ABOUT OUR PROJECT

Thank you for taking interest in our project. Our interdisciplinary research project focused on the cotton factory in the nineteenth century and each group member has taken diverse approaches to the subject according to our interests.

Nineteenth-century is, if not anything else, an era of rapid changes and turbulence. Revolutionary transformations took place in the form of scientific progress as well as social and psychological reconstruction. Our group has taken inspiration from the changes and reforms and each picked two areas that interest us the most to achieve a more holistic and integrated understanding of that time.

Contents

Object Biography-Cotton

The first approach is from an object biography perspective. Object biography is a relatively new approach that has been widely applied in academic areas including cultural studies, art history, and history. Objects are closely knitted into society and have become part of its construction. By exploring a simple item, one can study the world of its making and becoming. Though physically finite, the information the object contains and will contain is impossible to ever be explored thoroughly. Similarly, there is no one, correct way of writing biographies. Writers interpret the same object from multiple distinct perspectives, depending on their interests, and continue to explore its unlimited potential.

Relying Heavily on Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton: A Global History , Lilith He (TianYu He) from the Art History department decided to use the object, cotton, as a key term for navigating and exploring colonialism and the working class in the 19th century. The development of the cotton industry is fundamentally and essentially how European countries and capitalists remade one of the most important industries in the world in such a short period. Beckert rebuked the assumption of capitalism Globalization, that from the beginning, capitalism is Globalized.

Cotton was originally largely cultivated and grew in the Global South, in Asia, South America, and Africa. And it was also very much gendered, except for Navajo, Hopi, and some parts of south-eastern Asia, the majority of nations considered cotton sewing a women's job, hence the chinese phrase 男耕女织. Additionally, cotton sewing is domestic work, based on the family unit, and never took place in the form of massive production. However, with the rise of technological improvement in the industrial revolution and colonialism, the West managed to shfit the production capital to themselves. important inventors such as John Kay, James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, and Samuel Crompton significantly increased productivity and efficiency, and completely revolutionized cotton production.

Circle back to the cotton factories in Britain, under the glamorous facade of Victorian progress, is the notorious exploitation of child labour and women labour. Among Lancashire cotton factories, 36% of the workers are younger than 16 years old. The invention of childhood in capitalistic household was in fact based on the extreme exploitation of impoverished children. Women, especially unmarried young women also made up a large percentage of the cotton factory working population. It is safe to say that in Europe and America, women dominate the cotton industry, and it is percisely this domination that caused the cotton industry frequently neglected and overshadowed by male-leading industries such as coal mining. Unsurprisingly, the majority of the female workers came from rural areas, trying to earn a salary that make up for the loss in the declining agricultural industry. They are frequently underpaid, earning only 45%-50% of their counterpart. What is more staggering is their deleterious working environment. While authors like William Rathbone held a hopelessly and incorrigibly irrealistic romanticized view towards these 'conscientious, honest, painstaking maiden workers', the repetitive working routine and extremely stringent and disciplined working environment have made them no better than modern slaves. Female workers suffered intersectionality and were frequently exposed to working place sexual harassment from owners and other male workers.

Further Reading

Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global history.

John Tosh, A Pusuit of History.

Literature Perspective

The third approach is from a literature perspective. Lilith He (Tianyu He) from Art history department studied the contemporary literatures, North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell, that depicted industrial revolution and quotidian life of factory workers. This book held great importance in English literature and stood out not only as a romance that frequently juxtaposed with Pride and Prejudice, but also because the author's perspicacity and insight that accurated reflects the confrontations aroused in Nineteenth century. The novel consists two major story lines, each marks a daily heating conflict in society, rural and urban, labour and capital. The first one is the clash of ideological differences between two protagonists from two heterogenous cultural background, the relatively conservative south and the heavily industrialized north. The second one is the conflict between factory workers who strike to protect their rights and factory owners who believe in a meritocratic ideology and saw strikes contradictory to their belief. Underneath the fictional novel is the author’s realistic anxiety and concerns for space, society and gender role. Ending with Margaret using her heritage to support Thornton's bankrupted factory, it is quite clear Glaskell saw industrialization as inevitable. One might even push to say what Glaskell proposed is a solution that integrates the north and the south under one Utopian national identity, where the traditionalists and conservatives accept and respect the industrial progression and the rising middle class appreciate and integrate the old ideology. This book is particularly relevant becasue it summorized two confrontations that have been mentioned above. For instance, the death of Bessy Higgins very much reflect the prevalent health issue among workers and their family members. Magaret and Thorton's argument about meritocracy and pitying the poor, Margaret's discomfort towards the factories and her refusal to describe the south to her friend mirrors the nostalgia to the old days and anxiety towards the nouveau riches.

Further Reading

Liu Shang, North and South: An Industrial Version of the Victorian Community.

Liu Han, On Emotional structure of North and South.Glaskell Elizabeth, North and South.

Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. “North and South: A Permanent State of Change.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 34, no. 3, 1979, pp. 281–301. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2933329. Accessed 5 Jul. 2022.

Bhowmik, Urmi. “Empire and the Industrial Novel: Imperial Commodities and Colonial Labor in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South.” Nineteenth Century Studies, vol. 26, 2012, pp. 117–34. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/ninecentstud.26.2012.0117. Accessed 5 Jul. 2022.

Tosh John, A Man’s place: Masculinity and Middle Class Home in Victoria England.

Participants:

Lilith He （Tianyu He） History of Art

Erika Rugyendo-Henry History and French

Samitra Sarkar History