When Vidarbha Rivalled Egypt in Supplying Cotton to British Mills

When Vidarbha Rivalled Egypt in Supplying Cotton to British Mills

For a brief period in the 19th century, the Vidarbha region of central India (known in British records as Berar) became one of the world’s most critical cotton suppliers.

By 1867, Berar was sending as much raw cotton to Manchester’s booming textile mills as the entire country of Egypt. This remarkable feat was not a coincidence, but the outcome of global market forces and deliberate colonial policies.

During the British Raj, demand from Britain’s industrial cities and the turmoil of the American Civil War transformed Vidarbha’s cotton cultivation from a local practice into an export-driven enterprise. The region’s fertile black soil and new railway links turned it into a cotton powerhouse, with profound effects on its economy and people.

What follows is a detailed look at how Vidarbha’s cotton trade and production evolved under British rule, from sudden booms to the challenges that came with them, based on historical records and research.

From Subsistence Crop to Cotton Boom

Before the mid-1800s, cotton in Berar (present-day Vidarbha) was just one of many crops local farmers grew, largely for domestic use. That changed dramatically after the British gained administrative control of the region in 1853.

Colonial officials quickly recognised Berar’s potential. The area had rich, “black cotton” soil and a climate suited for cotton farming. British policy soon began nudging the region towards cash-crop agriculture.

In fact, the British even carved out a new administrative unit, Wardha District, in 1862 under the explicit “plea” of encouraging its cotton industry. By reorganising districts and land revenue systems, the colonial government created conditions for cotton cultivation to expand. Traditional agrarian practices were upended as the British introduced private property rights on land and encouraged farmers to grow crops for export profit rather than just subsistence.

The true catalyst for Vidarbha’s cotton boom, however, came from across the ocean. When the American Civil War erupted in 1861, the world’s largest cotton exporter, the United States, abruptly halted its supply.

Britain’s textile mills, especially in Manchester, were starved of raw cotton, sparking what was known as the “Cotton Famine.” In response, British traders and industrialists scoured the globe for alternative sources. India, with its vast farmland, stood out as the obvious solution, and within India, it was Berar that “positively electrified” observers in Britain.

In the early 1860s, cotton acreage in Berar started expanding at an unprecedented pace. One official report noted that before this period, cotton had been just one among many crops, but “it now became the prevailing, absorbing and predominating product”, displacing other crops on a large scale.

By the mid-1860s, villages across Berar were blanketed in cotton fields. Farmers who had once grown millet, sorghum or pulses for food were dedicating more and more land to cotton, enticed by soaring prices and the eager new market overseas.

Historic records and research quantify this dramatic shift. According to economic historian Amalendu Guha, Berar’s share of India’s total cotton acreage shot up from roughly 8% around 1850 to about 11% by the late 1860s. In other words, as India’s cotton exports doubled during the Civil War years, a large chunk of that increase came straight from the fields of Vidarbha.

Berar alone accounted for an astounding 42% of the expansion in India’s cotton-growing area in the second half of the 19th century.

These numbers underscore how a once-quiet agrarian region became a linchpin of global cotton supply. Contemporary accounts from the 1860s marvelled at the change: cotton was truly “king” in Berar, and the flow of white fibre from places like Amravati, Akola and Khamgaon to the ports of Bombay seemed unstoppable.

Railways, Markets and Manchester’s Pull

Several factors enabled Vidarbha’s cotton surge, but infrastructure was chief among them. The British Raj poured resources into new transport links expressly to get cotton from inland farms to the port and then on to Lancashire’s mills.

An efficient transportation system was urgently needed, and canal projects were impractical for the region’s terrain, so attention turned to roads and railways.

In the early 1860s, powerful commercial lobbies in Britain, including Manchester cotton manufacturers and Liverpool shipping firms, pressed the government to accelerate railway construction in India. Their lobbying bore fruit. By 1867, a major railway line spanned Berar, connecting this once-remote area directly to Bombay’s harbour.

