peter repealed this decree ‘out of pity for the merchants’, but imposed custom duties which continued making profits for the empire. All goods were exported on the purchasers’ ships – the Russians had no merchant fleet. Only 7 per cent of exports went overland, including exports to China via Kyakhta. In 1724 Peter established a monopoly import-export company with a handful of shareholders, following the example of the Dutch East India Company, which he remembered from his tour of Holland. ‘I would like my people to become manufacturers,’ said Catherine the Great in 1764. But the production of hemp and canvas remained cottage industries. Attempts to push the Russian merchants to export commodities on their own ships failed, but the balance of trade was usually in Russia’s favour. Export tariffs on raw materials financed state expenditure. The Hermitage bought up treasures from all over Europe. The army which would defeat Napoleon paid salaries to mercenaries of all ranks. Russian landowners wore frock coats of English broadcloth, drank French wine from Bohemian glasses, took pinches of Virginia tobacco, and then blew their noses on handkerchiefs dyed with indigo. In between all these activities they read Voltaire, Rousseau and even the anti-colonial Raynal. The richest landowners, such as the Demidovs and the Chertkovs, invested their wealth in Italian or British estates or even, like Alexander Herzen, in American bonds. All this was financed by the income received from the overseas sales of Russian raw materials.

During the Napoleonic wars Russia supplied the British Royal Navy with practically all the hemp it needed for rigging its ships, thus keeping Britain in a strategic dependency. But, in 1800, Emperor Paul I of Russia entered into a coalition with Napoleon – they planned to conquer and divide India. Paul confiscated all British property in Russia, including 200 ships harboured in Russian ports. Stopping trade in the Baltic was a blow for the aristocracy in Russia, Poland and Prussia; the curtailment of supplies was equally unacceptable for the British Navy. Admiral Nelson’s flotilla set fire to Copenhagen, clearing a route for British ships to reach the Baltic ports. But a palace coup in St Petersburg was more effective: British diplomats, Baltic barons and Russian landowners took part in the plot against Paul. Straight after his assassination, trade with England in hemp and grain started up again. In 1807, Russia and France again became allies. Having decided against invading England, Napoleon blockaded her trade with Europe by imposing the Continental System. With the consent of Alexander I of Russia, Napoleon deprived the British Navy of Russian rigging and left Russian cities without silver or sugar. In 1808 the British import of hemp diminished by a factor of three and its price in London doubled. Usually, the northern ports of the Russian Empire unloaded and loaded 4,000 to 5,000 ships per year; in 1808 there were fewer than a thousand. The Royal Navy made desperate attempts to grow hemp in India or to make ropes out of tropical trees. The Russian rouble was in free fall. As a consumer of Russian raw materials, France could not replace Britain: a continental power, France herself produced hemp, grain and hides.

With the Russian rouble devalued, the tsar had to choose between economic catastrophe and a change of allegiances. For a while, neutral American ships breached the blockade, took on loads of Russian hemp and sold it to England. Moreover, many British ships sailed under the American flag. Tsar Alexander, still an ally of Napoleon, did not stop them: he had not forgotten how his father and grandfather had perished, both victims of an aristocracy that had been impoverished by trade crises. In 1811, commodity trade prevailed over great power politics: the Russian cabinet rejected French overland imports and resumed sea trade with England. The value of the silver rouble on the European stock exchanges increased by 40 per cent. When Russian and American efforts dismantled the Continental System, everybody was happy except for the French emperor. Napoleon had money, having sold Louisiana to the Americans for $11 million in 1803: this sum would have covered many years of Russian exports and left the British fleet without ropes or sails. But Napoleon hoped to keep his ally for free – a grave miscalculation.

Wool and the Mesta

In Spain, the celebrated Merino sheep were migrants from North Africa. They were selectively bred to produce a fine, white wool which set the standard for woollen clothing throughout the civilised world. The sheep appeared on the Iberian peninsula before the Great Plague. An indigenous breed of sheep – the Churra, more sturdy and valued primarily for its meat and cheese – had been farmed there earlier. Churra flocks were kept on permanent pastureland. Over the centuries local workshops had used their coarse, warm wool to produce cloaks, carpets and blankets. Merino yarn was finer, more attractive and more expensive. Many Spanish shepherds were Berbers, and they taught the Spanish their unique methods of rearing their Merino sheep, which included transhumance – a seasonal migration across the hills of Castile and Aragon. From this came the unusual division of labour: the fine-fleeced Merino sheep moved from one pasture to another, crossing the peninsula annually in huge flocks; the coarse-fleeced Churra stayed on permanent pastures around the towns. The Reconquista in the thirteenth century united the southern, Muslim part of the peninsula with Christian Spain. Ever larger flocks now spent the winter on uninhabited southern pastures. Members of religious-military orders protected the flocks – some of those knights still remembered the Crusades. Travelling with the Merinos, they used force of arms to occupy the territories needed for the migrating flocks and oust the Arabs with their settled flocks of sheep. At the peak of the wool trade in the sixteenth century, there were about 3 million Merino sheep on the peninsula. The sheep were privately owned, but along with their shepherds and guards they were under the patronage of the crown. The government had a monopoly on the export of Merino wool. 14

There were many more Churra sheep than migrating Merinos; peasants used some of their wool, meat and cheese on their farms and sold the surplus to the towns. But the Merinos were considered to be creatures of a higher order. These two sorts of sheep exemplify with textbook clarity the difference between a local raw material and a resource for long-distance trade. The law forbade the killing or eating of Merinos. Their cross-breeding with Churras was banned. It was a capital crime to export live Merino sheep abroad. The Habsburg Empire depended on its Merinos more than on its Churras and, probably, more than on its men and women. The migratory pattern of the pure-bred Merinos and their contrast with the settled flocks of the peasants had something aristocratic about it, as if it evoked memories of the nomadic, foreign origins of the European nobility.

