Empire of Cotton: A Global History

by Sven Beckert

The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality to the world economy, and its making and remaking of global capitalism.

Cotton is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, yet understanding its history is key to understanding the origins of modern capitalism. Sven Beckert’s rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world. Here is the story of how, beginning well before the advent of machine production in the 1780s, these men captured ancient trades and skills in Asia, and combined them with the expropriation of lands in the Americas and the enslavement of African workers to crucially reshape the disparate realms of cotton that had existed for millennia, and how industrial capitalism gave birth to an empire, and how this force transformed the world.

The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. The result is a book as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Economics, World History, Politics, Business, American History

640 pages, Hardcover

First published October 21, 2014

About the author

The Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University, Sven Beckert is co-chair of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard and co-chair of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History. Professor Beckert researches and teaches the history of the United States in the 19th century, with a particular emphasis on the history of capitalism, including its economic, social, political, and transnational dimensions. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, among others.

Reviews

[Maziyar Yf · Rating 4 out of 5]

اسون بکرت استاد برجسته تاریخ آمریکا در دانشگاه هاروارد و مورخ قرن نوزدهم آمریکا است . مطالعات و تحقیقات او بیشتر تاریخ سرمایه‌داری، از جمله ابعاد اقتصادی، اجتماعی، سیاسی و جهانی آن را شامل می شود
امپراتوری پنبه تاریخ جهانی معروفترین کتاب اوست .این کتاب داستان تجارت جهانی پنبه و تأثیر آن بر اقتصاد جهانی را روایت می‌کند. کتاب او راوی مبارزه دائمی جهانی بین بردگان و ارباب ها ، بازرگانان و دولتمردان، کارگران و صاحبان کارخانه است . بکرت تلاش کرده چگونگی ورود آنان را به دنیای سرمایه داری و سرمایه داری مدرن را شرح دهد .
اهمیت پنبه و تجارت آن :
تا زمانی که تجارت نفت در قرن بیستم شروع شد، پنبه برای قرن های متوالی مهم‌ترین محصول بوده. پنبه عامل اصلی انقلاب صنعتی در ایالات متحده و بریتانیا بود. پنبه برای ساخت منسوجات استفاده می‌شد که برای لباس و سایر محصولات ضروری بودند.
تجارت پنبه در قرن نوزدهم به اوج خود رسید. این امر به دلایلی مانند صنعتی شدن، که منجر به افزایش تولید پارچه شد و توسعه کشت پنبه در مناطق جنوبی آمریکا و سرانجام افزایش جمعیت که نیاز به پنبه را بیشتر می کرد رُخ داد .
روال تجارت پنبه در قرن نوزدهم به این صورت بود که :