Suddenly, bales of raw cotton from Vidarbha could reach the docks in a matter of days instead of the weeks or months previously required by bullock cart.

This new connectivity transformed the cotton trade. Previously, Berar’s cotton was sold in a handful of local marts, but now it could truly feed the mills of Manchester on a large scale.

British eyewitnesses in the late 19th century described the “upcountry” cotton business thriving thanks to the railways.

Market towns in Vidarbha blossomed into bustling cotton centres. Khamgaon in Buldhana district became known as the “Cotton City” because traders from all over converged there to buy and sell raw cotton for export.

British administrators set up regulated cotton markets (mandis) in places like Khamgaon and Amraoti to streamline the trade. Infrastructure improvements were not limited to rail: feeder roads were built to link villages to railway towns, and telegram lines helped coordinate commodity prices and shipments.

By the early 1870s, one could see endless bullock carts laden with cotton fibre lining up at railway sidings in Berar, a vivid illustration of how deeply the region had been drawn into global commerce.

The British also experimented with agricultural improvements to boost cotton output. During the 1860s, colonial officials introduced new cottonseed varieties from America to improve the quality and quantity of Indian cotton.

Agricultural departments distributed pamphlets and held demonstrations for farmers on better ginning practices (removing seeds from picked cotton) to meet the quality demands of British mills.

Ginning factories were established in several towns. Wardha city alone had multiple cotton gins by the late 19th century. In the town of Hinganghat, one of Vidarbha’s first modern cotton textile mills was founded in 1881, indicating that the cotton boom even spurred early industrialisation locally.

All these developments were geared towards one goal: maximising the supply of raw cotton for export. As one observer noted at the time, local landowners and cultivators “were doing their utmost to satisfy the cry from Manchester for more cotton”, even if it meant neglecting traditional crop rotation or soil rest cycles.

By most economic measures, the last decades of the 19th century brought unprecedented prosperity to the cotton trade in Berar. Official records between 1861 and 1892 spoke of an “unbroken record of progressive prosperity” in Berar and the surrounding Central Provinces – punctuated only occasionally by a poor harvest year. The volume of cotton exports through Bombay kept rising.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 further shortened the trip to Europe, reducing freight costs and fueling even greater demand for Indian cotton. It was during this period that Manchester’s dependence on Vidarbha’s cotton became a defining feature of the global textile industry.

The fact that Berar could rival Egypt in raw cotton exports by the 1860s shows how tightly the region’s fortunes were tied to world markets. British documents from the 1870s and 1880s frequently praised Berar as a model region for commercial agriculture – a place where railways and commerce had uplifted a once “remote” province into the beating heart of an imperial supply chain.

Prosperity and Its Price

Prosperity and Its Price

The cotton boom undoubtedly brought wealth to certain segments of Vidarbha’s society. Large landholders and traders profited from the high cotton prices of the 1860s. A new class of middlemen, often British or Indian trading firms, emerged in market towns to handle the cotton export business.

The colonial state also benefited from land revenue. Taxes collected from cotton cultivation filled government coffers.

However, this rapid transformation came at a cost that became painfully clear in the following decades. The heavy focus on cotton monoculture made the region’s economy more fragile and its people more vulnerable to both market swings and nature’s whims.

When the American Civil War ended in 1865, global cotton supply rebounded and prices crashed. Many Berar farmers who had borrowed money to expand cotton planting suddenly faced debt as their crop’s value plummeted.

In western India, this dynamic led to the Deccan Riots of 1875, when indebted cultivators rose up against moneylenders. Vidarbha did not see an open revolt, but the strain on its cotton farmers was evident in other ways. In 1877, a season of scanty rainfall coincided with low cotton prices, leaving cultivators doubly stricken.

They had fewer food crops of their own and less income to buy grain. Contemporary accounts speak of thousands of rural families in Berar facing severe hunger during the late 1870s as “cotton prices fell while food grain prices rose, putting food out of reach” for many who had switched to cash crops. The colonial administration’s own reports noted that even in such distress, farmers struggled to pay land taxes, often selling assets or going further into debt to do so. The very systems lauded for Berar’s “progress” offered little mercy when weather or world markets turned unfavourable.