Leaving in October from León, Segovia and other inhabited areas, the shepherds and their Merino flocks travelled between 100 and 500 miles south. Their journey took a month or more. The passage of huge flocks of sheep over the craggy hills of Castile was an impressive spectacle. The lands they passed through were privately owned, but the law required the landowners to step aside while the migration took place. If conflicts arose, armed guards and special clerks defended the shepherds. The only places off limits to the Merinos were enclosed agricultural areas – fields with standing crops, orchards or vineyards. Twice a year the Merino flocks passed by the permanent pastures where the Churra grazed. Well-armed curators safeguarded the pure pedigree of the Merino flocks.

The Shepherd Brotherhood, or Mesta – the first agricultural corporation in European history – was created for dealing with the Merinos. The Mesta didn’t own any sheep and didn’t pay the shepherds; it was a guild and not a joint stock company. It branded every Merino and noted the brand markings in special books; it also licensed the shepherds. All these operations combined the ancient practice of transhumance with the complex logistics that could be achieved only by a bureaucratic state. From the end of the fifteenth century, the head of the Mesta became a member of the Consejo Real , the Spanish cabinet of ministers. The shepherds of the Mesta became a privileged stratum; they were exempt from military service and civil law. Authorised officials of the Mesta defended them in local conflicts. The courts of the Inquisition also supported them.

But then, just about the time when America was discovered, the Spanish Empire fell into a debt crisis. Charles I, king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, involved the powerful banker Jakob Fugger in these transactions, and after 1545 the house of Fugger controlled the finances of the Mesta (see chapter 6 ). Most of the wool was now sent to Spanish Flanders for spinning and weaving; Bruges was the centre for this activity. Pirates and storms increased the cost of transportation: in the middle of the sixteenth century a sack of Spanish wool cost three times as much in Bruges as in Burgos. The influx of American silver exacerbated the problems. Imported goods cost now five times more, but the price of wool only doubled. The volume of wool exports fell, and old truths had to be revisited. The enlightened historian Pedro Campomanes became in 1762 head of the Treasury and, later, head of the Council of Castile. Judging that the privileges of the Mesta acted as a hindrance on the path to development, he persuaded the king that more tax could be obtained from arable land than from pasture; that settled sheep rearing was more profitable than transhumance; and that the population was denser on the northern coast where there was no Mesta presence. Supporting his ideas with field research, he wrote two substantial volumes about the damage caused by the Mesta . Like his contemporary Adam Smith, Campomanes believed that landowners were better placed to decide on how to use their land than state bureaucrats. 15

By the end of the seventeenth century the Mesta was on the verge of bankruptcy. The price of grain rose while the price of wool fell. Cavalry horses displaced the Merinos from the best meadows. The most unusual privileges were abolished. Liberal lawyers characterised the Mesta as ‘the enemy of the towns’. Only then was it discovered that Merino sheep were perfectly happy leading a settled existence. Smuggling delivered the final blow: in 1720 a flock of Merino sheep was sold to Sweden; then they appeared in Prussia and France. Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, imported Merino sheep to England, and Jefferson took some to North America. In 1836 the new Spanish government banned the use of the word Mesta . Throughout the world, flocks of Merino sheep now grazed on fenced pastures.

Leviathan in sheep’s clothing

Medieval England, like Spain, exported wool to Flanders. In the mid-fourteenth century, King Edward III, wanting to celebrate the importance of wool in the country’s revenue, ordered his lord chancellor to sit on the Woolsack. The Company of Merchant Adventurers, founded in 1407, enjoyed a monopoly on wool exports and was hugely successful under Henry VII; financed by the company, ‘wool churches’ all around East Anglia testify to its ambition. 16 Eager to do business with the company, landowners replaced their traditional grain and meat production with wool, which could now be traded and taxed. This caused a rapid growth in state revenue. Not content with their own fields and pastures, the landlords turned to the commons to provide more grazing land. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, English landowners, with the support of Parliament, took arable land and common meadows from the peasants, enclosed the plots, and put sheep on them. The smallholders and the poor had used these fields for producing wheat, meat and dairy products for their survival. Enclosing these plots, the landowners lost their tenants but increased their flocks: unlike humans, the sheep were able to ‘turn sand into gold’. The interests of the landowners, the merchants and the crown finally coincided.

Deprived of land, the peasants rebelled; the most famous example was Robert Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk (1549), which was put down by the army: 3,000 peasants were killed and Kett was hanged. Thomas More, in his Utopia (1516), wrote of sheep ‘devouring men’ as the major problem of the kingdom: ‘the nobility and gentry, and even those holy men the abbots, … stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge sheep in them.’ 17 The alarmed authorities limited the enclosures, but they continued. In the early seventeenth century, there were twice or three times more sheep than people in England, and, while sheep were producing income for the state, people were wasting it in their ‘consumption’. Pre-dating continental cameralism, the English bureaucracy revered science, collected statistics, invited craftsmen from abroad and scorned traditional rights. Wool became a mono-resource – the backbone of the state economy, the nourishment of the sovereign, the kingdom’s second body. This was exactly the period when the country’s elite adopted the fashion for wigs, which were made of sheep’s wool and horse hair.

