Empire of Cotton: A Global History

Accessible, long term history of the cotton industry and how it changed the world we now live in. Fascinating.

My only gripe is the lack of comparisons to other contemporaneous industries to really show the importance of cotton in each time period.

A minor issue for an overwhelming fascinating book and history that my friends have all been hearing about for weeks.

Very interesting read about cotton and it's influence in world history. One can see the problems production caused back in the 1800's and in the 2000's. Globalization started decades and decades ago.

Very well written with wide ranging vision. I wish that this understanding of international trade was available when I was studying this period. Economic history has come a long way since the 60's. I am in awe of the breath of evidence used in this book.

I disagree with the critiques that ascribe a Marxist bent on this book. The author’s or the reader’s political preferences (bias) are not what make or break a book. I believe this book needs to be evaluated on its strengths and weaknesses. The comprehensive world-wide view of cotton is definitely a contribution not otherwise captured before. The connection of cotton with the industrial revolution, and the transition of the agricultural product to a manufacturing output that originated the birth of an industry presents a second valuable point. The role of slaves (foreign and domestic) and the internationalization of capitalism are other descriptions that present real value.
I did not like the use of terminology like “War Capitalism” that was never fully defined. It was not clear if the author was talking about commerce at gun-point, country to country economic pressure, use of tariffs and taxes, control of transportation, free labor or what? This was not fully developed.
The structure of the book is also weak. Things are not organized in chronological order, so you assume that it will organize by topic or subtopics. But that is not true either. I would say that most of the discussion revolves around the second half of the 19th century. Yet every chapter has bits and pieces of that timeline. Because of the poorly structured order, I kept going back to India’s cotton market for 14 chapters without been able to put all the India, or the global “Empire of Cotton” information together. My preference would have been to have the chapters organized either by country or by time-frame. Since the book attempts to make an international assessment, I would say that it would have been nice to have it organized by decade. That way, you could see the role each country played at different time-frames throughout the Empire of Cotton.
I feel that a few well-placed reference tables could have provided clarity and flow, while avoiding a tedious numeric narrative content.
Book is short on defining things clearly. It would have been nice to have clear definitions of the different aspects of the cotton industry. For example; the narrative transitions without pause from the agricultural production of cotton, to weaving, to spinning, to manufacturing, to imports and exports, etc. These are completely different aspects of the same industry that have their own complexities and constituents.
Author really kills me when after hitting me with tons of statistics by European country, all the sudden start using terms like “Continental Europe,” or the paragraph in page 408 in which he makes reference to England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Where do I go to get the stats on Continental Europe? Add all the European countries from the table? What table? Am I expected to know the differences between England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, as it refers to the cotton industry?
In summary, a must read to have some context on the cotton topic and the industrial revolution, but a hard read.

This is a well researched and analyzed accounting for the development of the modern economy as seen through the lens of the original industrial technology, cotton spinning. It brings together perspectives from divergent cultural and geographical regions. Anyone who wants to understand how we arrived where we are and where we are headed must read this book.

Different authors write about the second or third industrial revolution involving steel or petroleum, trains, telegraphs, telephones, cars and information and they are right. But they imply that the original revolution ended. This book shows that it simply changed geography and by doing this it gives much greater insight into the life cycles of other industrial revolutions and the nature of capitalism itself. You can't read this book as the descendant of people who worked in the textile industry--and that means all of us if you go back far enough--without being humbled by what sacrifices they made to produce your life.

Dr. Beckert's *Empire of Cotton* provides us at long last with a true global history of capitalism. Indeed, Beckert's work gives us an excellent lens through which to study the 19th and 20th century worlds. By examining cotton, its many permutations, and its focal point essentially coming full circle by the present day, Beckert clearly demonstrates the value of global examinations of capitalism. Many historians of capitalism within the United States often look inwards and it can be to their detriment. By taking a page out of Dr. Beckert's playbook and opening themselves up to more global examinations of capitalism and whatever specificity they may be examining, they would be doing themselves and the discipline a great service in more fully understanding the evolution of capitalism on a global scale.
Dr. Beckert's research that spans every continent save Antarctica demonstrates a true desire to examine this phenomena on a global scale. He was willing to move outside his linguistic comfort zone in order to uncover all material of interest. Other scholars would be well served to try and move beyond their national boundaries of examination in order to develop the whole picture. Dr. Beckert's writing only enhances this narrative leaving the reader captivated as we journey around the globe (with Liverpool and Manchaster often serving as a crucial go-between.) Beckert's examination of capitalists, slaves, and laborers alike gives us a better sense of how cotton operated unlike any other commodity in the 19th and 20th centuries.
As another reviewer has noted, this is certainly one of the strongest historical works of 2014 and will be a work that historians will come back to you for years to come.

Agricultural advancements in cotton strains, fertilizers, and processing have changed the industry. The industry has moved to lesser advanced countries where inexpensive labor runs the industry and huge retailers demand the commodity.

This is a dense, scholarly, 'exhaustive' and fascinating history of the development of global capitalism through several stages. It's a history all of us in the West need to know, and mostly don't, in order to understand where our wealth came from and how much we have to account for.

Sven Beckert takes you on global historical journey of cotton, the plant the became the center of the industrial revolution. This book will change your perspective about how the West industrialized, how the U.S. Civil War caused a dramatic change in the world economic system, and how the Global South has reindustrialized in the 20th Century. I would only wish there was more detail on global finance played its role and how War Capitalism was able to conquer India and China in the 18th and 19th Centuries. A must read book.

