Egyptian cotton has become practically synonymous with luxury.
Since the discovery of the long-staple variety just over 200 years ago, it has steadily made its way into every corner of the high-end fabrics industry.
Its reputation certainly precedes it, and much like French cheese or Greek olive oil, there are few who don’t know of its unparalleled quality.
Cotton production in Egypt was insignificant before the 1800s, but production increased drastically in the years preceding the beginning of the 20th century. The increase was influenced by historical events such as the American Civil War, which disrupted the supply of cotton from the United States. For Egypt, the 19th century brought drastic and sudden economic changes. The groundwork for this explosion of production had been in place for decades. Earlier, cotton production for export was present but represented an insignificant portion of revenue for the country.
By the 20th century, this was completely reversed. This drastic economic change was afforded with the help of continual investment into the production and processing of cotton, enabling several infrastructure improvements. Muhammad Ali of Egypt saw an opportunity in long-staple cotton and acted to promote its cultivation.
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Muhammad Ali Pasha, the founder of modern Egypt, embraced cotton as a valuable cash crop.
One factor that led the cotton industry to success was continuous dedication to its funding. Change is not the first example of federal investment in cotton. Previously, the Egyptian government had funded research in cotton production. Several infrastructure projects were taken on by the government throughout the entirety of the 1800s. These projects focused on both production and processing of cotton. Production and agricultural improvements included canal and dam construction.
Early Cultivation and Discovery of Long-Staple Cotton
The cultivation of cotton goes back thousands of years, with some of the earliest evidence of cultivation and domestication dating back to around 5000-7000 BCE. The ancient Peruvians, Sudanese and Pakistanis were among the first cultures to make fabric out of cotton; they say the very first strain ever recorded was in the Indian subcontinent, in the Indus Valley, although there have been other records of domestication in the ancient Sudanese Kingdom of Kush, as well as some very early examples that have been discovered in Huaca Prieta in Peru and in the Tehuacan Valley in Mexico.
Egyptians have been growing and using cotton for their textiles for over a thousand years, some accounts report even earlier dates that go back to around 2500 BCE. There is some debate as to whether the ancient Egyptians grew cotton or not; flax was the main source of fiber in the production of textiles, wool to a much lesser degree because it was considered impure. There are accounts of cotton being used by priests but these tend be closer to the 5th century BCE. Of course the quality they could achieve at the time was nowhere near the quality of modern Egyptian cotton. It was a completely different strain, one of the Old World varieties which had much shorter fibers that were both coarser and weaker than the New World strains.
But it wasn’t until the 19th century though that Egyptian cotton became the luxury item it is today. French textile engineer Louis Alexis Jumel apparently discovered long-staple cotton in 1918 in a Cairo garden belonging to a Turkish officer. This new variety, with its long and strong strands, produced a fabric that was softer, more durable and more absorbent than any other. Jumel, who was in Egypt at the time to work on a spinning and weaving project, was able to convince Egypt’s then ruler, Mohamed Ali Pasha, that cultivating this particular strain could completely revolutionize the cotton industry, and he was right.
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By the mid-1820s, around 10,000 tons of the new cotton were being produced and shipped abroad. Special machinery was needed to work with the fine strands and produce the best quality threads possible; for a while they could only be found in specialized mills in the English county of Lancashire. But there were still flaws in the quality of the resulting product and it was the combination with a different seed, the Sea Island variety, and the optimal growing conditions of the Egyptian Delta that eventually produced the perfect strands that are so highly sought after today.
The Impact of the American Civil War
How the Cotton Gin Changed America
Just a few decades later, in 1861, the American Civil War would prove to be another major milestone in the story of Egyptian cotton.The American Civil war began in 1861. As northern warships blockaded southern ports, closing them off to commercial shipping, the cotton plantations of the Confederacy struggled to export their ‘white gold.’
With the great textile mills of England now deprived of the lifeblood of their industry, 80 percent of which had previously come from the U.S, the price of cotton very soon went through the roof. It took just a couple of weeks after the outbreak of hostilities in South Carolina for farmers the world over to realize the scope of the bounty that had landed in their lap. Agricultural laborers from Australia and India to the West Indies ditched wheat and other food staples and hastily planted up their fields with cotton. Prices had risen by up to 150 percent.