From the fourteenth century onwards, the export of raw wool was gradually superseded by the trade in cloth. The Company of Merchants of the Staple, already incorporated in 1319, helped to regulate the domestic market, but the direct prohibitions on the export of raw wool were issued 300 years later. Still, the proportion of woollen cloth in English exports, and therefore the proportion of paid labour, was growing steadily. 18 The wool industry was structured like a pyramid that relied on land, with sheep and shepherds at the base, and turned into gold at the apex. The body of this pyramid was made up of the thousands of rural workers who produced wool. A flock of sheep supplied wool to a carder, three carders provided the roving – a bundle of fibre – for a spinner, three spinners produced the yarn for a weaver, and several weavers sent their cloth to a shopkeeper. Men, women and children took part in this continuous process. Located in lofts or outbuildings, small workshops were equipped with spinning wheels and hand looms. Work on a loom or spinning wheel could be fitted in with other sorts of agricultural work. The diffused character of wool as a resource, and the significant part played by labour costs in the export of cloth, counterbalanced monopoly trade and supported the English economy. Providing income to the poor, ‘cottage industries’ drew them into the larger economy and opened new prospects, but only after it had impoverished many thousands of families.

English raw wool was grey or whitish; the art of dyeing wool was unknown in England. Woven in thousands of cottages, the cloth was exported to Antwerp, where it was dyed and tailored, and then sold all over Europe. The strategy of the growing export revenue was clear: without the skill of dyeing, the lion’s share of profits would remain with the Flemish and the Dutch. If only the English masters could dye wool as well as their colleagues in India dyed cotton!

Pursuing this idea, in 1614 William Cockayne, governor of the Eastland Company, convinced James I to grant him a monopoly on exporting dyed wool. By the same act, the export of undyed woollen goods was banned. Failing to employ Flemish refugees with the necessary expertise, Cockayne was unable to succeed in production. His real interests were different; the Eastland Company, a counterpart of the Muscovy Company which traded with the Russian north, traded with the Baltic states, from Prussia to Poland. With the decline of the Hanseatic League, the English competition with the Dutch in the northern seas led them further east. The Cockayne project led to the reorientation of the English wool trade from the Low Countries to the north-east of Europe. As a result, the export of wool collapsed, the London merchants were ruined, and revolts started in the countryside. 19 Chronologically, the Eastland Company’s failed project of dyeing wool and establishing a wool monopoly developed simultaneously with the Muscovy Company’s project of colonising the Russian north and establishing a hemp monopoly. But, in 1617, James I reversed his course and cancelled both projects. He permitted the export of undyed wool again and allowed his ambassador to Moscow, John Meyrick, to set up a peace deal that made English intervention impossible. Nevertheless, Cockayne was promoted to be lord mayor of London, and Meyrick went back to Moscow to sign yet another treaty. At this point, wool prices were falling, although the cottage industry continued against the odds. The aristocracy had long been investing in land, and any profit was better than nothing. Parliament, which was made up largely of landed gentry who owned sheep, refused to allow James to raise new taxes; eventually this course led to the Glorious Revolution, which only strengthened the dominance of the wool merchants over the sheep owners.

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes published his Leviathan . On the famous frontispiece of this book, we see depicted the composite body of the sovereign, which consists of swarms of his tiny subjects, sprouting from his skin like sheep’s wool. 20 Born and educated in Malmesbury, an important centre of the wool industry whose fortunes declined during his lifetime, Hobbes was aware of the crucial relations between the humble sheep and the terrifying Leviathan. 21 Probably the most discussed image in the history of philosophy, the composite body of the state on Hobbes’s frontispiece confronts the city and the country, which are both depicted with conventional line engraving. The city is empty; two doctors wearing masks and two guardsmen patrol it, as if it is on lockdown. 22 The creator of this powerful picture is unknown; some scholars suggest the artist was Wenzel Hollar from Bohemia, who settled in London as a war refugee. While still in Prague he had studied with Arcimboldo, the master of composite portraits, which explains his unusual style. The dominant theory, however, is that the engraver was the French artist Abraham Bosse. *

In these sophisticated debates, scholars have ignored the visible resemblance of the sovereign’s body to sheep’s wool. However, I believe that this simple reading has its merits. First, it explains the fact that only the body of the sovereign is composite: the state consists of the sheep-like, sheepish people and the king who is their head and shepherd. Second, it explains why the city is depicted as empty: the wool economy depended on pastures and cottages, and there was no role for the city in this ‘body politic’. Paradoxically, it was the towns, with their excessive ‘consumption’, that became a burden for the mercantilist state. Third, it resonates with the concerns and statements of Hobbes’s contemporaries. In 1696, Charles Davenant, a customs official and the eldest son of William Davenant, a poet who corresponded with Hobbes, wrote: ‘As bread is called the staff of life, so the woollen manufacture is truly the principal nourishment of our body politic.’ 23 This was not about interpreting the frontispiece of Leviathan . Calling for a ban on raw wool exports, Davenant proposed to force the large population of English almshouses (counted as more than a million) to work on woollen goods for export, which would entail a new mass-scale organisation of proto-industrial labour. Fourth, this reading of the frontispiece reveals a direct line of continuity from More’s Utopia , to Hobbes’s Leviathan , to Davenant’s version of mercantilism, to Bentham’s Panopticon .

