Cotton

Sources

Questions for Homework:

Rewatch this prezi at home. What aspect of the story of cotton in the 1920s stood out to you the most? Write 1-2 paragraphs explaining why you found this detail important.

How do objects have power? Write 2-3 paragraphs using the example of cotton to explain how the qualities of a thing (rather than people) has the power to shape the world.

Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A New History of

Global Capitalism. UK: Penguin, 2014. Print.

-----. "From Tuskegee to Togo: The Problem of

Freedom in the Empire of Cotton." The Journal

of American History 92.2 (2005): 498-526. Print.

Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. NY: Vintage,

2011. Print.

Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. The Great Gatsby. NY:

Vintage, 1995. Print.

Luhrmann, Baz. The Great Gatsby. Warner Brothers,

2013. DVD.

Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-

Eye View of the World. Random House, 2001. Print

Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. Penguin,

1986.

What other things are powerful? Come up with at least 2 objects not mentioned in this presentation that you think shape our world today. Write 2-3 sentences for each object explaining why you chose it.

N.B. All images taken from wikimedia commons unless otherwise noted.

In the 1920s, Cotton was a powerful force connecting communities of people, commodities and technology. However, this global “republic” has included tremendous poverty and suffering, as well as undreamed of wealth like that personified by Jay Gatsby and extraordinary political movements like Gandhi's fight for Indian independence.

Class discussion: Can you think of similarly powerful objects that shape our world today?

Cotton

Today the global apparel market is valued at $1.7 trillion and employs 75 million people.

Chances are, you or someone you know has worked in the apparel industry.

The World in 1920

Lancashire

Manchester, "Cottonopolis"

What is power?

New York

The Harlem

Renaissance

& The Jazz Age

[Jay Gatsby]: “I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.”

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue.

Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”

As the historian Sven Beckert has argued in The Empire of Cotton (2015), as much as five years could elapse between the loan of money to clear swamps in the Mississippi valley for cotton planting to the moment it passed from an English woman’s hands to the shops of London and New York for purchase.

This means Jay Gatsby spent the same amount of time accumulating his fortune as it took to produce the cotton shirts that symbolize lost time to Daisy.

“Too often [...] in missionary and educational work among underdeveloped races, people yield to the temptation of doing that which was done a hundred years before [...] The temptation often is to run each individual through a certain educational mould, regardless of the condition of the subject or the end to be accomplished.”

― Up from Slavery

Booker T. Washington

1926

1949

1974

2013

Song by Bessie Brown, "Cotton Field"

Mexico

By satisfying our fundamental need for warmth and shelter, cotton captured resources and labor to reshape the world in its image, causing whole forests and swamps to be erased as people worked to create a perfect environment for this plant.

As the journalist and food activist Michael Pollan argues, “We don’t give plants nearly enough credit. They’ve been working on us – they’ve been using us – for their own purposes.”

Civil War, 1861-1865

Can things have power?

Republic = res (things) + publica (public)

Sharecropping

POWER

Prison labor

boll weevil

"This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations […]; where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in very cracks of the sidewalks [...]"

- William Faulkner, Delta Autumn

The khadi movement

Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India

John W. Robinson

The Global South