Lancashire Cotton Famine
랭커셔 면화 기근
The depression that struck the cotton industry of North West England in 1861–1865. Overproduction in the boom years of 1859 and 1860 was compounded by the interruption of raw cotton imports during the American Civil War and by merchants' speculation; mills closed one after another, and the Lancashire cotton operatives went from being the most prosperous workers in Britain to the most impoverished. Despite their hardship the cotton workers backed the Union against slavery.
In depth
In 1860 the region had 2,650 cotton mills employing 440,000 people. When the American Civil War broke out, Southern planters first withheld cotton in the belief that a shortage would cripple the British economy and force intervention, and when that failed the Union blockade stopped exports. Merchants held their stocks in expectation of higher prices; Middling Orleans, the benchmark grade, rose from 6½d a pound in 1861 to 27½d in 1864, and the merchants' windfall has been put at £35 million. Mill owners turned to Indian Surat cotton, whose short, brittle fibres cut a loom's output to about 40 per cent, and since operatives were paid by the piece their income was slashed.
Relief fell to the Poor Law Unions and local relief committees. The Mansion House Fund of the Lord Mayor of London was set up on 16 May 1862 and the Manchester Central Committee of the mayors of the affected towns on 20 June. Attendance at sewing schools and industrial classes run by the churches qualified people for relief. In March 1863 at Stalybridge, when the relief committee decided to pay in tickets instead of money, thousands turned out, sacked the shops of committee members and the relief depots, and eighty men were arrested after Hussars arrived. The Public Works (Manufacturing Districts) Act let local authorities borrow for sewers, parks and roads and employ the idle operatives on them.
The Confederacy hoped that distress in Europe's cotton districts would bring British intervention, and Confederate flags were flown in many cotton towns. But on 31 December 1862 a meeting of cotton workers at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester resolved to support the Union in its fight against slavery and wrote to President Lincoln, who replied on 19 January 1863 calling their stand an instance of sublime Christian heroism not surpassed in any age or country. Cotton imports were restored in 1864 and the mills went back into production, but many thousands of operatives had emigrated by then.
In the Inaugural Address of the International in 1864 Marx cited the paradox reported by the inspectors of factories and the Registrar General: the Lancashire operatives, put on a distress pittance of food, were actually improving in health because the cotton famine had temporarily excluded them from the mills, and child mortality fell. The same address declared that it was not the wisdom of the ruling classes but the heroic resistance of the English working classes that saved western Europe from plunging into an infamous crusade for the perpetuation and propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.