Cottonopolis - ‘King Cotton’ (Everybody deserves space and Wellbeing)
Cottonopolis - ‘King Cotton’ is a short video that contextualises McMillan’s eponymous poem that was commissioned by performance poet SuAndi, director of the National Black Arts Alliance (NBAA) in collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), which alongside videos by four other writers/poets was published in Everyone Deserves Space: Ruskin’s Manchester Now.
Each piece was created in response to writings and lectures about Manchester by the Victorian writer, philosopher and art critic, John Ruskin, who commented about the exploitation of working class labour in the industrial development of the city, known as ‘Cottonopolis’ that produced 80% of the world’s cotton yarn and fabric.
The films were screened and the book launched on 18th July 2022 at Manchester Metropolitan University. See film here.
Stills from Cottonopolis - ‘King Cotton’:
Manchester’s wealth was dependent on the cotton trade with the raw material picked by slaves on Southern plantations in the US. It was exported to Liverpool, where slave ships also departed from and disembarked to. Taken to cotton mills in and around Manchester and across North-East England, the yarn was weaved into fabric by steam driven machinery, whose development intrinsic to the industrial revolution and capitalism.
Children crawled beneath weaving machines collecting waste fluff, and were often maimed and killed. Child labour is not often portrayed as occurring on Southern slave plantations, or how children and families were affected when the East India Company destroyed their weaving looms, so that cotton mills in Northern England could flourish.
This mis(sed) representation continues with 1,132 Bangladeshi children and people paid a pittance so we can buy fast fashion, who were crushed to death in 2013 when the Rana Plaza factory collapsed, because their safety was less important than profit.
Fashion is the child of capitalism, which in the context of globalisation is dependent on western fashion brands outsourcing cheapened labour to the global south for fast fashion production. Cotton crops destroy the environment in the overuse of water, such as the draining of the Aral Sea, the fourth largest lake in the world, which was used to produce cotton.