In his acknowledgments, author Sven Beckert points to a number of people who read his manuscript as it was nearing completion ... and admits that "I have ignored, at my peril, some of their advice." Too bad. The advice no doubt urged the omission of so many statistics, such haphazard hop-skipping across time and place. With only a couple of notable exceptions, the narrative flow suffers through most of the chapters in this book because the author has done a tremendous amount of research ... and simply cannot allow himself to leave any of it out of the book. The result is an oftentimes mind-numbing experience for the reader, who has to sit through (in a single paragraph) an avalanche of supporting statistics -- from different parts of the world, from decades before and after the original point -- when a select few of these details would have been the more appropriate authorial choice. What's worse, it goes on for page after page after page ... in order to make the same points, again and again and again. It's as if Beckert thought his compensation hinged on the number of redundancies he could shoehorn into the book.

Empire of Cotton clocks in at 443 pages prior to the acknowledgements, notes and index. Fully a hundred pages could have been chopped off this thing. And the notes are a mess: Beckert simply tacks a note onto the end of every dense paragraph as a stand-in for sometimes 10-15 citations. The notes alone -- all 807 of them, by my count -- take up 138 pages. Some might consider this one of the book's merits; I instead consider it more than a little obnoxious. I would never have finished reading this book had I not been a teacher of world history. Perhaps my critical view of Beckert's skills as a writer is skewed slightly be the fact that I'm currently reading The Quartet, by Pulitzer-winning historian Joseph Ellis -- a man of much greater talents as a writer, and an unfair comparison for most of his fellow historians. Or perhaps it's skewed by my disappointment in David Walker Howe's glowing book-jacket endorsement of Beckert's tome. Howe's What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 stands as one of the finest works of history I've ever read. I guess I was hoping for something similar, and I most certainly did not find it here.

Exceptional, comprehensive in-depth research looking at the globalization of the cotton industry and the role that technology and politics played in the rise of Britain and United States. As a work of scholarship, the book is inspirational. As documentation of our country's history, it describes our dark side which haunts us to this day.

Mr. Beckert believes that Capitalism is an exploitative virus designed to plunder the world's people and resources; and, far from taking a chance with free enterprise principles, Capitalism amorally obtains (actually,requires) the support/intervention of the police power of its host to survive. The proof of this, he asserts, can be found in the history of the global cotton markets. Not a bad idea, but the book is overwhelmed by lack of balance and stupefying details about the numbers of spindles and looms in various markets.

Other reviewers have opined that in the hands of a better writer and a more objective presentation, this could have been an excellent book. Maybe so, but only if that better writer realized that the book doesn't need hundreds of pages of researched minutae to show that slavery was the evil backbone of early cotton and that imperialism ruined the societies of the colonized and sucked them dry.

On the other hand, the movement of capital in the cotton markets and its attendant financing vehicles used to enable slavery/imperialism/monopoly/securitization could benefit from expansive treatment. Unfortunately, these are given only superficial discussion in the book. Perhaps, capital movement/vehicles might be considered boring. However, they are less boring than the cotton production statistics that fill the pages.

Well, after having read books on salt, cod, sugar, rum, and others trying to convince me that these were the products that defined an age and changed the world, along comes Empire of Cotton. As an owner of a cotton clothing company, I dove into this book with high hopes. I was disappointed. I slogged through the first half of it, reminding myself constantly that this must be an important book. It is highly disorganized, constantly jumping back and forth in time, with no terribly coherent story. I live in the Caribbean half time, so am well aware of the importance of sugar in the British empire, but scant mention is made of that product - the world revolved around cotton according to the author. No mention of the role of coal and iron/steel production (for instance) in England. It would not be so bad, I suppose, if the author described the role of cotton in the proper context, but he leads the reader to believe that capitalism was invented around cotton which is totally in error. I rarely give up on a book, but gave up on this one half-way through.

WAY TOO MUCH IRRELEVANT INFO , IT HAS NO DEFINED NARRATIVE . INTERESTING BUT DIFFICULT TO READ !! LOTS OF STATISTICS , DATES , & INTERESTING CHARACTERS , BUT IT JUMPS BACKWARD IN TIME AND PLACES WAY TOO MUCH TO FOLLOW . COTTON IS INTERESTING TO STUDY , BUT A DIFFICULT READ .

“Empire Of Cotton” is really two books. First, it’s an exhaustive exposition of the history of cotton as a textile raw material. That’s about 80% of the book, and by exhaustive I mean very, very exhaustive. Second, and unfortunately dominating, it’s a puerile, scattered, self-contradictory and confused attack on the Great Boogeyman “Capitalism,” along with sustained criticism of anything originating in or related to European culture. This book is a sort of “Occupy For Eggheads.” But not for very clear-thinking eggheads.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with political screeds. If it had been well written, this would have been a reasonable political screed, sort of a Spartacist historical analysis for academics. It would have attracted the same people who always read such things, who believe howlers like Stalin ruined the righteous Russian Revolution founded by the great Lenin and that Trotsky would have Made It All Much Better, if he hadn’t been icepicked. But the book is instead a badly written political screed masquerading as an analysis of the cotton trade. I feel cheated.

Aside from its overt politics, “Empire Of Cotton” is actually more a book about the Industrial Revolution than cotton. Cotton is used as the progenitor and proxy of the entire Industrial Revolution, in order to erect around that discussion a political screed. Beckert seems to think, and other reviewers seem to think, that his accomplishment has little to do with cotton as such. Instead, he imagines himself heroically demolishing a range of myths relating to the Industrial Revolution, and demonstrating the resulting evils of “capitalism.” The truths he puts forth are, roughly, (a) factory workers in the Industrial Revolution had unpleasant, difficult and frequently brutal lives; (b) Western states arranged legal structures to facilitate industrial growth; (c) non-Western states were pushed around by Western states, frequently in nasty ways; (d) slavery was instrumental in certain aspects of the Industrial Revolution; and (e) some people got rich in the Industrial Revolution. But Beckert is somehow unaware that these things are commonplaces, known today and known then, and bemoaned then as now. A search for “Dickens” in Beckert’s book returns—wait for it!—zero results!

