Barbados Cotton

Topic: Gullah History
The production capabilities of England’s New World colonies grew faster than the parent country’s ability to absorb their products.  London prices dropped in 1631 when tobacco flooded the market, [1] plunging small planters on Barbados into debt.

The suggestion planters change to cotton may have come from ships’ captains who, of course, knew best the prices that commodities were fetching in European ports, and often were closely allied with merchants.  An equally likely source was instructions from James Hays’ proprietors [2] to their agents.  Marmaduke Rawdon was apprenticed to a cloth merchant and joined the Guild of Clothworkers. [3]  One of his partners, William Perkins, was a merchant tailor. [4]

Edward Baines believes cotton then was used for wicks. [5]  As mentioned in the post for 19 May 2019 on cotton markets, the use of the fiber in textiles did not begin until Flanders refugees, like William Courteen’s father, [6] were permitted to settle in England on the condition that they not compete with the woollen industry.  Baines thinks cotton-cloth manufacturing began sometime after 1601. [7]

Raw cotton came from the Levant where England had developed relations in 1582 [8] and the Dutch in 1612. [9]  I do not know how much the Thirty-Years War disrupted shipping in the Mediterranean. [10]  Johannes Gerard van Dillen believes Dutch trade in the Mediterranean was less intense between 1620 and 1645. [11]  Similarly, Jonathan Israel thinks trade weakened between 1621 and 1647. [12]

A temporary disruption in the import of raw cotton from Syria at the time when the manufacture of cotton cloth just was beginning may have created an opportunity for Barbados planters.  It probably did not matter what variety of cotton was supplied, so long as it had been cleaned.

However, the particular species probably was Marie-Galante. [13]  Since this is a perennial that takes two years to produce its first flowers, that trait would explain two lags. [14]  In 1631, Henry Colt said planting cotton “fills them all with hope.” [15]  If that were the first year it was planted, the first crop would have been shipped in late 1632 and feedback on the seeds would not have been received until sometime in 1633.  In 1634, Larry Gragg found machines for cleaning cotton in plantation inventories. [16]

The second lag was the hesitancy of small planters to change from the annual tobacco.  In 1636, the heirs of Hay sent his nephew Peter to investigate the status of the estate. [17].  He wanted everyone to plant cotton. [18]  However, those in debt could not afford to plant a crop that would not produce a monetary return for two years, and continued with tobacco, even though they made little. [19]

This simple accident of botany led to the first real differentiation among economic classes.  The poor could not afford to change, and creditors were more willing to support those able to provide commodities that brought them, the creditors, the greatest profit.

Cotton is less labor intensive than tobacco.  It is more like wheat that needs attention when it is planted and when it is harvested.  It needs periodic weeding, but time is not crucial in either weeding or harvesting.  The perennial form needs even less work once it is established.  Thus, an individual could grow more cotton with the same labor.  And, even more important, the crop fetched twice the price. [20]

This allowed the planters to begin accumulating capital. [21]  The money first would be invested in land to more fully utilize existing labor, then more servants would be needed as the land in cultivation increased.  The population on the island more than doubled between 1632 and 1636, and doubled again before 1640. [22]

In Virginia, John Rolfe suggested people leave England in June to arrive in time for the September harvest.  In Barbados, Alison Games found three of the nine ships that arrived from London in 1635, left in April, and more sailed earlier [23] to arrive when work was needed clearing new land.

The number of indentured servants used by planters varied.  Hilary Beckles found Thomas Hethersell had seven for 100 acres in 1639, while James Holdip had 29 for 200 acres in 1643. [24]  In some cases, not all the land was in production and in others planters may have had surplus labor.  Keeping that in mind, the calculated average number of acres per servant in those years was 12.39. [25]

About 1632, the island faced a new labor problem.  Contracts of indentured servants began falling due.  The usual termination payment was ten pounds or 400 pounds of cotton [26]  Beckles has examined land ownership in the 1630s.  The average size of a grant between 1628 and 1630 was 235.7 acres.  From 1631, when the first indentured servants were freed, to 1638 it fell to 67.7 acres. [27]