Overseen from the Woolsack, Parliament moulded the new wool market in a long series of Acts. Between 1660 and 1824, twenty-four different acts of legislation on wool exports were passed – roughly one every six years. 24 The export of raw wool was prohibited; if smugglers were caught they had their left hands cut off. In 1666, ‘An act for Burying in Wollen onely’ required woollen shirts for burials: under fear of penalty, subjects had to use wool in their deaths as they did in their lives. After many debates, this Act was strengthened in 1677. In addition, the Wool Act of 1699 prohibited the export of wool and wool products from Ireland and the American colonies. The purpose was to encourage both the local production and processing of wool. The Acts of Parliament shaped the internal demand for processed wool, the demand stimulated cottage industry, and this led to a boost in sheep farming. But there was no land to sustain it, which called for new acts of legislation. The series of wool laws brought the mercantile system home. Enforcing this system needed a huge effort – in 1742 the government of Robert Walpole created 330 salaried posts for registering all wool sheared in England. 25 Adam Smith attacked the wool laws, saying that they halved wool prices in Scotland and were ‘the effect of violence and artifice’. 26 The export ban on raw wool was withdrawn in 1824. Smith’s free trade celebrated a victory, but by now wool was relatively unimportant. The consumer switched from wool to cotton as ruthlessly as her forebears had switched from fur to wool.

Cotton

In human hands, plant and animal fibres competed with one another for thousands of years. Animals are higher up the food chain than plants, and, per unit of land, the cotton plant produces twelve times more fibre than a sheep produces wool. Not as durable as hemp but easier to process, cotton is cheaper than silk and more robust, lighter and finer than wool. For humankind a vital characteristic was cotton’s ability to interact with dyes – rare substances that came from the most unexpected parts of certain molluscs, insects or plants. The beauty of linen textiles lay in their whiteness, the beauty of cotton fabrics in their colours, the beauty of woollen cloth in its texture. In contrast to the northern fibres, cotton produced several crops per season, a fact which dictated the unremitting character of work on the cotton plantations. Like sugar, cotton required the intensive, machine-like work of slaves, which was quite at odds with the varied, ‘idle’ work of the peasantry. Cotton was the first raw material to benefit from the invention of mechanical devices and, later, steam-powered engines. It also gained from the mass impoverishment of the peasants who flocked to the cotton mills.

The ancient Romans brought back from India cloth made from the fibres of the round, white, fluffy ‘boll’ of the cotton plant. In the Middle Ages camels carried cotton textiles from India to Persia and from there to Byzantium and even to Ethiopia. In fourteenth-century China, special edicts commanded the peasants to grow cotton. From the sixteenth century, Portuguese ships exchanged Indian textiles for silver and brought cotton to Europe. But for a long time Europeans did not know how cotton grew; people thought of it as similar to wool. John Mandeville, who travelled to India in the fourteenth century, described seeing a plant that had sheep hanging from its branches, like fruit. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, cotton grew on the semi-wild plains of South Asia and Central America; sitting on low stools, women spun the thread and wound it up into balls using a wooden wheel on an axis. Selectively breeding cotton, peasants left the seed heads to develop on the best plants – those with a robust but fine fibre. Coloured Indian textiles which had no European names – muslin, chintz and calico – arrived on Portuguese caravels at the European ports, where they were sold on a par with silk. Then cotton processing developed in the Mediterranean colonies of Venice. Lacking their own raw materials, the Venetians were the founding fathers of ecological imperialism: they obliged their colonies to pay duties in a chosen commodity – in some cases this was timber, in others, grain, for Cyprus it was cotton. Cotton prints with a botanical or oriental design were used for decorating interiors instead of silk panels and trellises. In Africa, there was a demand for striped fabrics with symmetrical patterns; there the majority of cotton was used for clothes, not for upholstery. 27

European garments were often made of a blend of cotton with wool or linen. This fabric was called ‘fustian’; the forerunner of denim, it was hard-wearing and relatively cheap. The warm, brightly coloured clothing we see in Brueghel’s winter scenes was made of this long-forgotten material; it was all made at home, using very simple equipment. In Southern Europe, light clothes made of coloured cotton displaced silk. For a long time, India had the monopoly on the art of dyeing cotton or printing a design on it. The price of coloured textiles doubled during the course of the eighteenth century. Silk panels decorated the bedchambers of kings and the altars of churches. Furniture, walls and windows, upholstered or curtained with cotton textiles, became a feature of middle-class households. Still, they were precious. In 1791 a mob of Anglican supporters attacked the house of Joseph Priestly in Birmingham – the celebrated chemist was a Dissenter. Priestly claimed compensation and listed among his losses the matrimonial bed with a cotton canopy and a set of bed linen. He valued them at £25, a quarter of his annual income. 28

Joint stock companies were created to trade in cotton and other Eastern goods, with royal households the main investors in these companies. The British East India Company specialised in importing cotton to Europe, while the Dutch East India Company concentrated on trade between the Asian powers. But the growth of the cotton trade undermined the traditional interests of the wool producers – the majority of British landowners and tenants who got their income from sheep and wool processing. To protect its sheep, weavers and landowners, the British Parliament in the early eighteenth century issued the Calico Acts (1700, 1721), which banned the import of printed textiles from India; for the same reason, France, Spain and Prussia banned any imports of cotton. India was impoverished; huge areas were deprived of their usual income. Then the American plantations entered the picture. The route from America to England was shorter than that from Asia, and the mercantilist system encouraged the import of raw materials from the colonies while limiting the import of manufactured textiles. All this gave a boost to cotton mills in England and plantations in the American South.