Beckert never makes his precise political argument completely clear, other than Europeans Are Bad, though he is clearly influenced by Marxism. The word “capitalism” is used continuously without definition and with a variety of meanings. In the first 20% of the book, which contains most of the overt politics, (a) it is actually “war capitalism,” (b) it is only practiced by Europeans, all other cultures being pure and wonderful, and apparently pacifistic, (c) said Europeans did not invent or add anything, only took the inventions and work of others and caused harm, (d) it has no benefits to anyone, and (e) it is nearly exclusively based on slavery.

One big problem with the book is its constant bias. Beckert makes no pretense of objectivity—he is too busy being the vanguard of the proletariat. Among other things, he shows his bias continuously by his choice of words. Europeans “stole” metals from the Americas (leaving aside that the occupants themselves were constantly shifting “ownership” in violent wars, and weren’t getting the metals out themselves). Europeans are repeatedly sneeringly referred to as “ignorant” “barbarians” dressed in “skins and linen,” while the rest of the world apparently relaxed in advanced cotton luxury, free men all until Colonialism and Imperialism ruined their day. Africans who wanted different choices in cotton textiles are, according to Beckert, “dynamic and discerning,” though the quotes he uses to prove that actually calls them “varied and capricious.” Sure, the words Beckert uses may be the same thing ultimately, but Beckert chooses the most glowing adjectives to apply to any non-European in every single instance. (And he rarely stoops to pointing out that the Africans were dynamically and discerningly choosing those cotton textiles in trade for the other Africans they had captured in wars and were handing over to slavery—which of course is purely the Europeans’ fault and doing).

Coupled with vocabulary bias are Beckert’s ill-conceived and factually-unsupported obsessions. One obsession is alleged theft by the evil Europeans of the intellectual property of the pure and good peoples of the rest of the world. For example, when the English began to dominate the international trade of raw cotton and cotton textiles, Beckert believes that the English “appropriated Asian knowledge.” (Here, he means India. Sometimes, when he says Asia, he means China too, without any consistency.) In the span of two pages, he uses the loaded word “appropriate,” meaning “steal,” six times. Presumably the evil English tortured the hapless Indian weavers for their secrets? No, the nefarious “appropriation” consisted of “European manufacturers, supported by their various national governments, collect[ing] and shar[ing] knowledge about Indian production techniques.” They “closely observed Indian ways of manufacturing.” They “wrote reports on Indian woodblock printing techniques, based on their observations.” They “investigated how Indian artisans produced chintz.” Oh, the horror! The underhandedness! Truly, the depths of depravity of the thief know no bounds! (Naturally, the vastly greater modern transfers of English technology back to India, where productivity in the textile industries is nonetheless still abysmally low, are not called “appropriation.”)

And after all the Sturm und Drang about theft and “assimilation” of Indian technology, and the sweeping conclusion that “Asia [meaning India? China?] from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century remained the most important source of cotton manufacturing and, especially, printing technology,” Beckert gives a grand total of how many specific examples of technology that was “appropriated” or “sourced”? Zero. Go figure.

Then, two chapters later, Beckert says that all British cotton manufacturing was “entirely dependent upon imports,” namely “Asian technologies and African markets.” (Let’s leave aside how an export market can be an import.) But he never says what those technologies were, and then he says, referring to the first British water mill in 1784, it “was unlike anything the world had seen.” Later, he refers to “British tinkerers’ revolutionary methods for the production of cotton yarn.” If you actually parse the facts Beckert sets out, it’s obvious that for millennia there was glacial, incremental progress in cotton technology, and in fact all real advances were either directly invented first in the West, or first put there to appropriate, productive uses. Beckert just doesn’t want to admit that, because it might put Europeans in a positive light. So he simply makes fantasy statements about “appropriating” and “importing” (unspecified) technology.

Beckert’s other obsession is his invented term “war capitalism.” He loves this term. Loves, loves, loves. It is all purpose—it means a vast range of things, every single one of which puts Europeans in a bad light. At one point, he defines “war capitalism,” as “Imperial expansion, slavery and land expropriations.” It’s a bit strange to define a politico-economic concept by referring to the supposed impacts of it. At another, he says “war capitalism—exactly because violence was its fundamental characteristic—was portable.” So apparently it’s violence that marks out war capitalism from “traditional” capitalism (which is also never defined, but apparently simultaneously means state control and support AND total laissez-faire). But a few pages later, he says “Europeans gambled on the efficacy of war capitalism again and again: each time they succeeded in planting new fields, in coercing more slaves, in finding additional capital, they enabled the production of more cotton fabrics at cheaper prices, and they pushed their cotton rivals to the periphery.” So apparently non-violent aggressive competition, scientific studies and investment also all characterize war capitalism. Beckert uses war capitalism throughout as a Humpty Dumpty word, meaning nothing more or less than he wants in the case of each use, most useful for always casting a miasma over anything European as bad—even if what they’re doing is simply advancing human happiness by selling better products cheaper to poor people.

