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A long history of exploitation in the cotton industry

VIKAS BAJAJ, New York Times
The fires and building collapses that killed hundreds of garment workers in countries like Bangladesh in recent years serve as a tragic reminder of the millions in develop-ing countries who labour in wretched conditions. These workers, however, are not the garment or cotton industry's first victims.
A book published earlier this month - “Empire of Cotton: A Global History" by Sven Beckert, a history professor at Harvard --describes in vivid detail how the industrialisation of cotton contributed to slavery, the destruction of American Indian cultures and famines in British India. And while the parallels between the 18th century and 19th century and the present are inexact, the reader can't help but think that cotton, for all its many uses, still exacts a human cost.
High school history class is good at teaching us the positive elements of this past. Older textbooks described how breakthrough innovations like the cotton gin and the steam engine fuelled the industrial revolution and helped make cheap consumer goods widely available
for the first time. New books like "Empire of Cotton” and "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism" by Edward Baptist offer gripping and more nuanced stories of economic history.
Beckert explains how the emergence of a textile industry in England contributed to wars against American Indian tribes in the South and fuelled the slave trade. American Indians were forcibly removed from territory their ancestors had long inhabited because those fertile lands were needed to grow cotton to supply mills in Manchester and Liverpool. Hundreds of thousands of slaves were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean and moved within the United States to sow and harvest the plant.
Later, when the Civil War disrupted cotton production in the United States, British and other European capitalists turned to countries like India and Egypt that were already growing the plant along with food crops. Assisted by colonial administrators, industrialists cajoled farmers to switch to growing only cotton, subjecting farmers to trade volatility for which
they were ill-prepared and greatly diminishing the food supply.
"In 1877 and again in the late 1890s, Berar, as well as northeastern Brazil, witnessed the starvation of millions of cultivators as cotton prices fell while food grain prices rose, putting food out of reach of many cotton producers," Beckert writes, referring to a province in British India.
Then, as now, people who bene-fitted from the status quo said that ending the human exploitation that made cotton so profitable would cause broader economic harm. In 1858, Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina warned on the Senate floor that "England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilised world with her, save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king."
In more recent times, Western retailers have resisted taking responsibility for improving working conditions in clothing factories in developing countries in large part because doing so would raise the cost of making cheap T-shirts. Some companies like Walmart have contributed only modestly to com-
pensation funds for workers who died in fires and building collapses in factories where their clothes were made. Their lame excuse is that they did not authorise production in those specific factories and should not have to pay for the choices and mistakes of their contractors and subcontractors.
It's true, of course, that for poor Bangladeshis, Cambodians and others who make today's clothes, these jobs offer an escape from poverty and subsistence farming. But the callous disregard that factory owners, large Western clothing companies and government officials have shown for worker safety in pursuit of profits bears more than a passing resemblance to the historic injustices committed in the name of King Cotton.
Companies like Walmart, Gap and H&M and the government of Bangladesh have recently committed to making factories safer. But that effort, begun only after the collapse of Rana Plaza and the loss of more than 1,100 lives in April 2013, will require years of hard work. History will surely judge the clothing industry and political leaders harshly for waiting so long to act.