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Global Cotton Connections

It’s estimated that 9,520,548* enslaved people were transported across the Atlantic in slaving ships in the period 1701-1866

Take a look through the two timelines to view the global cotton story.

Supported by researchers at: University of Nottingham, The Arkwright Society and Nottingham local studies.

*Transatlantic Slave Trade Database www.slavevoyages.org
** Derbyshire Record Office archives heritagehindusamaj.wordpress.com/2013/04/

Cotton Timeline - Global

  • 1721

    Calico Acts (1702 and 1721) banned most Indian cotton imports into Britain, exceptions were muslins and blue-dyed calicoes. At this time India was the world’s leading cotton textile producer.

  • 1765

    The British East India Company granted revenue authority of Bengal

  • 1772

    The Somerset Case.

    Lord Mansfield ruled that James Somerset could 1772 not be forcefully returned to enslavement in the colonies, that slavery was legally unsupported within England, but not the wider British Empire.

  • 1774

    Calico Act 1721 repealed

  • 1776 - 1783

    American War of Independence

  • 1780

    The US state of Pennsylvania introduces An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery

  • 1784 - 1793

    An annual average of c.102,751 enslaved African people were shipped across the Atlantic in these years

  • 1787

    Freed enslaved people set up a ‘Province of Freedom’ on the Sierra 1787 Leone river

    &
    The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade set up in Britain

  • 1791

    Enslaved people of African descent overthrow their French enslavers in Saint Domingue, leading to the Black-led Haitian Republic

    &

    An Abolition of the Slave Trade Bill fails to pass in British Parliament

  • 1792

    Danish participation in the transatlantic slave trade is declared illegal from 1803

  • 1793

    Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin for cleaning freshly picked cotton

  • 1794

    France abolished slavery (Napoleon re-introduced it, then it was abolished again)

  • 1802

    Parliament passes the Health of Morals and Apprentices Act, prohibiting the employment of apprentices for more than 12 hours a day and forbidding night work between the hours of 9.00pm & 6.00am

  • 1804

    By 1804, all the Northern US states had abolished slavery or introduced gradual emancipation. This created a North-South divide that would lead to the US Civil War in the 1860s

  • 1807

    Act for the Abolition for the Slave Trade prohibits legal British slave trading.

    &

    The USA passes the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which takes effect in January 1808. However, the international trade continues

  • 1817

    In a treaty with Great Britain, Spain abolishes its slave trade, effective from 1820

  • 1823

    The Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions set up (commonly known as the Anti-Slavery Society)

  • 1831

    Brazil abolishes its slave trade, but this law is rarely enforced prior to 1850. It is estimated that nearly 5 million enslaved people disembarked slaving ships in Brazil (more than any other country), including over two million between 1800 and 1850

  • 1831

    The Sam Sharpe Rebellion (or Baptist War), one of the largest enslaved uprisings in the Caribbean, rocks Jamaica. The brutal repression which followed helped persuade the British parliament to abolish slavery a few years later.

  • 1833

    Slavery Abolition Act passed leading to the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean. But it included an unpaid period of apprenticeship until 1838 and compensation payments for plantation owners not the enslaved

  • 1865

    The USA abolishes slavery after the American Civil War (1861-1865)

  • 1888

    Brazil abolishes slavery. Britain imported raw cotton from Brazil from the later 18th century

Cotton Timeline - East Midlands

  • 1721

    Thomas Lombe builds his silk mill at Derby

  • 1758

    Jedediah (also Jedidiah) Strutt patents his ‘Derby Rib’, a mechanical attachment which allows stockings to be knit with a rib.

  • 1769

    Richard Arkwright is granted a patent for his spinning frame later known as the water frame

  • 1771

    Arkwright builds his first mill at Cromford in partnership with Jedediah Strutt and Samuel Need

  • 1774

    Arkwright, Strutt and Need campaigned for a repeal of the 1721 act that forbade the production & consumption of pure cottons in Britain

  • 1779

    Arkwright’s Birkacre Mill in Lancashire attacked during anti- machinery riots

  • 1781

    Jedediah Strutt builds his first mill at Milford

  • 1783

    Arkwright builds Masson Mill

  • 1785

    Arkwright’s patents are cancelled by the Court of the King’s Bench, leading to a rapid expansion of cotton mill building

  • 1786

    Richard Arkwright is knighted by George III

  • 1787

    Around this time the Evanses opened their first cotton mill at Darley Abbey which burned down in 1788 but was quickly replaced and further extended in 1796-1805

  • 1790

    Samuel Slater established the first cotton mill in America (Born in Belper he worked at Strutt’s mill, and took the knowledge and set up the first mill in the US, in Rhode Island)

  • 1791

    William Strutt begins building a cotton mill in Derby using cast iron in the frame – the world’s first fire-resistant multi-storey building. This method was also used for a warehouse in Milford and mills in Belper.

