British Imperialism in India: Cotton and the Creation of a Core and Periphery

Please set up your notes in the Cornell notes form on Pg. 55A of your notebook. Title these notes: Core and Periphery Write the ASQ and BSQ questions on the left side of the notes and answer them on the right side. Dont forget to do the Summary at the end of the day! Name: Core/Periphery Key Words, ???Notes, diagrams, charts VocabDefinition Summary:

Words you will need to know for this lecture… Core- at the center Periphery- in the outskirts, opposite of core, at the edge Subsistence Farming- Growing food to eat yourself Cash Crop- Growing a plant to sell, like cotton or tobacco, that cannot be eaten 1 st world countries- The industrialized nations, mostly North America, Europe, and Japan 3 rd world countries- Nations that have not yet fully industrialized or do not control the industry in their own countries, most of Africa and the Middle East, Most of South Asia, Parts of South America

Cotton ASQ! 1.Where was most cotton produced before the U.S. Civil War? 2.Who purchased most of that cotton? 3.What was it used for?

During the Civil War ( ), the South couldnt export cotton to Great Britain. The factory owners in Great Britain were desperate to obtain cotton. 4.What do you think they decided to do?

5. 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 crops More cotton = less food 6. What might be the consequences of the shift from subsistence farming to cash crops?

Drop in food production + El Niño weather patterns = Famine 7. For the people of India, what were the consequences of increased cotton production for export?

Estimated Famine Deaths in India YearNumber of deaths million million Total 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 Indias Share of World Manufacturing Output 8. Did Indias economy benefit from being a British colony? (use your prior knowledge to answer this fully) Statistics from Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), p %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 Core (Great Britain) Periphery (India, Egypt) Core and Periphery as Social Studies Terms

We are not dealing, in other words, with lands of famine becalmed in stagnant backwaters of world history, but with the fate of tropical humanity at the precise moment (1870 – 1914) when its labor and products were being dynamically conscripted into a London-centered world economy. 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

Analysis: A key thesis of this book is that what we today call the third world is the outgrowth of income and wealth inequalities – the famous development gap – that were shaped most decisively in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the great non-European peasants were initially integrated into the world economy…By the end of Victorias reign…the inequality of nations was as profound as the inequality of classes. Humanity had been irrevocably divided. And the famed prisoners of starvation,…were as much modern inventions of the late Victorian world as electric lights, Maxim guns and scientific racism. -Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts