Empire of Cotton

While Beckert’s narrative has thus far focused on the merchants, statesmen, and inventors of the cotton industry, here the author pays homage to the untold millions of individuals who labored on plantations and in cotton mills, tying their struggles to the poetry of both William Blake and Bertolt Brecht. Beckert writes, “One of the saddest sights to this day is St. Michael’s Flags in Manchester, a small park where allegedly forty thousand people, most of them cotton workers, lie buried in unmarked graves, one on top of the other” (176).

One of the few cotton workers whose name and memory persist in the historical record is Ellen Hootton. In June 1833, at the age of ten, Hootton appeared before His Majesty’s Factory Inquiry Commission to testify about the conditions that child laborers faced in British cotton mills. While child labor was common and accepted by many, the experience of Hootton and other British youths more closely resembled that of an enslaved person. Her 15-hour days included the tedious and stressful work of repairing multiple broken threads a minute. If she failed to keep up with the speed of the machinery, she suffered brutal reprisals at the hands of her overseer, Mr.