Cotton, Botany & Empire: Tracing botanical sciences in the archives of the first industrial city

Written by Arianna Tozzi, JRRI ECR Fellow 2024-25

While inventions like the water frame and the spinning jenny are widely regarded as the sparks that ignited the Industrial Revolution in Britain, less attention has been paid to the role of botanical innovations in developing the high-quality cottons used in textile manufacturing. Yet, imperial botanists—often employed by mercantile corporations such as the East India Company—played a central role in advancing agricultural research that supported the spread of plantation crops like cotton, helping to establish Britain as a 19^th-century superpower. Mapping, classifying, and experimenting with plants across the colonies, imperial botanists helped convert diverse ecologies into raw materials (Subramaniam, 2024), lubricating the wheels of Empire’s systemic exploitation and extraction of environmental resources.

As an Early Career Research Fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute, I sought to follow these botanical threads, delving into a lesser-explored aspect of Manchester’s cotton archives – which are often examined from the perspective of industrial capitalism, free trade ideologies, and labour regimes. In doing so, I asked what the cotton archives of the first industrial city reveal about the role botanical sciences played in creating extractive cotton landscapes across the British colonies, and the kinds of epistemic logics that underpinned their scientific practices.

India was the central focus of my investigation. Identified as Britain’s “cotton hope” (Cotton Supply Reporter, 1858), the subcontinent became the centre for botanical efforts aimed at “improving” what were widely regarded as defective indigenous varieties and reforming the “careless” agronomic practices of Indian farmers. By the mid-19th century, the over reliance on American cotton—renowned for their superior quality and cleanliness—had in fact become a source of anxiety for British manufacturers, who feared that any disruption in supply could bring their textile mills to a standstill (Harnetty, 1972). In response, botanists stationed at newly established botanical gardens became central to the colonial project of improving Indian cottons so that they could compete with American varieties in the British markets (Guha, 2007).

Staple length as a “matter of quality”

Among the materials held at the Rylands that clearly point to the role of botanical sciences in shaping an extractive cotton economy is a series of lithographic representations ranking cotton from different geographical regions by the length of their staple (Figures 1-2-3). 

Following this system, American varieties of Gossypium hirsutum and barbadense were regarded to be superior compared to Asian cottons of the Gossypium herbaceum and arboerum varieties. “The value of cotton,” writes Dr. Royle, superintendent of the Botanical Gardens at Saharanpur, in support of this system of classification “depends on the length, strength and equality of the fibre. While formerly colour and fineness had a great influence, now the great distinction is long staple and short stapled” (Royle, 1851, p. 28).

But how did this system of grading come about? Far from a neutral evaluation of the plant’s botanical characteristics, correlating higher qualities of cotton with staple length reflected the industrial priorities of the time—specifically, the need to align cotton production with the requirements of textile machines designed to process long-staple American varieties (Prasad, 1999). 

Ironically, the very Indian varieties that botanists came to rank lowest in their cotton hierarchies were the same ones from which the famed Dhaka muslins—also known as “webs of woven air”—had been spun, and which inspired a wave of manufacturing innovations across Britain aimed at replicating their exceptional finesse (Raman, 2023).

Produced by botanical scientists and disseminated through merchants’ groups such as the Cotton Supply Association, these lithographic plates testify to a process of alignment between botanical systems of classification and market-based valuations of cotton as a raw material in the production of marketable commodities.

“Cotton Experiments” and their legacies

Over the 19^th century, this close correlation between staple length and cotton’s economic value became the scientific rationale for an extensive program of botanical experimentation across British India.

A visit to the Manchester Museum herbarium – just 10 minutes’ walk from the John Rylands Library – reveals the practical use of these cotton lithographs as an instrument of empire. In fact, the print in Figure 1 appears to have been sent alongside a sample of American cotton to the various agricultural societies established across British India to showcase to the native cultivators the kind of produce “most required by English buyers, with a view to urge them to produce such quality” (Figure 5).

Over the years, attempts to introduce American cotton into India on a large scale failed due to a combination of factors. These included the incompatibility of American varieties with the country’s black cotton soils, the inability to compel farmers to grow cotton as a monoculture, and the adaptability of indigenous varieties to India’s monsoon climate. Nonetheless, these experimental efforts—and the scientific research they generated—provided an unprecedented impetus for the systematic collection, classification, and characterisation of cotton, laying the foundation for yield-enhancing hybridisation efforts that came to underpin the logics of cotton capitalism in the centuries that followed.

---

References 

• Guha, S., 2007. Genetic change and colonial cotton improvement in 19th and 20th century India. Situating Environmental History. Delhi: Manohar Publications.
• Harnetty, P., 1972. Imperialism and free trade: Lancashire and India in the mid-nineteenth century. Manchester University Press.
• Prasad, C.S., 1999. Suicide deaths and quality of Indian cotton: Perspectives from history of technology and khadi movement. Economic and political weekly, pp.PE12-PE21.
• Royle, J. Forbes, 1851. On the Culture and Commerce of Cotton in India, and Elsewhere. London: Smith, Elder, & Co.
• Subramaniam, B., 2024. Botany of empire: Plant worlds and the scientific legacies of colonialism. University of Washington Press.
• The Cotton Supply Reporter, Volume 1. 1858. Published by The Cotton Supply Association.

---

All images unless otherwise stated are copyright of the University of Manchester and can be used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike Licence.