Tobacco, sugar and cotton: all three plant-based raw materials needed large plantations and cheap, repetitive labour. Economy of scale played an ever-increasing role: the bigger the enterprise, the cheaper the cost of production and, therefore, the greater the profit. For the sake of cotton, any gentleman got the right to trade in human beings (1698); moreover, the governors in the British West Indies received a bonus for every slave supplied. The risks of the slave trade were unparalleled. On the transatlantic crossing one in five ships was lost; but in Liverpool it was thought that, even if one in every two ships made it to port with its cargo, then the owner made a profit. Capital acquired from sugar, cotton and slaves went to shipbuilders, insurers, bankers and mill-owners. Barclays Bank was founded by a family of Quakers who worked as slave traders in the West Indies. Lloyd’s of London began by insuring deals in slaves, sugar and cotton. James Watt, inventor of the first steam engine, was financed by a bank that derived income from trade in the West Indies. 29

In the name of efficiency, slave-owning plantations specialised in monoculture – they produced nothing but cotton. The harvested cotton had to be cleaned, pressed into bales and delivered to the docks. The cleaning process caused a bottleneck in the system – it was tedious to separate each fibre from the seed coat. By inventing the ‘cotton gin’, a mechanical gadget that made cleaning fifty times quicker, Eli Whitney enabled the rapid burgeoning of cotton plantations in the American South. Whitney patented his invention but never made any money from it; after many unsuccessful lawsuits he switched to designing muskets. Like sugar cane, cotton rapidly depleted the soil. But, unlike sugar, cotton would grow in Louisiana – a vast and boundless territory compared with the small islands of the West Indies. Labour was in short supply there, but the volume of the cotton trade doubled nearly every decade. Little else in history can compare with the explosive growth of the cotton trade; only sugar before it, and petroleum after it, grew as fast.

‘King Cotton’ led to the catastrophically rapid deforestation of the new continent. New plantations in Louisiana needed canals, which dried out the boggy soil. Supplies reached the plantations via these canals – slaves, grain, dried or salted fish, hemp ropes and bales, linen shirts for the slaves, and luxury items for the plantation owners. The work went on all year round; in December the third cotton crop of the year was harvested, and then it had to be cleaned and pressed into bales. The life of a slave was nothing like the life of a peasant with its complicated tasks and periods of creative idleness. Focused on nothing but profit, the cotton plantation became the first capitalist enterprise, while slaves were the first industrial workers. It was not for nothing that factory workers were later compared to slaves.

Proto-industry

On the other side of the ocean, in England, the village processing of cotton expanded and became more specialised. Even in 1833 the majority of the wool and cotton in England was processed by hand, in rural workshops. But, as had earlier happened in Italy, the mills gravitated towards cities. Bales of cotton were brought straight from the ports and distributed to individual houses; the peasants spun it by hand or wove it on hand looms, sometimes adding wool or linen that they themselves had produced. Much more than wool, the processing of cotton depended on middlemen. It was they who delivered the bales of raw material to the villages, and they who collected the rolls of finished cloth and delivered them to tailoring workshops. As always happened, these curators took the greatest share of the profits. Servicing a cluster of neighbouring villages, they paid for the cotton out of their own pockets. Their business was simple, risky and profitable. The spinners, knitters and weavers earned a wage in a free labour market without leaving home. While women were working the looms, their husbands worked the land, as subsistence farmers. But it was this industry that led the villages onto the hard road of trade and growth. Peasant families were able to spend the cash they earned on sugar and tea, rum and gin, horses and harness, and, finally, silver and decoration. Many, though not all, of the goods introduced into the countryside came from the colonies; from sugar and tobacco to fashionable calico prints, these addictive commodities engendered habit and dependency. These led to the ‘decomposition of the peasantry’, a process that Lenin and other critics of capitalism wrote about. In fact it was exactly the same thing they called ‘progress’. The development of the fibre proto-industry in different parts of the world engaged in global trade – in England, India, New England, and on the shores of the White Sea in Russia – played a key role in the change in gender relations and the development of mass consumption. Characteristic of textiles, fashion became a universal tool for accelerating the market. 30

Invented for wool, spinning and weaving technologies were easily adapted for cotton. Water-powered machines gave cotton its decisive advantage, which was later amplified by the power of coal and steam. In 1780, ten times more woollen textiles were produced in the British Isles than cotton goods. In 1850, six times more cotton textiles were produced than woollen. By this time, in order to replace the output of British cotton factories with woollen textiles, it would have required 168 million sheep, which would have grazed 50 million acres of pastureland, twice the area of all the agricultural land in the British Isles. The intensive cultivation on the American plantations, and the mills of the first Industrial Revolution, gave England millions of ‘ghost acres’. 31 The balance of trade also gained by this massive switch from wool to cotton. During the eighteenth century, the deliveries of raw cotton to the British Isles increased threefold, while the export of manufactured cotton goods increased by a factor of fifteen.

With a constant supply of cotton, English village workshops developed new techniques of dyeing cotton. The old colouring method that Alderman Cockayne had failed to master, even under royal patronage, relied on a supply of exotic and expensive dyes from the colonies and needed expert knowledge. In the mid-eighteenth century, craftsmen applied to cotton the new methods of print-making which had been developed by engravers and book printers for work on paper: wooden or brass plates were coated with dye and the cloth was rolled over the plates. Imitating Indian calico, printed fabrics increased profit; thanks to machines, their productivity was eighty times greater than that of traditional Indian techniques. Then chemists created a dye to replace the very costly cochineal. Proto-industry materialised the exchange between slave labour across the ocean, subsistence farming in the British countryside, and early capitalism in towns and ports. The source of raw materials, for example silk or cotton, was remote and concentrated; but their processing in Italy or England was based on the distribution of this commodity among dozens of adjacent villages and thousands of workers. New industries combined topical resources, such as sugar, cotton and silver, with diffused resources such as grain, wool, coal and hemp. But the extraction of topical resources and their primary processing – the cause of great evil – took place across the ocean, while the extraction of diffused resources and the secondary – most profitable – processing remained in England and Europe.