Averages can mask disparities when two economic classes exist.  Beckles found fifty land sales that averaged 235.96 acres between 1630 and 1644. [28]  However, Larry Gragg says 62% of the sales involved 50 acres or less, and at least 6% were less than the 10 acres most use as a statistical threshold.  As he notes, such small land sales often went unrecorded to avoid legal fees. [29]

Games followed the lives of 935 men who entered the island as servants in 1635.  By 1640, 43% owned land, and 35% of the new land owners in 1640 were new servants in 1635.  Most purchased small lots with partners.  Using the above standard, two men could work 25 acres. While she believes partnerships provided a substitute for families in a society that was 90% male, [30] it also was the prevailing type of business in a period when permanent companies were rare.  David Sacks found that, while Bristol merchants used agents in other countries, they also entered partnerships, which were more like trading fellowships than business firms. [31]

With capital formation came speculation.  William Hilliard was a Southampton merchant who received a 600-acre grant from Hay’s estate in 1637, with the intent of sending servants.  Two years later he began buying and selling land to raise more money for his operations. [32]

Speculation in labor became obvious in 1638, when Thomas Verney arrived and acquired a hundred acres from the heirs of Hay. [33]  He wanted twenty servants, but some got sick and he had to auction others to pay debts.  Then, in 1640, he asked his father to send one hundred men from a local prison.  Beckles thinks he either needed more servants to pay debts, or wanted to begin selling their contracts to others. [34]

Beckles adds by then, planters “bought, sold, gambled away, mortgaged, taxed as property, and alienated in wills their indentured servants.” [35]  As he observes, this transformation of labor contracts into a commodity was an intellectual precondition for buying and selling human beings themselves as slaves.

Cotton prices dropped in 1639.  Beckles suggests other islands had begun growing cotton and the market was saturated; [36] even the price for raw cotton from Smyrna “fell by 50% between 1635 and 1641.” [37]  Given the choice, the first cotton manufacturing mill in Manchester purchased its raw materials from Cyprus and Smyrna. [38]

This probably was not just about price, or even preferences in trading with familiar suppliers.  Cotton from Smyrna was a different species.  One thing that distinguishes species is the nature of the fibers attached to seeds.  Baines says the spinning machines were too crude to handle fine yarn. [40]  The spinners and weavers in Manchester probably were using equipment designed for the Smyrna species and preferred working with what was familiar and succeeded best.

End Notes
1.  Hilary Beckles.  A History of Barbados.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.  13.

2.  Hay is introduced in the post for 7 November 2021.

3.  Richard Dace.  “‘Who lieth here?’ Sir Marmaduke Rawdon (1582-1646).”  Hastang website, May 2021.  For more on Rawdon, see the post on 14 November 2021.

4.  “The William Perkins Family.”  An American Family History website.  Perkins was one of Rawdon’s partners. [41]

5.  Edward Baines.  History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain.  London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835.  97.  Jack Hutchinson thinks it possible cotton lint first was used in ancient India for lamp wicks, since it is attached to oil-bearing seeds. [42]

6.  Courteen is introduced in the post for 31 October 2021.
7.  Baines.  87.
8.  Baines.  98.

9.  Mehmet Bulut.  “The Role of the Ottomans and Dutch in the Commercial Integration between the Levant and Atlantic in the Seventeenth Century.”  Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 45:197–230:2002.

10.  David Sacks says 50% of the Bristol vessels were individually owned, but it was down to 25% in 1629.  Merchants spread the risk during “war.”  England was neutral during the Thirty Years War, but not immune to what Sacks calls “maritime warfare that plagues these years.” [43]

11.  Johannes Gerard van Dillen.  Van rijkdom en regenten; Handboek tot de economische en sociale geschiedenis van Nederland tijdens de Republic.  The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1970.  Cited by Bulut.  214.

12.  Jonathan I. Israel.  Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585-1740.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.  Cited by Bulut.  214.

13.  J. B. Hutchinson and S. G. Stephens.  “The Evolution of the Species of ‘Gossypium’.”  54–80 in The Evolution Of Gossypium And The Differentiation Of The Cultivated Cottons, edited by Hutchinson, R. A. Silow, and Stephens.  London: Oxford University Press, 1947.

G. Ano and J. Schwendiman.  “Multi-Phase Collecting Missions for Cotton (I).”  United Nations, Food and Agricultural Organization Plant Genetic Resources Newsletter 54:2–6.  5.