War capitalism is all powerful, except when it’s not. For example, Beckert goes on and on, for many pages in many places, about how war capitalism was used to subjugate India, keep it as a captive market, and require generation of raw cotton for English manufacturers. But then he admits that despite aggressive efforts for decades, “Europeans only very superficially penetrated India’s cotton growing. Western merchants had no impact whatsoever on how cotton was produced in the Indian countryside. They had just as little impact on the ways cotton moved from its producers to the traders on the coast. British efforts to grow cotton on large farms with wage labor failed spectacularly, because labor could not be mobilized.” What happened to the continuous violence that war capitalism used to force everyone to do its bidding?

Of course, “war capitalism” isn’t capitalism at all as traditionally understood. What Beckert is referring to is really the simple and well-understood historical concept of mercantilism (without the emphasis on bullion), coupled with frequent reference to the violence inherent in the pre-modern world (but only pointed out when committed by Europeans, of course). But “mercantilism” is not sexy enough and doesn’t sound original, and Beckert can’t use that to imply that the modern West is simply the old West with a glossy veneer, still wholly dependent on violence and exploitation (until wonderful socialism arrives, doubtless).

The mask slips from Beckert in other ways, too. The best example is that he repeatedly quotes the odious and thankfully dead historian Eric Hobsbawm, an unrepentant Stalinist, for general principles of history, such as that the Industrial Revolution was “the most important event in world history.” That he goes to such a source for (banal) statements, when very few if any other historians are cited other than in footnotes, should tell us something about Beckert.

There are lots of facts in this book (lots of repetition, too). Most are apolitical, so if you try hard enough you can separate out the dross that Beckert has layered on top. If you read the book with a practice and informed eye, a different story arises. That’s the story of Western heroism—how a small group of dynamic, risk-taking men took the entire world out of the Malthusian Trap by their actions, and thereby benefited the entire world (and themselves, if they didn’t die in the attempt, as most did). They should be celebrated. But this book isn’t the vehicle, and it’s not worth the time to read it.

A landmark book that will significantly alter our understanding of modern capitalism. By bringing Slavery into that narrative, Beckert has enlarged our view of capitalism and created a much more nuanced picture of capitalism that we have had before.

