Nature's Evil

Overseen from the Woolsack, Parliament moulded the new wool market in a long series of Acts. Between 1660 and 1824, twenty-four different acts of legislation on wool exports were passed – roughly one every six years. 24 The export of raw wool was prohibited; if smugglers were caught they had their left hands cut off. In 1666, ‘An act for Burying in Wollen onely’ required woollen shirts for burials: under fear of penalty, subjects had to use wool in their deaths as they did in their lives. After many debates, this Act was strengthened in 1677. In addition, the Wool Act of 1699 prohibited the export of wool and wool products from Ireland and the American colonies. The purpose was to encourage both the local production and processing of wool. The Acts of Parliament shaped the internal demand for processed wool, the demand stimulated cottage industry, and this led to a boost in sheep farming. But there was no land to sustain it, which called for new acts of legislation. The series of wool laws brought the mercantile system home. Enforcing this system needed a huge effort – in 1742 the government of Robert Walpole created 330 salaried posts for registering all wool sheared in England. 25 Adam Smith attacked the wool laws, saying that they halved wool prices in Scotland and were ‘the effect of violence and artifice’. 26 The export ban on raw wool was withdrawn in 1824. Smith’s free trade celebrated a victory, but by now wool was relatively unimportant. The consumer switched from wool to cotton as ruthlessly as her forebears had switched from fur to wool.

Cotton

In human hands, plant and animal fibres competed with one another for thousands of years. Animals are higher up the food chain than plants, and, per unit of land, the cotton plant produces twelve times more fibre than a sheep produces wool. Not as durable as hemp but easier to process, cotton is cheaper than silk and more robust, lighter and finer than wool. For humankind a vital characteristic was cotton’s ability to interact with dyes – rare substances that came from the most unexpected parts of certain molluscs, insects or plants. The beauty of linen textiles lay in their whiteness, the beauty of cotton fabrics in their colours, the beauty of woollen cloth in its texture. In contrast to the northern fibres, cotton produced several crops per season, a fact which dictated the unremitting character of work on the cotton plantations. Like sugar, cotton required the intensive, machine-like work of slaves, which was quite at odds with the varied, ‘idle’ work of the peasantry. Cotton was the first raw material to benefit from the invention of mechanical devices and, later, steam-powered engines. It also gained from the mass impoverishment of the peasants who flocked to the cotton mills.

The ancient Romans brought back from India cloth made from the fibres of the round, white, fluffy ‘boll’ of the cotton plant. In the Middle Ages camels carried cotton textiles from India to Persia and from there to Byzantium and even to Ethiopia. In fourteenth-century China, special edicts commanded the peasants to grow cotton. From the sixteenth century, Portuguese ships exchanged Indian textiles for silver and brought cotton to Europe. But for a long time Europeans did not know how cotton grew; people thought of it as similar to wool. John Mandeville, who travelled to India in the fourteenth century, described seeing a plant that had sheep hanging from its branches, like fruit. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, cotton grew on the semi-wild plains of South Asia and Central America; sitting on low stools, women spun the thread and wound it up into balls using a wooden wheel on an axis. Selectively breeding cotton, peasants left the seed heads to develop on the best plants – those with a robust but fine fibre. Coloured Indian textiles which had no European names – muslin, chintz and calico – arrived on Portuguese caravels at the European ports, where they were sold on a par with silk. Then cotton processing developed in the Mediterranean colonies of Venice. Lacking their own raw materials, the Venetians were the founding fathers of ecological imperialism: they obliged their colonies to pay duties in a chosen commodity – in some cases this was timber, in others, grain, for Cyprus it was cotton. Cotton prints with a botanical or oriental design were used for decorating interiors instead of silk panels and trellises. In Africa, there was a demand for striped fabrics with symmetrical patterns; there the majority of cotton was used for clothes, not for upholstery. 27