ABSTRACT
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the stringency of the war and the sense of urgency in its last two years than does the control of the cotton industry. The cotton industry was one of the sources, if not the traditional fount of British prosperity. From the end of the eighteenth century on, the needs and the growth of the textile industry had to a large extent conditioned the source of industrial and political development of Britain. The British lion of the nineteenth century was made of no sterner stuff than cotton. A Shakespeare of the nineteenth century might well have written: “He who touches the cotton trade touches the heart of Britain.” Fair Marianne might clothe the world in silk, but British cotton served to shroud French pretensions to economic power and hence, as three great wars have demonstrated with repetitive horror, to political power.