No one, however, seized on the opportunity quite like the Egyptians, who had just a few decades beforehand freed themselves from almost 300 years of direct Ottoman rule. Under the ambitious leadership of Muhammed Ali, an Albanian soldier who had seized power in 1805 and is widely considered the founder of modern Egypt, the country had already embraced cotton as a valuable cash crop.
Blockades imposed on southern ports essentially cut off American cotton plantations from the rest of the world. This left the English mills with nothing to spin and created a massive rift in the global trade, production and sale of cotton, which of course drove prices to an all-time high. Between 1861 and 1863, Egypt had more than doubled its cotton production. In 1861, Egypt had only exported 600,000 cantars of cotton (a traditional measurement equal to about 100 pounds), but by 1863 it had more than doubled this to almost 1.3 million cantars, the New York Times reported at the time.
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Looking back, it might seem as if there were a certainly inevitability to Egypt’s capture of much of the American market share. With its foothold on the Mediterranean, it was much closer to Liverpool than its competitors, and to the ports at Marseille and Trieste, through which France and the Austro-Hungarian Empire funneled cotton north to their mills. After assuming the throne in 1863, he presided over a massive program of public works, which included building much of the network of irrigation canals that farmers use to this day, and continuing his father’s embrace of modern technology.
Labor and Social Impact
Initially, at least, it wasn’t just the landowning and mercantile classes who benefited from this extraordinary boon. With their unexpected new prosperity, some villagers paid dowries or went on the pilgrimage to Mecca.
For just as the expansion in the trafficking of slaves to the southern United States is often explained in part by the pick up in cotton production, so too the arrival of this tremendously labor intensive crop in Egypt led to the introduction of a variation of the feudal system. Farmers who had previously spent much of their time planting land that was for all intents and purposes theirs, now found themselves pressed into work on large estates.
“It explains child labor, it created seasonal labor [during the harvest],” says Mona Abaza, a professor at the American University in Cairo, whose book The Cotton Plantation Remembered recounts how her family built up great wealth through cotton.
How did the growth of Egyptian cotton impact its workers? Mohamed Saleh’s examination of some of the world’s earliest decolonial population censuses has revealed it led to a huge growth in slavery and state-coerced labour.
When the American Civil War (1861-1865) led to a global cotton shortage, Egypt began to emerge - along with India and Brazil - as a major cotton producer. Although it was India that replaced the United States as the world’s top producer, Egypt’s cotton was prized because of its superior quality. The long fibres of the variety of cotton grown in Egypt were closer in quality to US cotton than the “short staple” variety grown in India.
The Nile Delta with its fertile and year-long irrigated soil provides ideal growing conditions for cotton. Crucially, Egypt was also able to supply the other essential ingredient to farm the crop - labour. The gruelling work of growing and harvesting the crop could be fulfilled through both slavery and the lesser-known system of state coercion of local labour.
Slavery had been a long-standing medieval institution in Egypt, with black slaves being transported in caravans via trans-Saharan land routes and then sold competitively on the open market. About 94 per cent of slaves were black and from the Nilotic Sudan - which includes current day Sudan and South Sudan and extends to Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania.
Trans-Saharan slave trade routes, highlighting the movement of slaves from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa and the Middle East.
The trans-Saharan slave trade was distinct from its transatlantic cousin which relied mainly on slaves from western and central sub-Saharan Africa.
These population censuses are unique because they are the earliest precolonial censuses from a non-Western country to include information about every household member.
Dr Mohamed Saleh, Associate Professor of Economic History at LSE, explains: “The trans-Saharan slave trade was far smaller than the transatlantic slave trade, but it was a much older institution and persisted for longer.”
The other coercive system of labour in Egypt was state coercion which forced peasants to work through violence and intimidation. Egyptian cotton trade relied on slave and state coerced labour
Dr Saleh has investigated the impact of Egypt’s cotton boom on these two types of labour. As part of his research he digitised, for the first time, two nationally representative samples of the Egyptian population censuses of 1848 and 1868 from the original Arabic manuscripts at the National Archives of Egypt. These allow a comparison of the rural labour force before and during the cotton boom.
Dr Saleh explained, “These population censuses are unique because they are the earliest precolonial censuses from a non-Western country to include information about every household member. They enumerate not only men, but also women, children and importantly for my research, slaves.
“They are also the only surviving individual level record of the slave population in Egypt, and possibly the Middle East.