One of the most well-informed participants of the American Revolution, Alexander Hamilton, wrote that there was something in the nature of cotton that made it particularly suitable for being processed by machine. 32 Waterwheels powered wool, flax and silk factories, but the newest cotton factories were powered by steam engines. Those entrepreneurs who could take production away from cottages and put all the processing under one roof in a factory profited from the economy of scale, cutting transportation distances and using machines. In 1841 in Manchester there were already 128 cotton factories – ‘satanic mills’– and they produced more than half of all British textiles. The number of domestic workshops producing cotton and wool fell by a factor of ten. Having lost their work and land, people were moving to the factories.

The historian Karl Polanyi considered the Industrial Revolution to be a transformation ‘as extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians’. The new creed consisted in the belief that ‘all human problems could be resolved given an unlimited amount of material commodities.’ 33 New factories astonished contemporary observers by their size. More and more machines – for cleaning, spinning and, finally, weaving – were powered by the energy of falling water, harnessed by weirs and driven through mill-races. They all benefited from the economy of scale, but this scale depended on the nature of the resource being processed: in England in 1835 the average cotton factory employed 175 workers, while a wool factory had forty-four. Cotton mills were the first in which steam machines supplemented waterwheels; wool factories were several steps behind. The cotton thread, sturdier than wool, was not damaged by the tension and vibration produced by the machines; more expensive, cotton fabrics offset the expenses of complex machinery. Most of the inventors of the new machines started as watchmakers. Their machines were expensive and the cost of entering this new business was very high. But the expenditure was well worth it: large weaving looms, powered by waterwheels and supported by steam engines, could process the same quantity of cotton as hand looms but needed only a tenth of the workforce. 34

Richard Arkwright was the first entrepreneur to install a steam engine in a cotton mill; he used it to pump water to the mill-race of a waterwheel. He also invented a ‘water frame’ which continuously spun cotton threads and could be reconfigured; it was far more powerful than the hand-powered spinning jenny. Using new mechanisms, Lancashire businessmen produced grey cloth with linen warp and cotton weft, which could be printed almost like a calico. Robert Owen, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, introduced this system in the Scottish village of New Lanark, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century became a centre for social experiments. Owen limited the working day in his cotton-spinning mill to ten hours, refused to employ children under twelve years old, and expected workers to know their multiplication tables. Robert Peel, the owner of watermills in Lancaster, soon adopted these rules; in 1819 these two mill-owners introduced to Parliament the Factories Bill, in an attempt to regulate the work of children in the cotton industry. Dogged by patent scandals and lawsuits, Arkwright still succeeded in becoming a wealthy man. Owen lost control of Lanark in 1825 but won fame for founding New Harmony, a utopian community in America. One of Peel’s sons, another Robert, became the prime minister of the United Kingdom.

The birth of the proletariat

With wool in decline, farmers and tenants lost their incomes, and shepherds turned into paupers. Again, the growing cities absorbed the surplus population. Much bigger than the metals-processing industry, the textile industry was the real cradle of the proletariat. Mechanised spinning and weaving looms needed constant input from human workers to keep them going. At the lowest levels, these people themselves had to work like machines, repeating thousands of identical movements and doing nothing else. The monotonous character of this work repelled the peasants, but their children excelled at this work. To a greater extent than ships or mines, these factories shaped an indistinguishable mass of human bodies who had nothing to lose but their work. These untrained but disciplined, poorly motivated and exhausted workers did constitute a proletariat of sorts – an alienated workforce subjected to the machine.

As long as cotton mills depended on waterwheels they had to be located near river weirs, which preserved the rural character of the industry. These mills were far from sea ports, usually in hilly terrain – they needed a fast-flowing current and stable river banks. Only the second generation of steam-powered machines, which didn’t need a waterwheel, made the cotton industry urban. Thanks to these new machines, coal-powered factories were built in the same coastal clusters which had been developed for long-distance trade. The Industrial Revolution led to the depopulation of interior regions. The widely scattered cottage industries that had absorbed displaced agricultural labour and the watermills that had been built where nature dictated were all abandoned. Proceeding at an extraordinary pace, new coastal urbanisation boosted inequality. Radically changing its terms, the exchange between town and country increased the power of the ports and metropolitan cities, which sucked in everything – people, resources and capital.

The Napoleonic wars caused a spike in the demand for fibre; it was needed in all its variety to meet the demands of war – ropes, sails, uniforms, blankets, tents and much more. After the war, demand plummeted and prices collapsed. Ships with American cotton stayed unloaded in British ports for months. Having returned to the hemp market in 1814, Russian landowners once again saw no profit. The pay of weavers in English factories was three times lower than during the war. In Lancashire, the centre of the textile industry, people were hungry. In August 1819 an infamous massacre took place at St Peter’s Field in Manchester. A mass rally of 10,000 textile workers and their families, dressed in their Sunday best, demanded bread, work and parliamentary reform. A regiment of mounted hussars with drawn swords dispersed the crowd, leaving fifteen men and women lying dead on the field. The incident was dubbed Peterloo, an ironic reference to the recent Battle of Waterloo.