It is both fitting and pleasantly ironic that Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert, was not only the final book I read in 2015 but arguably the most consequential. Every now and again, I encounter a work of a magnitude such as this which offers a truly fresh perspective that compels a reevaluation of core concepts. This was the case, for example, with Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond, Maps of Time, by David Christian, and 1491, by Charles C. Mann. Books like these transcend historical scholarship and move in a greater intellectual arena that not only challenges accepted wisdom but literally annihilates it and thereby forces the construction of an entirely new narrative. Empire of Cotton, an epic in the genre “Big History,” does all of that and does it with penetrating insight.
In some four hundred fifty pages of tightly compressed and often dense but readable text, Harvard Professor of History Sven Beckert demolishes the myth of capitalism as it has been traditionally understood. In that model, which Beckert in nearly a single stroke brilliantly renders obsolete, we have long been taught that the industrial revolution, a European triumph, was the product of technology fueled by free markets, liberal democracy and the Protestant work ethic to create the economic miracle of capitalist growth and progress that has literally defined the modern west. But Beckert, a social, political and economic historian, peels back cherished notions to reveal that in fact neither the industrial revolution nor capitalism as we know it could have evolved without state coercion – nor could it have existed without the central staple crop that made it all possible: cotton, the central element that weaves (pun fully intended!) it all together.
Of course, the myth of European exceptionalism has long been dented and bruised by more recent historiography. Only a couple of centuries prior to its ascent to global dominance, Europe was kind of a backwater to the Arab Middle East and China, until the Columbian Experience brought vast wealth and exotic new products that literally shifted the global epicenter from the Mediterranean and the east to the Atlantic trade and the west. Yet, one of those new exotic products was decidedly not cotton, which apparently had been cultivated, spun and woven for thousands of years in geographies as disparate as Egypt, the Indus valley and Peru. Europe was one of the places highly-prized textiles made from cotton were not at all common. As Beckert argues in his complex but persuasive thesis, cotton proved to be the key ingredient that was to change everything, and from the very beginning it was cooked into a stock vigorously stirred by violence and often brutal state coercion that he calls “war capitalism,” amply seasoned by healthy doses of state investment and protectionism. Set aside steel and other more familiar totems of the industrial revolution for the moment: none of it would have been possible without cotton.
Before there was an industrial revolution, there was of course industry, or rather the technology that made mills possible to create great volumes of textiles made from cotton. But cotton does not grow in temperate European climes. Prior to this, the finest cotton textiles originated in the east and especially in India, the very center of global cotton dominance. The first stop for war capitalism, Beckert tells us, was British imperialism and the roots of colonialism that aggressively sought the raw material for its mills at the lowest possible cost. British economic interests propped up by British military might began to transform centuries of Indian cotton cultivation and production, spinning and weaving, and the marketing of the finished product through middlemen and merchants. Britain forcefully remade India as a supplier of raw materials to its mills in a heavy-handed process that over decades transformed it from a powerful vendor to world markets to an almost helpless customer of the British who relied upon state investment and protectionism to dominate cotton textile production. As Beckert notes: “India’s cotton industry was decimated … In the wake of the Industrial Revolution … India lost its once central position in the global cotton industry and, in a great historical irony, eventually became the world’s largest market for British cotton exports.” [p172] So much for free markets and free enterprise …
The central tenet to European textile production was cheap cotton, which meant cheap labor to cultivate the cotton crop. For cheap labor, you cannot beat slave labor, which is why slavery became absolutely central to cotton production and the industrial revolution. The windfall of the Columbian Experience had gifted European overlords with vast territories in the Americas favored with the kind of warm climates conducive to cotton cultivation, but the near annihilation of its pre-contact population due to old world pandemics created a dearth of labor. African slavery had already proved a successful if brutally inhumane solution for sugar and tobacco plantations in the New World. Now that the Industrial Revolution had turned cotton into “white gold,” the availability of high quality cotton textiles proved in a cruel irony to be valuable tender for slave traders as payment for the human chattel who would cultivate new raw materials later turned into the finished products that were the very price of their purchase.
War capitalism – through colonialism, expropriation of territory and slavery – created the empire of cotton and thereby bred its next critical phase, “industrial capitalism,” which created wage laborers: an entirely new phenomenon for vast numbers of people that for a variety of factors were forced to abandon a traditional agricultural lifestyle and become workers in the mills, for long hours, little compensation and often in grueling conditions. But here too state coercion continued to play a significant role, as the power of the state generally aligned with the moneyed interests against the ill-treated factory proletariat, enforcing one-sided contracts, instituting compulsory work laws, and blocking any attempts at reform.
Interestingly, as Beckert points out in his study of the United States, while war capitalism was essential for the foundation of industrial capitalism, the two typically remained mutually exclusive. For instance, the plantation south of the antebellum years hosted very few mills, while textile production flourished in the north. “A society dominated by slavery was not conducive to cotton industrialization,” Beckert insists. “Slave states were notoriously late and feeble in supporting the political and economic interests of domestic industrializers. This was also the case in the slave territories within the United States, the only country in the world divided between war and industrial capitalism, a unique characteristic that would eventually spark an unprecedentedly destructive civil war.” [p171]
Students of the American Civil War are well-familiar with the Confederacy’s unshakeable confidence that Europe could not endure without their cotton, so much so that the CSA withheld cotton shipments early on. Panic and economic depression did indeed ensue in Britain and elsewhere, but rather than the recognition and aid Richmond had anticipated, the shortage of cotton prompted a renewal of war capitalism to seek alternate sources of supply. This persisted long after Appomattox and the result was an even greater commitment to colonialism. Parts of India, for instance, were completely refashioned to force a monopoly for cotton cultivation over all other kinds of agriculture. Railroads and telegraphs, later products of the industrial revolution, permitted the British to penetrate deeper into the interior for such purposes. When cotton prices fell and food grain prices rose in the 1870s, some six to ten million Indians died of famine in the Berar province alone, although there was plenty of food available but economically out of reach to the affected population. This was repeated in the 1890s, when another nineteen million people perished of famine in that same geography in similar circumstances.
Empire of Cotton contains many horrific episodes such as this to reveal the grim realities of both industrialization and capitalism, elements of which persist to this day – something that will no doubt provoke chagrin and loud cries of revisionism by outraged “heritage” historians who hurl the invective of “political correctness” against any new historiography that challenges their more rosy enshrined narrative. And we can expect similar fury to be sparked in the camps of contemporary free market ideologues, as Beckert reminds us that even now: “Violence and coercion, in turn, are as adaptive as the capitalism they enable, and they continue to play an important role in the empire of cot¬ton to this day. Cotton growers are still forced to grow the crop; workers are still held as virtual prisoners in factories. Moreover, the fruits of their activities continue to be distributed in radically unequal way – with cot¬ton growers in Benin, for example, making a dollar a day or less, while the owners of [otherwise unprofitable] cotton growing businesses in the United States have collectively received government subsidies of more than $35 billion between 1995 and 2010. Workers in Bangladesh stitch together clothing under absurdly dangerous conditions for very low wages, while consumers in the United States and Europe can purchase those pieces with abandon, at prices that often seem impossibly low.” [p442]
Empire of Cotton is a remarkable and extremely thought-provocative book, although it can be a difficult read, since Beckert the careful historian includes many details and much statistical information that occasionally bogs down the text – in addition to some 135 pages of endnotes. Yet, Beckert’s thesis remains convincing, aptly demonstrating throughout this long, complicated work that cotton industrialization is vitally dependent in all phases upon extremely cheap labor, and concluding with a chilling reminder that: “For the past several decades, Walmart and other retail giants have continually moved their production from one poor country to a slightly poorer one, lured by the promise of workers even more eager and even more inexpensive. Even Chinese production is now threatened by lower-wage producers. The empire of cotton has continued to facilitate a giant race to the bottom …” [p440] This is a very important book, in my estimation, and despite the difficulty I highly recommend it.

Arrived in very good condition and in a very short time. Having scanned through it, I am anxious to read it. I have ordered 15 books so do have many to read. Thank you for the quality of this order.

Sven Beckert is not the first historian to discern the vital nexus between cotton and industrialization. An interesting analysis of the fiber’s contribution to the development of the Industrial Revolution was made by David Andress in his 2009 book, 1789, The Threshold Of A New Age (please see my previous review of this book if interested for further detail). This was only one facet of Andress’s general thesis, however. The Empire Of Cotton focuses exclusively on the issue of how the miracle fiber played a key role (the author would say crucial) in the development of mass production, modern capitalist society. He makes his analysis with a masterful command of detail gained from a vast variety of primary sources, to include mundane commercial documents, bills of lading, merchant correspondence, etc. Supported by strong evidence, Beckert carefully and logically expounds his argument for cotton as the first industry to drive, then revolutionize the mechanical miracle of the 18th and 19th centuries, at first in Northern England, then spreading to North America and the European continent, and eventually involving the entire world in a systematic web of cotton cultivation, production, export and import.

Some of the authors key points include: a division of capitalism into two phases, war capitalism and industrial capitalism. The former is the earlier form, relying on naked force to appropriate territory and resources to generate capital. Two examples would be the conquest of the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade. Industrial capitalism, the latter, more modern version, largely discards the open use of force in favor of legal and social constraints designed to implement capitalist production. An example of this would be how subsistence farmers were compelled to give up their previous traditional way of life to either share crop cotton or work in mills for wages.