The complete name is Gossypium hirsutum var. marie-galante.  It is a member of the Malvaceæ family.

14.  Gossypium cannot tolerate frost.  The Upland and Sea Islands cottons that are grown in the United States are annuals that produce flowers the year they are planted.

15.  Henry Colt.  “The Voyage of Sir Henrye Colt Knight to the Ilands of the Antilleas.”  Cambridge University Library MSS, Mm. 3, 9.  69 in Vincent T. Harlow.  Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623-1667.  London: The Hakluyt Society, 1925; since reprinted.  Colt is mentioned in the posts for 14 November 2021 and 21 November 2021. The original is: “now ye trade of Cotton fills them all with hope.”

16.  Larry Gragg.  Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.  94–97.  Cited by Michael D. Bennett.  “Merchant Capital and the Origins of the Barbados Sugar Boom, 1627-1672.”  PhD dissertation.  The University of Sheffield, June 2020.  49.  The cited pages are missing from the online version of Gragg’s book and copies are prohibitively expensive.

17.  Beckles, History.  11.
18.  Beckles, History.  14.

19.  J. H.  Bennett.  “Peter Hay, Proprietary Agent in Barbados, 1636–1641.”  Jamaican Historical Review 5:9–30:1965.  16.  Cited by Jordan Goodman.  Tobacco in History.  London: Routledge, 1993.  No page numbers in on-line edition.

20.  Michael Bennett.  9.  In the 1640s, one pound of tobacco was worth 2 pence, while a pound of cotton brought 4 pence.  In the middle 1630s, cotton sold for 6 pence.  The exact numbers are less important that what economists would call the relative return on investment in land and labor.

21.  Hilary MacDonald Beckles.  “White Labour in Black Slave Plantation Society and Economy: A Case Study of Indentured Labour in Seventeenth Century Barbados.”  PhD dissertation.  The University of Hull, August 1980.  26.

22.  Beckles, Labour, has a chart of the growth on page 18.  Gragg says there were 600 whites living in Barbados in 1629 and 9,000 in 1639. [44]

23.  Alison Games.  “The English Atlantic World: A View from London.”  Pennsylvania History 64:46–72:1977.

24.  Beckles, Labour.  50.

25.  Calculation based on a table in Beckles, Labour, cited in above note 24.  I excluded those planters who had both slaves and servants.  Given all the unknowns, this is, at best, a rough number, but it is the only one I have to compare different information from different sources.

26.  Beckles, History.  17.
27.  Beckles, Labour.  17.
28.  Beckles, Labour.  19.
29.  Gragg.  150.

30.  Alison Games.  Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999.  125.

31.  David Harris Sacks.  The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450–1700.  Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1991.  68.

32.  Gragg.  139.

33.  He came with a recommendation from Robert Rich who was aligned with the heirs of William Courteen.  He is mentioned in note 31 of the post for 7 November 2021.

34.  Beckles, History.  16.  Verney’s father refused the request and young Verney was expelled from the island for not paying his debts.

35.  Beckles, History.  17.

36.  Beckles, Labour.  27.  “This boom in cotton prices attracted the other English planters in the Eastern Caribbean into cotton production, and by 1639 the London market was glutted, and prices fell rapidly.”

37.  Beckles, Labour.  28.
38.  Baines.  100.

40.  Baines.  102.  The cotton from the Levant is Gossypium herbaceum. [45]  Hutchinson thinks the genus developed during the Jurassic period when “the continental masses of South America, Africa, Southern Asia, and Australia all lay in a single block south of the Equator.” [46]  The differentiation into different species came after the continents separated, but the development of modern types did not occur until humans began selecting plants for weaving and other uses. [47]

41.  Beckles, Labour.  16.

42.  J. B. Hutchinson.  “The Classification of the Genus ‘Gossypium’.”  1–53 in Hutchinson.  70.

43.  Sacks.  70.
44.  Gragg.  145.
45.  Hutchinson, Classification.  34.

46.  Hutchinson, Classification.  56.  He is writing before the theory of plate tectonics was widely accepted, and uses the earlier terminology of “continental drift.”

47.  Hutchinson, Classification.  53.