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Thursday 13 July 2023

Cotton in Egypt

Egypt

The main article contains information about the Cotton in Egypt.

A group of Egyptian males harvesting cotton by hand, beginning in the early 19th century, a Frenchman named M. Jumel advised that Mohamed Ali Pasha, the powerful ruler of Egypt at the time, cultivate an extra-long staple kind of cotton (Gossypium barbadense) in Lower Egypt and ship it to the French market to make a sizable sum of money.

Mohamed Ali Pasha accepted the recommendation, which led to him giving himself a monopoly on cotton import and export in Egypt. Additionally, Mohamed Ali Pasha ordered that cotton be planted before other kinds of crops.


Cotton Flower



According to the number of spindles produced per capita, Egypt had the fifth-most productive cotton industry in the world under Muhammad Ali in the early 19th century. [40] At first, the sector was propelled by technology that used conventional energy sources including windmills, water wheels, and animal power.

Up until about 1870, these were also the main energy sources in Western Europe. Steam engines were first introduced during Muhammad Ali's administration, according to [41]. [42] At the beginning of the 19th century, Egypt


Annual shipments had climbed to $16 million (120,000 bales) by the commencement of the American Civil War and to $56 million by 1864. This increase was mostly caused by the reduction in Confederate supply on the international market. Exports increased even with the reintroduction of American cotton, which was now produced by a hired workforce, and by 1903, Egyptian exports had reached 1.2 million bales annually.

Britain

The East India Company

The major articles include the Industrial Revolution's impact on textile production and the Calico Acts.

Cotton bales can be seen at the pier in Bombay, India, in the 1860s.

The English East India Company (EIC) provided low-cost calico and chintz fabric to the people of the United Kingdom after the restoration of the monarchy in the 1660s. The low-cost multicolored fabric, which was initially brought in from its spice-trading ports in Asia as a novelty side business, quickly gained popularity and, somewhere in the late 17th century, overtook the EIC's spice trade in terms of value.

The EIC produced and imported cloth in large quantities as a response to the demand, particularly for calico, and opened up new levels of competition for domestic woolen and linen textile producers. Calico became one of the most divisive topics in national politics between the years 1680 and 1730 because of opposition from affected weavers, spinners, dyers, shepherds, and farmers. Parliament noticed that domestic textile sales were declining while those of textiles imported from other nations, such as China and India, were increasing.

The East India Company and their importation of textiles were viewed as a threat to native textile businesses, which resulted in Parliament passing the Calico Act in 1700. This law made it illegal to import cotton cloth. The practice of bringing in this in-demand item illegally increased because selling cotton cloth would continue to go unpunished.

A stronger addendum was adopted in 1721 as a result of Parliament's displeasure with the results of the previous act. This time, it outlawed the sale of all cotton, domestic and imported, except raw cotton and thread fustian. As a result of raw cotton being excluded from the ban, 2,000 bales of cotton were initially imported each year. Using Fustian as its initial product, this laid the groundwork for a new domestic business.

The fact that raw cotton was excluded from the ban, though, was more important since it led to the invention of several machine spinning and weaving techniques that were employed to process the material.

The majority of this mechanical output was centered in brand-new cotton mills, which gradually increased until by the start of the 1770s, 7,000 bales of cotton were imported per year. Because the new mills could readily compete with anything the EIC could import, the owners of the new cotton mills put pressure on Parliament to abolish the ban on the production and sale of pure cotton cloth.

Cotton Production

After the statutes were repealed in 1774, there was an explosion of investment in cotton production and spinning at mills. This caused the demand for raw cotton to double within a few years and then double again every ten years until the 1840s. The United States was at this time.

Cotton Textile

Bengal-made cotton textiles, in particular, maintained to have a competitive advantage over their overseas rivals up to the 19th century. To compete with India, Britain invested in labor-saving technical progress, while implementing protectionist policies such as bans and tariffs to restrict Indian imports.

At the same time, the East India Company's rule in India contributed to its deindustrialization, opening up a new market for British goods,[42] while the capital amassed from Bengal after its 1757 conquest was used to invest in British industries such as textile manufacturing and greatly increase British wealth.

British colonization also forced open the large Indian market to British goods, which could be sold in India without tariffs or duties, compared to local Indian producers who were heavily taxed, while raw cotton was imported from India without tariffs to British factories which manufactured textiles from Indian cotton, giving Britain a monopoly over India's large market and cotton resources.

 India served as both a significant supplier of raw goods to British manufacturers and a large captive market for British manufactured goods. Britain eventually surpassed India as the world's leading cotton textile manufacturer in the 19th century.

The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw major changes in India's cotton processing industry due to the East India Company's expansion. shifting its emphasis from providing raw cotton to East Asia to serving the British market. [48] As a result, Europe chose the less expensive slave-produced long-staple American and Egyptian cotton for its own materials and the fact that artisan-made textiles were no longer competitive with those created industrially. [Reference needed]


Economic Revolution

The main topic is focused on the production of textiles during the Industrial Revolution.

Slaves utilized the cotton gin to help with the cotton harvest and processing.

The beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain coincided with the emergence of textiles as the most prominent export good for the nation, which significantly increased cotton production. The roller spinning machine was created in 1738 by Birmingham, England residents Lewis Paul and John Wyatt. They also developed the flyer-and-bobbin technique, which employed two sets of rollers moving at varied speeds to draw cotton to a more uniform thickness.

These two ideas were both protected by patents. Later, British spinners were able to produce cotton yarn at noticeably higher rates thanks to the inventions of the spinning jenny by James Hargreaves in 1764, the spinning frame by Richard Arkwright in 1769, and the spinning mule by Samuel Crompton in 1775.

Beginning in the late 18th century and lasting into the 20th century, Manchester, in the United Kingdom, acquired the moniker "Cottonopolis" due to the city's extensive cotton industry and its status as the hub of the world's cotton trade.

Cotton Gins

In 1793, American inventor Eli Whitney came up with the concept for the modern cotton gin. As a result, both the United States and Great Britain were able to produce more.

Before cotton gins were created, it took a lot of work to manually separate the cotton fibers from the seeds. This procedure took a long time. Several crude ginning machines were previously created by the late 1700s. However, even using people as slave labor, the production of cotton on a big scale in the United States was unprofitable because it took 600 hours of human labor to make only one bale.

The Holmes design gin that Whitney developed reduced the amount of time required to process each bale to a little under a dozen hours. Whitney actually produced a cotton gin that Henry Odgen Holmes had previously designed and patented in 1796, even though Whitney claimed to have created his own cotton gin design.

The development of a commercial chain in which raw cotton fibers were (at first) bought from colonial plantations, turned into cotton cloth in the Lancashire mills, and then exported on British ships to captive colonial markets was made possible by advances in technology and increased control over global markets.

Read more about cotton economic revolution