One of the most interesting aspects of Beckert’s analysis is his discussion of how the pre-Civil War U.S. incorporated both war and industrial capitalism, with the former represented by the agrarian, slaveholding South and the latter by the rapidly industrializing North with its wage-based economy. Beckert shows how the two systems worked synergistically to make the U.S. the chief provider of cotton to the U.K. and Europe while simultaneously ratcheting up political and economic tensions until the country ultimately tore itself apart. His analysis of the effect of the Civil War upon the cotton industry, how U.K. and other cotton manufacturers were compelled to seek alternative sources, and how this led to the eventual complete triumph of industrial capitalism worldwide is also well done. He also shows how the cotton industry eventually inverted itself, when former powerhouses as the U.K. and U.S. lost position to a once again globally dominant South, only now integrated into a comprehensive, worldwide capital system.

I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in modern history and how globalism came about.

Beckett's exploration of cotton is truly encyclopedic - this is both a blessing and curse. I wanted a mouthful of information - after reading his book, it feels like I had a firehose turned on me. Beckett's is truly a global perspective on the commodity, beginning with the domestication and cultivation of cotton in the ancient world (interestingly enough, world-wide, from Meso-America to India and southeast Asia, concluding with a discourse on the modern cotton industry, there is little left out in his his history of the crop.

But to say the book is exclusively about cotton is to miss the elegance of the book, as it is as much about the growth of the cotton industry as it is about the birth and growth of global commerce, industrialization, and capitalism. This is the real strength of the book, and is the primary reason I kept reading. The relationship of cotton production and its manufacture into a global commodity has its roots in what Beckett refers to as "war capitalism" - economic growth predicated on coercive measures be it slave labor in the Americas or child labor in the factories. With this, we see how crucial the textile industry was to the creation of modern global capitalism as international banking, shipping and competition for labor all share a common thread with the cotton industry. For example, Beckett outlines these connections when he writes, "Consider just one chain of links. ... slave-grown Mississippi cotton manufactured into yarn in Lancashire might be woven into a shirt somewhere in the Indian countryside. The empire of cotton consisted of tens of thousands of such links."

The quantitative data provided is staggering in support of his conclusions, which is another real strength of the book. The exploitative nature of capitalism is frequently criticized, which may ruffle some feathers, but Beckett supports his conclusions and inferences with strong data and solid reasoning. I give it four stars, however, for the sheer volume of detail and tremendous depth with which he explores the topic - it is simply overwhelming. Economists, economic historians or those with an interest in the commodity will no doubt find much to enjoy here. For the lay reader or those (like me) seeking broad details and outline around cotton and industry in the early and modern period will find more than enough information to suit their needs.

If you want a special view of how capitalism, capitalist economies, and much of Western
economies were created, then this is a fascinating book. In fact if you want a story that
explains how the industrial revolution was created and, especially, what supplied the
energy that enabled it to take off, then read this book. I'm tempted to call it a
"founding myth" for our modern, industrial, capitalist civilization, except that Beckert
has not written mythology; he has written a history, and it's one filled with supporting
facts and data.

If that kind of story or theory or explanation interests you, then you may also want to
read "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism", by
Edward E. Baptist. It focuses on the production of raw cotton in the United States,
whereas raw cotton is just a part of Beckert's broader story. Beckert covers a broader
picture that includes the growing and production of raw cotton, as well as how it was
delivered to the mills in England, how it was turned into yarn, how it was woven into
textiles, and how it was shipped and sold. And, since his story is a history, Beckert
describes how those processes developed and changed.

So, let's suppose that you agree with this story about how capitalist was created.
Perhaps you even are coming around to believing, as Beckert suggests, that capitalism
could not have happened without cotton. An even stronger claim is the one that this
economic and industrial system that depended on cotton could have been created without
slavery, and that there were other options. The use of slave labor for the planting,
growing, and harvesting of raw cotton could have been done with wage labor. If you accept
*that* claim, then there is no easy exoneration, even a partial one, through the claim
that without a brutal slave regime, the industrial revolution could not have gotten
started and the incredible improvement in the standard of living for so many people would
have been delayed for so many years.

The word "global" in the subtitle of Beckert's book is significant. This was perhaps the
first industry where the production of raw material, the processing of that material to
turn it into goods for end users, and the marketing and sale of those goods took place at
locations separated by vast distances. And so, as Beckert phrases it, the industry based
on cotton "meant building the first globally integrated manufacturing industry". We take
that kind of globalism for granted now. We see nothing new, strange, even noteworthy
about a production and manufacturing process that is spread across the world. But,
Beckert can make you see it for the amazing thing that it was and still is.

Another aspect of this story is that this system of production was created through war and
violence and through the use of military force, and some of the military forces that committed
that violence were private militias. Beckert summarizes this by saying that the solution
to the problem of producing the needed raw material, raw cotton, was "slaves in the
southern United States growing cotton on land expropriated from Native Americans. I've
picked one of the more sanitized and milder descriptions by Beckert. He, and Baptist
especially, give you a vivid picture of how brutal and violent that process was. It's not
a pretty picture, except for those who admire brutality and conquest, I suppose.

And, by the way, the Wikipedia page on the cotton gin is very informative on the changes
that occurred due to the increased production of cotton in the southern U.S. in the first
half of the 19th century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin.