The 1840s was a time of crisis all over Europe. The demand for textiles and manufactured goods in the colonies stagnated. Again, British industry was changing its resource platform. The new development project – metal, coal and railways – was just evolving. The resource platform has changed time and again, but the world continues to produce and consume enormous quantities of cotton – 123 million bales in 2013. To replace this volume of cotton we would have to rear 7 billion sheep, which would require all the land of Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals. ‘The great divergence’ which allowed the West to outstrip the East came about thanks to cotton – a traditional product of the East that was imitated in the West. 35

Uzbek cotton, Russian textiles

The Russian customs tariff in 1822 followed a reduced version of mercantile principles: encouraging the import of raw cotton, it protected the internal market from manufactured goods, but transportation was still entrusted to foreign vessels. Thanks to this tariff, Russian manufacturers were able to make a profit processing American cotton. There was huge domestic demand for calico prints, and cotton factories sprang up to replace proto-industrial sites that had specialised in flax processing. Powered by waterwheels, cloth factories in the Moscow region adapted their looms for cotton. In the village of Ivanovo, surrounded by flax fields, new dynasties of textile manufacturers appeared; most of them belonged to the ‘priestless confession of Old Believers’ – a radical, semi-clandestine sect who didn’t recognise the Orthodox priesthood. Hired labour was cheap and credit was informal. Looms were imported from abroad, as was the cotton. In 1832 an English steam-powered machine was brought to Ivanovo. Out of the 130 factories in Ivanovo in 1844, many had the right to have their own serfs, and the bigger ones had nearly a thousand of them. But almost half the factories belonged to peasants, some of whom were still serfs. 36 The bureaucrats were surprised by the growth of this town, which was absent from the administrative map – the whole town belonged to Count Sheremetyev, one of the biggest serf-owners. But the economic growth of such places was phenomenal. When the Soviet powers made Ivanovo a regional centre in 1929, this region was third in the whole Soviet Union for the value of its industrial output.

Russia contradicted the thesis that capital-intensive machinery was adopted only in countries where the workers were highly paid, such as England. According to the economic historian Robert Allen, if the cost of labour was low, as it was in India or Poland, it was more profitable for employers to hire extra workers and develop cottage industries than to spend money on machinery. 37 Russia was different: labour was cheap, but persecuted communities, especially the Old Believers, had accumulated large amounts of capital, were unable to export it and therefore used any business opportunity available. During the decade before the Crimean War, the number of spinning machines tripled. Then cotton prices rose fourfold during the American Civil War, and this boosted the import of cotton from Central Asia.

These wars ended, but the Great Game – proxy conflicts between the British and Russian empires – continued in Central Asia. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Russian troops invaded Turkestan. Some hoped to find metals there, but cotton proved to be a far more valuable resource. While the government in St Petersburg wished to resist English influence there, manufacturers were concerned that the Uzbek Khans could also introduce protectionist duties on raw cotton. At first unstable, the quality of Bokhara cotton gradually improved; deliveries were expensive but, taking all wars and crises into account, more reliable than those from across the ocean. Almost as in the American South, Central Asian cotton was king. After the annexation of Turkestan, cotton imports increased tenfold, giving work to millions of local peasants, thousands of workers in central Russia, and a great number of coachmen, barge haulers and dockers who were employed in the transportation of cotton across half of Eurasia. Carried from Fergana on camels, cotton bales were delivered to the Caspian Sea and from there were transported up the Volga. By 1865 cotton and textiles made up 15 per cent of the trade turnover of the major Russian fair in Nizhny Novgorod. The railway from Samarkand to the Caspian Sea was completed in 1888, but even then the journey to central Russia took six weeks. 38 In contrast to the British Empire, no oceans separated the places where cotton was produced and where it was processed – only vast unpopulated steppes and tracts of marshland. But, in this case too, textiles were manufactured thousands of kilometres from where the cotton was grown. Alexander Hamilton wrote that the nature of cotton made it suitable for mechanical processing; he might have added with even greater surprise that nature created cotton for long-distance transportation.

The Russian authorities made Turkestan a textbook example of mercantilism in action: they encouraged the production of raw cotton, prevented it from being processed locally, held back local consumption, and kept the means of transportation in their hands. In the greater part of Turkestan the Russian authorities established indirect rule, which suited the traditional ways of Uzbek peasants. By the end of the century, however, a new threat emerged. The peasants of central Russia began a mass migration into Central Asia, making a beeline for the oases where cotton was grown. Fearing overpopulation and ethnic conflicts, St Petersburg put a brake on this migration. The governor-general of Turkestan was Konstantin Kaufmann, an experienced colonial administrator who had brutally suppressed rebellions in Poland and Fergana. Against expectations, he defended the local population from the Russian colonists by limiting their land purchases. Kaufmann saw that the transfer of the cotton fields to Russian ownership would be a bloody and very expensive enterprise. A civil war in Turkestan would have raised the price of cotton more than the Civil War in America. This protection of the local population against the influx of colonists was a rare instance in colonial history. All the same, Russian banks gradually deprived many Uzbek peasants of their land; by 1914, a quarter of the cotton-producing farms were left landless because of debts. Peasant uprisings in this distant periphery of the empire pre-dated the revolution in the capital.