The ultimate reckoning came with the devastating famines of the 1890s. For decades, Berar had been considered relatively food-secure. It was sometimes called the “land of plenty” by officials because good rail links allowed grain to be imported quickly in times of scarcity.

But this assumption was shattered in 1896-97 and again in 1899-1900, when widespread drought hit India. In Berar, these were the first major famines in living memory, and they struck hardest in areas dominated by cotton fields.

With so much land devoted to non-edible cash crops, the local food supply was meagre, and the population depended on buying grain. As prices for wheat and rice soared, poor farm labourers and smallholders found themselves without the means to feed their families.

The result was catastrophic. In the famine of 1900, about 8.5% of Berar’s population perished, “with the greatest number of deaths occurring in districts most specialised in cotton production”.

Colonial officers who had once bragged about cotton-fueled prosperity now observed with alarm that the very regions previously deemed immune were suffering massive mortality. A British report on the 1900 famine grimly tallied entire villages emptied by starvation and epidemic disease, particularly in the cotton belt of western Vidarbha.

Looking back, it became evident that Vidarbha’s 19th-century cotton boom was a double-edged sword. On one hand, it integrated the region into the global economy and brought investment, infrastructure, and periods of high income.

On the other hand, it exposed farmers to volatile international markets and undermined traditional food security. By the end of British rule, cotton had secured its place as the dominant crop of Vidarbha, a legacy visible even today in the region’s continuing role as a cotton-growing hub. But the British era also left behind enduring challenges, cycles of boom and bust, farmer indebtedness, and vulnerability to climate stress. All these were experienced first-hand by Vidarbha’s people in the late 1800s.

The story of Vidarbha’s cotton trade under the British Raj is one of dramatic change driven by global forces. In little more than a decade, a quiet agricultural province was thrust onto the world stage as a critical supplier of raw cotton to Britain’s industrial might.

The facts speak for themselves: by the late 1860s, Berar (now Vidarbha) matched Egypt in feeding cotton to Manchester’s mills, and by the century’s end, it had become a linchpin of India’s export economy. This transformation brought new riches and infrastructure, rail lines, market towns, and even some of the region’s first factories, laying the groundwork for modern economic life in Vidarbha. Yet it also served as a cautionary tale. The very success of cotton monoculture made the region profoundly dependent on distant markets and rainfall patterns, a dependence that proved deadly when conditions turned.

Vidarbha’s experience under British rule highlights how a global commodity boom can reshape a region’s destiny, for better and for worse. The cotton trade created an enduring identity for Vidarbha as a “cotton country,” one that persists in the cultural memory and economy of the area.

At the same time, the hardships that followed, from farmer indebtedness after price crashes to the famines that took thousands of lives, revealed the human cost behind the export statistics. This chapter of history remains crucial to understanding Vidarbha’s development. It shows how imperial economics wove this part of India tightly into world markets, and how local lives were affected in the process.

In sum, the British-era cotton boom in Vidarbha was a period of great opportunity and great risk, the impacts of which have echoed through generations in this region. It stands as a vivid example of the profound transformation and trials that colonial economic policies brought to India’s heartland.

References

• Das, D. (2015, July 2). Famines and Public Distribution System in India. Sanhati. https://sanhati.com/articles/13812/

• Prakash, S. (2019). The Paradox of Plenty: The Transformation of Berar. Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research, 6(4), 839–850. https://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR1904V71.pdf

• Beckert, S. (2014). Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

• Government of Maharashtra. (1974). Maharashtra State Gazetteer: Wardha District (Revised Edition). Bombay: Gazetteers Department. (Archived text available at Archive.org)

• Khamgaon Municipal Council. (2023, October 8). Khamgaon: Vidarbha’s Silver City Built on Trade and Craft. The News Dirt. https://www.thenewsdirt.com/post/khamgaon-vidarbha-s-silver-city-built-on-trade-and-craft