Opinion | Why I’m sitting out the Xinjiang cotton boycott
- What may have begun as a genuine attempt to improve the lot of Uygur detainees seems to have become embroiled in a wider diplomatic exercise to attack China
In 1862, Lancashire mill workers at great personal sacrifice took a principled stand and refused to touch cotton picked by slaves on American plantations. They had been among the best-paid workers in Britain but many were subsequently driven into poverty. Their decision had a great impact on the course of the American civil war as it weakened the economy of the slave-owning south and contributed to the unionist victory in the north.
In 1863, president Abraham Lincoln wrote to thank “the working men of Manchester” for their “sublime Christian heroism, which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country”. His words are inscribed on the pedestal of his statue standing in Lincoln Square, Manchester today.
The great boycott effort of my youth involved South Africa’s apartheid regime. On the initiative of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, people around the world were urged not to buy South African products. I remember our family, though not well off, would not choose fruit from South Africa in the supermarket though it was cheap and of high quality.
An academic boycott began in 1965; England’s cricket tour to the country scheduled for 1968-69 was cancelled after the intending visitors selected a non-white player Basil D’Oliveira as a team member; the US Congress in 1986 enacted disinvestment legislation. Finally, the apartheid system was scrapped in the early 1990s and the leader of the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela, became president.
One key feature of these two early examples of boycotts is that they involved ordinary people and a degree of self-sacrifice.