In a large part, that rapid increase in cotton production in the U.S. was enabled by two
conditions: (1) the depopulation of large areas of land and the destruction and
elimination of Native American cultures and (2) the strong political power of Southern
planters. That political story is described in detail in Baptist's book (see above). You
can also get another perspective of that political struggle in "Team of Rivals: The
Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln", by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Growing cotton exhausts the soil it is grown in rather quickly, which encouraged planters to seek
new land that had not yet been depleted. And, that led to political pressure on the U.S.
Federal government to open more land to planters and to allow the use of slaves in those
areas. So, for those of us in the U.S., this is part of our foundation story, though it's
an aspect of our story that most of us are not proud of. Since Native Americans were
often removed from their land by the U.S. military, this was actually an early version of
a military-industrial complex, this one based on the production of cotton.

I'd say that Beckert's book can be an important part of understanding our country and its
history and its creation.

Sven Beckert inadvertently revives Confederacy's ridiculous "Cotton is King" argument.

Beckert's thesis is that the cotton industry was the centerpiece of the emergence of global capitalism in the 19th century, which by extension links capitalism to slavery. Although he weaves an engaging narrative, his argument is flawed on three levels:

(1) He never really defines what he means by the term "capitalism." His use fluctuates between extreme laissez-faire on one end, and state-supported subsidy of private manufacturers and banking on the other end - a system that serious historians of economic thought (of which Beckert is not) refer to as mercantilism. If "capitalism" means everything from pure free markets with no government intervention to managed markets in which the government is a collusive partner with the cotton industry and its financiers, then the term "capitalism" becomes a meaningless substitute for everything about economics that Beckert doesn't like.

(2) Beckert seems painfully oblivious to the avowed anti-capitalist ideology subscribed to by most slaveholders in the late antebellum. He only evinces superficial awareness of George Fitzhugh, the radical pro-slavery theorist and self-described socialist + hater of all markets. He also does not sufficiently engage with the fact that most of the British free traders were anti-slavery, including those who traded in cotton goods.

(3) There's a fundamental problem with Beckert's claim about the centrality of cotton to the rise of modern industrialization. If his thesis is true, then he has just inadvertently revived and endorsed the old "Cotton is King" argument that was advanced by the slaveowners before the Civil War. These slave proponents believed their crop was so central to the world economy that it would collapse if they were cut off from the global cotton market, and that Europe would come intervening to their rescue during the Civil War as a result of the northern blockade. Yet as we plainly know from the Civil War, none of this happened. The North's blockade cut off the cotton trade and the rest of the world went on without them, finding other sources of cotton and substitute fibers.

To summarize, Beckert actually just unwittingly made the argument why the Confederacy should have "won" the Civil War, or at least had the backing of the majority of the world's economic interests, and to top it all off he seems blissfully unaware that this absurdity is a direct implication of his conclusions.

The whole book gives off a vibe as if Beckert started from the conclusion that cotton explains the rise of "global capitalism" and worked backward from there to fill in the evidence. In some small instances this works, but as a grand unifying narrative of economic growth it seems entirely contrived. If you have strong ideological priors that lead you to distrust industrialization and "capitalism," you will probably find them confirmed in this book. Otherwise the case is unconvincing, and it's readily apparent that the author is not particularly competent in the very same economic doctrines he sets out to critique.

This very well written and exhaustively researched book is a first-rate narrative and analysis of the development of our modern economy. Beckert focuses on what was arguably the most important industry in the genesis of the modern world economy - cotton textiles. Because of the global distribution of suitable cotton species, cotton domestication and use was widespread in the pre-modern world. The great majority of cotton production was handicraft production for local or at best regional consumption. Over time, signficant proto-industrialization related to production of cotton yarn and cloth emerged in several regions with suitable climatic conditions, notably the Indian subcontinent and China. As Beckert points out, Europe was something of an exception because of inadequate climactic conditions for cotton cultivation. In the early modern period, however, expanding European-based international trade and prior proto-industrialization of cloth production for other fibers brought increasing amounts of cotton yarn and cloth production to Europe.

The expanding cotton industry in Europe was based squarely on considerable success of European expansion and imperialism. The ability of Europeans to insert themselves violently into the traditional trade networks of Asia, the acquisition of the "ghost acres" of the western hemisphere, and access to servile labor from Africa made possible the great expansion of cotton manufacturing. This introduces one of Beckert's main themes. This form of economic expansion was made possible the emergent powers of European states. Beckert stresses repeatedly the importance of state backing and power in the European economic expansion, particularly the expropriation of the western hemisphere from its native peoples and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Beckert terms this combination of expanding mercantile activity supported by the state "war capitalism." A major theme of this book is the recurrent importance of state support for early modern, 19th century, and modern capitalism. This interpretation is opposed to the common view of the emergence of capitalism as based on relatively non-interventionist states. To the extent that cotton industrialization is typical of capitalist development over the last few centuries, and it certainly is, Beckert's interpretation is very well supported.

This form of war capitalism then intersects with the emerging industrialization in Britain to create the beginnings of the modern industrial economy. This cotton complex is based on aggressive imperialism-colonialism to produce cheap fiber, reorganization of labor in the form of early factories in Britain, and the increasing articulation of a sophisticated global system of transport and credit. Beckert stresses the importance of state support in all these features. The key role of the US South is stressed. By the mid-19th century, American producers dominate cotton fiber production, forming the base for the most important European industry. The US Civil War then precipitated a global economic crisis. The loss of American cotton production and the end of American slavery resulted in wholesale economic changes.

These changes are partly responsible for the transition from war capitalism to what Beckert terms "industrial capitalism." The abandonment of slave labor, increasing mechanization in Europe, and formation of the modern working class are features of this transition. Beckert produces a particularly interesting analysis of the international correlates of this process. Again, with strong state support, there was a wholesale transformation of the countryside in many regions, India being a notable example, with the destruction of traditional peasantry and household production and its replacement by cash crops and rural consumers of factory goods. Beckert shows the often negative consequences, particularly the loss of food security that accompanied this process.