In Russia the price of textiles rose, as did the price of bread, outstripping everything else. In 1900 the government again raised the tariff on imported cotton products, and domestic prices became higher than international ones; all the same, Russian capitals and port cities increased the import of expensive European textiles. The growth of cotton from Central Asia and the booming textile industry round Moscow depended on internal consumption in Russian villages. While coastal and industrial cities were booming, the standard of living in villages stagnated. One of many explanations for this effect is beet sugar: cheap and available across the country, it raised consumption among the peasants but failed to connect local households to distant trade and world affairs. Huge, barely populated expanses depressed trade. The division of labour was contingent on seasonal work and migration. Having made it to the town, peasants quickly mastered new skills; but they refused to use them when they returned to their villages. Theirs was the world described by Chayanov in his model of the moral economy – a world which didn’t need growth. 39 In the eighteenth century, the state used both stick and carrot in its treatment of the peasants. The twentieth-century state kept only the stick.

Industrialising the countryside, the ironclad Leviathan had one method of interfering in the moral economy of the village: brute force. Explaining his goals in the summer of 1928, Stalin said that, in capitalist countries, industrialisation had happened at the cost of plundering the colonies. The Bolsheviks, he said, built their industries at the cost of ‘internal accumulation’ – in other words, by plundering the countryside. The state confiscated the modest reserves accumulated in peasant smallholdings, transferring the proceeds into the development of mines and factories. ‘This is an additional tax on the peasantry in the interests of raising industry … it’s a little bit like “tribute” … It is, not to mince words, an unpleasant task,’ said Stalin. He didn’t agree with the opposition, who proposed ‘an alliance between towns and villages’, which meant supplying more textiles in exchange for food. ‘We will not just give the peasants calico. We will give them every sort of machine, seeds, ploughs, fertilisers … so the alliance will be based not only on textiles but on metals as well.’ Stalin spelt out the details. ‘An alliance through textiles is concerned, primarily, with the personal needs of the peasants’, but ‘an alliance through metal’ signified the collective remaking of the peasantry. ‘In general, how can you rework, remake the peasant, his psychology, his productivity?’ asked Stalin. To this end, his plans presumed ‘the mechanisation of agriculture, the collectivisation of peasant labour, the electrification of the country’. 40 To turn the Russian peasantry into a proletariat, sugar wasn’t necessary and there was precious little calico. For collectivisation and urbanisation – the Soviet versions of enclosures and resettlements – what was needed was metal.

Notes

Notes

1 Braudel, A History of Civilizations , p. 378. 2 Haigler et al., ‘Cotton fiber’. 3 Seneca, Declamations , 375. 4 Molà, The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice ; Rezakhani, ‘The road that never was’; Classen, The Deepest Sense . 5 Kosunova, ‘Krimskii kokon’. 6 Crosby, America, Russia, Hemp, and Napoleon . 7 Ibid. 8 Green, ‘John Dee, King Arthur, and the conquest of the Arctic’. 9 Rutherfurd, The Importance of the Colonies to Great Britain ; Kaplan, Russian Overseas Commerce with Great Britain . 10 Małowist, ‘Poland, Russia and Western trade in the 15th and 16th centuries’. 11 Liubimenko, ‘Angliiskii proekt 1612 g’; Dunning, ‘James I, the Russia Company, and the plan to establish a protectorate over North Russia’. 12 Crosby, America, Russia, Hemp, and Napoleon . 13 Kulisher, Istoriya russkoy torgovli , p. 227; Tengoborskii, O proizvoditel’nykh silakh Rossii . 14 Klein, The Mesta ; Phillips and Phillips, Spain’s Golden Fleece ; Phillips and Phillips, ‘Spanish wool and Dutch rebels’. 15 Kamen, ‘The decline of Castile’; Engstrand, ‘The Enlightenment in Spain’; Bacigalupo, ‘Two journeys with one vision’; Mahoney, Colonialism and Postcolonial Development . 16 Bisson, The Merchant Adventurers of England . 17 More, Utopia , p. 12. 18 Bowden, The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England . 19 Leng, Fellowship and Freedom ; Friis, Alderman Cockayne’s Project and the Cloth Trade . 20 Brown, ‘The artist of the Leviathan title-page’; Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes ; Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes, Der Leviathan ; Malcolm, ‘The titlepage of Leviathan ’. 21 Martinich, Hobbes , p. 6. 22 Agamben, Stasis . 23 Davenant, ‘An essay on the East-India trade’, pp. 88, 100. 24 Hoppit, ‘The political economy of wool’; Hentschell, The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England . 25 Hoppit, ‘The political economy of wool’. 26 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , p. 248. 27 Riello, Cotton . 28 Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain , p. 2. 29 Williams, Capitalism and Slavery ; Pomeranz, The Great Divergence ; Beckert, Empire of Cotton . 30 Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain ; Riello, Back in Fashion . 31 Riello, Cotton , pp. 238–45; Sugden and Cockerill, ‘The wool and cotton textile industries’; Sidorova, Indiiskii khlopok i britanskii interes . 32 Hamilton, Report on the Subject of Manufactures . 33 Polanyi, Origins of Our Time: The Great transformation , p. 42. 34 Chapman, ‘The cotton industry and the industrial revolution’; Riello, Cotton ; Beckert, Empire of Cotton . 35 Pomeranz, The Great Divergence ; Berg, ‘From imitation to invention’. 36 Stolbov, ‘Kapitalistye krest’jane-staroobrjadcy’; ‘Selo Ivanovo’. 37 Allen, Global Economic History . 38 Obertreis, Imperial Desert Dreams ; Allen, Farm to Factory . 39 Moon, The Russian Peasantry . 40 Stalin, ‘Ob industrilizatsii i khlebnoi probleme’.