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British Imperialism in India:
Cotton and the Creation of a
Core and Periphery
Cotton
• Where was most cotton produced before the U.S. Civil War?
• Who purchased most of that cotton?
• What was it used for?
• During the Civil War (1861-1865), the South couldn’t export cotton to Great Britain.
• The factory owners in Great Britain were desperate to obtain cotton.
• How did the British government respond to this situation?
Question 2: What does this graph show?
Table 1: Cotton Exports from India, Egypt, and Brazil, 1860–1866, in Million Pounds. Sources: Government of India, Annual Statement of the Trade and Navigation of British India and Forign Countries vol. 5 (Calcutta, 1872); vol. 9 (Calcutta, 1876); Roger Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 1820–1914 (Oxford, 1969), 90; Estatisticas historica do Brasil (Rio de Jeneiro, 1990), 346.
• Subsistence farming vs. cash crop
• More cotton = less food
• What might be the consequences of this shift?
Drop in food production + El Niño weather patterns = Famine
Estimated Famine Deaths in India
Year Number of deaths
1876-1879 6.1-10.3 million
1896-1902 6.1-19.0 million
Total 12.2-29.3 million
Statistics from Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), p. 7.
De-Industrialization in India
India’s Share of World Manufacturing Output
Statistics from Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), p. 294.
1750 1830 1900
24.5% 17.6% 1.7%
• Core – industrialized nations like Great Britain, America, Germany, and Japan
• Periphery (Peripheral) – countries that provided raw materials to the industrialized nations; very slow to begin industrializing themselves
Periphery(India, Egypt)
Core (Great Britain)
Core Edge Periphery
Were these countries core, edge or periphery by 1910?
• Germany• France• Austria• India• United States• Great Britain• Japan• Egypt• China
• Russia
• Mexico
• South Africa
• Nigeria
• Others?
Where are the core countries?
“Millions died, not outside the “modern world system,” but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures.”
- Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts
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