But, this process contained some of the seeds of its own destruction. Proletarianization in Europe was followed by the development of labor movements and increasingly democratic societies. This eventually results in rising labor costs and movement of factories to the low labor cost zones. With some state support, Japanese industrialization being an excellent example, non-European states or proto-states (India) develop their own cotton industries. Again, state support is a key to this process of the spread of industrialization. In an ironic way, this is true even of the industrialization fostered by Communist states such as the Soviet Union and China, whose policies mirrored many aspects of the colonial transformation of the countryside in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Beckert concludes with an interesting commentary on more recent developments in the post-WWII era. He makes the interesting point that the spread of global capitalism, with its relatively uniform legal and financial systems, allows large firms a certain amount of freedom from the state.

As mentioned above, this is a very well written book and the depth of research is impressive. Beckert's general interpretations are supported well and he has many shrewd observations about aspects of this process. The bibliography is excellent. There are a couple of minor points where Beckert is, I think, a bit off target. He correctly stresses the role of aggressive imperialism in acquiring the lands needed for cotton cultivation in the western hemisphere. He never mentions, however, that the European dominance of the Americas was a windfall made possible by the epidemiologic isolation of Native American peoples. Partly because he is focused on the economics of cotton textiles and the development of modern capitalism, I think he underestimates the at least semi-independent role played by the western scientific tradition in the emergence of industrialization.

Sven Beckert's "Empire of Cotton" and Humes work "The Slave Trade" are the bookends on the subject of slavery, that every American and particularly every Black American should read and have in their library. These two works are the definitive scholarly portrayals of the history of the slave trade and of cotton's importance in reviving slavery and the slave trade in America, after it was prohibited in England and France and in many States in the America. Bekert's work in particular, will make you realize how our public shcool and college textbook discussions of the industrial revolution in Britain and in America were not built upon mechanization, but rather on the need of those machines - for an ever increasing quantity of cotton and how that raw material could not be acquired in such amounts in an ever increasing demand for lower prices, except by slavery and of Great Britain's industrialization link to the financing and mortgaging of slavery in America. Both of these books turn the politically correct versions, as taught in academia, on their heads. You cannot understand 19th Century and its antecedent history unless you have read these seminal works on the topic, which approach the subject from two different angles.

This book tells you everything you could ever want to know about cotton production, it has been widely praised and won prizes. I almost feel guilty with my criticism, however the book is very heavy going and goes into unbelievably minute detail on the cotton industry. I will never regret reading it but it is quite a slog at times, the book argues that cotton and slavery are the engines of the industrial revolution and he manages to convince me. I just wish there were more tables and less verbiage. The book is encyclopedic with no detail left out.

Ranging from seventeenth-century Indian villages to nineteenth-century English textile mills, this is an informative if biased global history of cotton. Sven Beckert reminds us early and often about the nefarious drawbacks of global capitalism -- "the realities of slavery, expropriation, and colonialism" (p. xviii), "slavery, colonial domination, militarized trade, and land expropriations" (p. 60), "the many spoils of imperial expansion" (p. 81), "the newly global, dynamic, and violent form of capitalism" (p. 84), "the onslaught of European merchant capital" (p. 131) and--just in case you didn't get the message--"a vast and impenetrable machine, a painfully efficient mechanism for profit and power" (p. 135). Like George W. Bush, professor Beckert doesn't do nuance. The book totes up all the costs but none of the benefits of an industry that -- in addition to its undoubted dark side, such as involvement with the African slave trade and plantation slavery in the American South -- has provided employment to millions of workers and comfortable clothing to billions of consumers. In his haste to indict capitalism, Beckert misleads readers on important topics. For example he conflates the "dark satanic mills" of 19th century England (which employed indigent paupers) with the textile factories of New England where acute labor shortages forced capitalists to attract workers (mostly young unmarried women living on farms) by providing reasonably good wages, working conditions, and living conditions. Worth reading, but read with caution.

Growing up in a sharecropper's family, and owing my education to the cultivation of cotton, I looked forward to listening (I listened to it on Audible) this book. Honestly I was disappointed for a number of reasons. 1st, and perhaps with good reason, Beckert spent almost no time on the actual growing of cotton. He gave some lip service to the historical stereotypes of the plantation agriculture, but was far more concerned with the manufacture of cotton textiles than with cotton production. This is the 1st book of his I have read, but it seemed that he approached his subject with a Marxist template: capitalism is always bad, and subsistence production is better than any other kind. When you listen to the book (it was read well, by the way) it contains a constant stream of statistics, percentages, and numerical representations. I think I would have believed him even if he had left out half of them. Another distressing aspect is his shallow handling of the sharecropper system. If he ever spoke with anyone who lived as a sharecropper (there are plenty of us around) it was not apparent. He also "blamed" cotton production for the westward expansion of Americans, ignored the fact that the peoples displaced by cotton agriculture had displaced others who preceded them, and seemed to think that a 12 to 14 hour work day is inhuman. While there has been no shortage of inhuman working conditions throughout history, I, like the migrant construction workers building houses on my street, was glad to be able to work those hours. More work meant more money and a better living. Absolutely no attention was given to mechanization in cotton production, nor to chemical and genetic discoveries that made lint production sky-rocket. Finally, perhaps it is the arrogance of chronology, but Beckert seemed to measure by-gone eras and ancient societies by standards of our century. I guess we all do this, but we shouldn't. The book is more a critique of capitalism than anything else, with "its cotton's fault that the world is capitalist" thrown in.