“In the United States the first census that provided information at the individual level took place in 1850.”
Dr Saleh’s research reveals that while the majority of Egypt’s rural labour force prior to the cotton boom, in 1848, were self-employed peasants (51 per cent) and wage agricultural labourers (10 per cent), eight per cent were subject to coercion. Rural slavery was rarer, with slaves constituting one per cent of the population in 1848.
However, the cotton boom caused the number of slaves to surge, with the rural slave population tripling between 1848 and 1868, from 39,762 to 144,592, to make up three per cent of the rural workforce.
Interestingly, the rising demand for slaves came from the rural middle class - village headmen from areas outside large estates - rather than from the landed elite. In contrast the elite met their demands for labour through the coercion of local peasants.
“Middle class landowners relied on slaves rather than coercive labour because they did not have access to the tools of state violence,” says Dr Saleh. However, they did have access to money, so they could afford to purchase imported slaves on the open market.”
Dr Saleh’s work shows how the two institutions of state coercion and slavery reinforced one another. In areas where there was more state coercion of the peasantry, there was also a higher demand for slaves among the rural middle classes.
“If you have a fixed amount of people available for labour in your village and then the state comes in and takes many of them out of the labour market by coercing them to work on the landed elites’ estates, then you have fewer workers to recruit. This is how state coercion increased the demand for slaves,” explains Dr Saleh.
The trans-Saharan slave trade ended in 1877 when, under pressure because the country had defaulted on its international debt, a weakened Isma'il Pasha, the Khedive or ruler of Egypt, acquiesced to the demands of the British Abolitionists.
However, forced labour in Egypt did not end with the end of slavery. British Abolitionists, familiar with the transatlantic slave trade, had little knowledge about state coercion of the local peasantry because it was a localised institution that existed in the Middle East and was more subtle than the slave trade.
“The abolitionists in Britain, and Europe more generally, were focused on abolishing the trans-Saharan slave trade because of their work on and familiarity with the transatlantic slave trade. This meant that they didn’t pay much attention to the coercion of the locals,” says Dr Saleh.
“I think one implication here is that you need local expertise to understand what institutions are significant in their context. In terms of magnitude the local coercion of local peasantry was far larger than slavery.”
But state coercion did not increase after abolition, as might have been expected.
“In fact, Egyptian parliamentary minutes show that rural middle-class Members of Parliament started to become more critical of state coercion in the wake of abolition.” says Dr Saleh. “This is not because they were necessarily progressive, but because they didn’t like the fact that the landed elite had a complete monopoly over the coercion of state locals.
Influx of Foreign Influence and Eventual Decline
Unsurprisingly, Egypt’s newfound riches didn’t escape the attention of enterprising tradespeople across Europe or the Levant either, many of whom were keen to share in the cotton spoils. Between February and August 1864 alone, 12,000 more foreigners arrived than left, Owen writes, with Greeks the largest group among them.
Intent on securing business for their nationals, European governments rushed to open up missions throughout the Delta and Upper Egypt. This influx was in itself not terrible as the foreigners brought with them considerable expertise to a country still clawing its way back from centuries of stagnation. But their arrival also coincided - and indirectly contributed - to a rash of poor decision-making among Egypt’s ruling classes that was to eventually lead to the arrival of the British military on a long-term basis in 1882.
Very soon he’d built up such big debts to mostly British and French creditors that he couldn’t hope to ever pay them back. crop came back on the market and proved particularly damaging for Egypt.
“I think you can say that the American Civil War - and the effects on cotton - made the British change their policy towards Egypt,” says Mohamed Awad, director of the Alexandria & Mediterranean Research Center at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
As the overwhelmed Egyptian treasury bounded from one crisis to another, the European and Syro-Lebanese communities set about snapping up much of the cotton trade.
The decline of Egypt’s Cotton Market and foreign trade created an economic crisis brought by a drop in demand. Some of the contributing factors included increased competition, production issues and national debt. More foreign competition in the cotton industry plateaued international cotton prices, leaving the Egyptian market with little room to grow.
Egypt’s agricultural production had swelled at an incredible rate and kept up with itself until the early 1900s. In the early 1900s, environmental and human factors both lowered production rates. After the prior “boom” of the cotton industry, the population began to increase quickly and consistently. The economy did not follow suit.
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