  • 1794 - 1803

    73% of raw cotton used by the Strutts in the Derwent Valley came from South America (particularly Brazil, Demerara (now part of Guyana) & Suriname. Just under a quarter 24% came from the West Indies, especially Carriacou

  • 1804

    The Strutts rebuild the North Mill, using a fire-resistant metal frame. The building still exists today.

  • 1804 - 1817

    62% of raw cotton used by the Strutts in the Derwent Valley still came from South America, while 17% came from the West Indies, 14% from North America and 7% from the Indian sub-continent

  • 1830

    Thomas Adams (1807-73), who developed a business which became a household name in Nottingham began his career in 1830 as a lace merchant. The buildings in the Lace Market were initially warehouses rather than factories. Workers would take their lace goods to the Lace Market where they would then be finished and then sold in bulk by the warehouse owners.

  • 1820’s - 1850’s

    The USA supplies the majority of raw cotton used in Britain, from plantations in the US South. In 1860 it supplied 80% of Britain’s raw cotton

  • 1830’s

    By 1839 there were 13 mills for spinning cotton in Nottinghamshire.

  • 1860’s

    A ‘famine’ of raw cotton – a shortage of slave-grown cotton imports as a result of the American Civil War – hits the north-west of England, putting pressure on the Derwent Valley Mills. To help fill the gap additional raw cotton was imported from the Indian sub-continent.

  • 1868 - 1877

    Calver Mill sourced raw cotton from the Indian sub-continent, including Western Madras (Tamilnadu), Surat and Broach (Gujarat) **

Spanish Wells Cotton Plantation

1862 list of women and girls of African descent, enslaved upon Spanish Wells Plantation, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, USA, whose owner William Eddings Baynard supplied raw Sea Island cotton to the Strutts in 1823.

Enslaved women and girls of African descent were core workers in the cotton fields of the southern states of America, valued by enslavers for their skills in planting, weeding and picking cotton at speed.

Enslavers also regarded enslaved women of childbearing age as vital reproducers of their unpaid cotton plantation workforce.

Women and girls of African descent challenged enslavement on cotton plantations in a variety of ways, including slow working, growing and selling food to earn money, resistance to motherhood, escape, armed resistance, and building kinship ties through the making of quilts.

Source: Gooptar, C (2022) Sea Islands & Jamaica: Tracing the Enslaved People.

(Report 3 for The Scott Trust.) University of Hull, pp.12-15.

Supported by researchers at: University of Nottingham & The University of Hull

Spanish Wells Cotton Plantation

  • Clarinda 50 years

    Nancy 7 years

    Dinah 28 years

    Sylvia 40 years

    Peggy 26 years

  • Bess 20 years

    Julia 3 years

    Dinah 2 years

    Molsie 22 years

    Caroline 30 years

  • Rosanna 20 years

    Kate 15 years

    Sophy 18 years

    Filice 6 years

    Bettie 30 years

  • Jennie 42 years

    Pleasant 40 years

    Lucy 7 years

    Sue 6 years

    Sarah 44 years

  • Harriet 3 years

    Menda 21 years

    Dianna 2 years

    Jennie [age unknown]

    Cinda [age unknown]

  • Grace 3 years

    Clara 60 years

    Violat [age unknown]

    Antonia 30 years

    Sarah 22 years

  • Hagar 60 years

    Hettie 33 years

    Judy [age unknown]

    Nellie 5 years

    Dires 85 years

  • Doll 33 years

    Sarah 5 years

    Jane 3 years

    Lucy 38 years

    Nancy 26 years

    Minda 1 year

  • Sarah 32 years

    Sophia 40 years

    Hester 37 years

    Nancy 60 years

    Sylvia 16 years

    Judy 7 years