The Brazilian raw cotton trade : merchants and mercantile strategies during the industrial revolution

Abstract

The golden age of Brazilian cotton production (c.1760s-1820s) coincides with the classic period of European – and especially British – industrialization. Before the rise of U.S. cotton from the first decade of the nineteenth century, Brazil was one of the world’s main suppliers of this raw material. Yet, much of what we know about Brazilian cotton comes from the perspective of British demand, thus hiding essential features of its production and commercialization. This thesis follows Brazilian raw cotton from its cultivation through to its shipping across the Atlantic. It concludes with an analysis of its circulation and consumption in the most important European manufacturing centres. The role played by the Portuguese Empire (with Brazil and parts of Africa), France, and ports such as Genoa and Hamburg are shown to be a much-forgotten chapter in the history of the “cotton revolution”. Classic narratives consider cotton as almost exclusively connected with labor (as slave labor in the production of raw cotton in the Americas, or as wage labor engaged in the mechanised production of cotton goods in European mills). As a consequence, trade has been marginalized and disconnected from the history of industrialization. My main argument is that one cannot narrate cotton without its merchant communities, the political economy of the Portuguese Empire, and a “multi-national” perspective. Commerce was vital to the history of cotton, and merchants were its main protagonists. The main conclusions of this thesis point to two modes of production and commercialization of cotton in Brazil: one made by large planters in Maranhão and another made by small slaveholders who sold their crops to merchants on the coast in the Northeast. The hundreds of importers in Lisbon were almost all Portuguese, and the few re-exporters were nearly all foreigners. A large part of Brazilian cotton was purchased in Lisbon by British traders, though my thesis also shows the enduring importance of cotton exports to France by Portuguese merchants.