Raw cotton

node · earth · Imported to Lancashire from the Levant, the West Indies and the United States South

The fibre that industrialised first, and the one detail of the story that cannot be told inside Britain. Cotton had no British agricultural interest to protect — unlike wool, which had guilds, statutes and a parliamentary lobby — so mechanising it met little organised resistance, and it takes mechanical handling better than wool or flax. Every pound of it was imported. The supply moved from the Levant and the West Indies to the plantations of the United States South after the 1790s, and Lancashire's expansion is inseparable from the expansion of chattel slavery that produced the crop: the mill and the plantation were two ends of one system, and the cheapness of the cloth depended on the unfreedom at the other end. Britain's raw cotton imports grew from a few million pounds a year in the mid-eighteenth century to several hundred million by the mid-nineteenth, one of the steepest sustained series in any pre-modern trade record.