پنبه در مزارع در سراسر جهان کشت می‌شد اما مزارع پنبه در قرن نوزدهم عمدتاً در جنوب آمریکا واقع شده بودند. ایالت‌های جنوبی آمریکا، به ویژه ایالت‌های آلاباما، آرکانزاس، فلوریدا، جورجیا، لوئیزیانا، میسیسیپی، میسوری، ، تنسی و تگزاس، مرکز مزارع پنبه بودند . در سال ۱۸۶۰، جنوب حدود دو سوم پنبه جهان را تولید می‌کرد . پنبه از مزارع غالبا در جنوب آمریکا ابتدا با ناوگان تجاری انگلیس به لیورپول و سایر بنادر انگلستان ، سپس به کارخانه‌های نساجی بیشتر در انگلستان ، سپس در فرانسه و پروس و سرانجام در سراسر جهان منتقل می‌شد .
در کارخانه‌های نساجی، پنبه به پارچه تبدیل شده و پارچه از کارخانه‌های نساجی به کشورهای مختلف صادر می‌شد که البته بیشتر این حمل و نقل ها هم با کشتی های انگلیسی بود .
نقش پنبه در توسعه فناوری :
بکرت نقش کلیدی پنبه در توسعه فناوری‌های جدید قرن نوزده را کامل شرح داده . فناوری هایی که می توان آن ها را شامل ماشین‌آلات کشاورزی، ماشین‌آلات نساجی و روش‌های جدید فرآوری پنبه دانست . یکی از مهم ترین این فناوری ها ، اختراع ماشین بخار بوده که تولید پنبه را کاملا دگرگون کرد . هم چنین پنبه زیر ساخت های حمل و نقل ریلی و دریایی به ویژه در آمریکا و انگلستان را هم کاملا تغییر داد
سرمایه داری جنگی و سرمایه داری صنعتی
مفهوم دیگری که بکرت به آن پرداخته و کوشیده آنرا شرح دهد سرمایه داری جنگی ایست . سرمایه داری جنگی را می توان استفاده از جنگ برای کسب سود اقتصادی، که می‌تواند شامل مواردی مانند گرفتن بازارهای جدید ، غارت منابع طبیعی ، استفاده از نیروی کار اجباری ، استفاده از جنگ برای حمایت از منافع تجاری باشد تعریف کرد. با استفاده از تعریف کامل بکرت ، امپراتوری بریتانیا و آمریکا را می توان نمونه کاملی از سرمایه داری جنگی دانست .
در برابر شرایط سرمایه داری جنگی که در آمریکا و به ویژه در جنوب آن حاکم بود بکرت سرمایه گذاری صنعتی در اروپا ( انگلستان ، فرانسه و پروس ) را هم بررسی کرده ، سرمایه داری صنعتی را بکرت این گونه تعریف کرده :
سرمایه‌داری صنعتی یک مرحله از توسعه سرمایه‌داری است که با ظهور ماشین‌آلات و کارخانه‌ها در قرن هجدهم آغاز شد. این مرحله با افزایش تولید و بهره‌وری همراه بود که منجر به رشد اقتصادی و رفاه شد. سرمایه‌داری صنعتی با ویژگی‌هایی مانند مالکیت خصوصی ابزارهای تولید ، کسب سود و رقابت شناخته می شود .
سرمایه‌داری صنعتی منجر به تغییرات بسیار عمده‌ای در جامعه شد . این تغییرات شامل ظهور طبقه کارگرو جدال آن با صاحبان کارخانه ها یا طبقه سرمایه‌دار ، رشد شدید شهر نشینی شد . مانند همیشه این تغییرات بیشتر در انگلستان و سپس آمریکا دیده شد .
بکرت به شرایط غیر انسانی کارگران در سرمایه داری صنعتی هم پرداخته ، شرایطی که گرچه بسیار دشوار بوده اما به مراتب از شرایط وحشتناک برده ها بهتر بوده و از آن مهمتر پتانسیل پیشرفت و بهبود را هم داشته . بکرت شرایط کار کارگران را هم شرح داده ، شرایطی بسیار سخت و دشوار ، آنها اغلب مجبور بودند در شرایط خطرناک و نامناسب کار کنند. ساعت‌های کاربسیار طولانی و حقوق هم ناچیز وتنها برای زنده ماندن کافی بوده .
اما شرایط سخت کارگران در سرمایه‌داری صنعتی منجر به اعتراضات و جنبش‌های کارگری شد. دلایلی مانند ظهور اتحادیه‌های کارگری و اصلاحات قانونی سبب به وجود آمدن جنبش هایی شد که برای بهبود شرایط کار کارگران تلاش کردند. شرایط کار کارگران در سرمایه‌داری صنعتی با تلاش‌های کارگران و جنبش‌های کارگری به تدریج بهبود یافت. این جنبش‌ها برای بهبود شرایط کار کارگران، مانند کاهش ساعت‌های کار، افزایش حقوق، بهبود ایمنی و ایجاد مزایای اجتماعی و از همه مهمتر بهبود شرایط کار کودکان تلاش کردند.
پنبه و تجارت آن گویی در تمامی ابعاد زندگی انسان نقش مهم و حیاتی داشته. بکرت در کتاب جنبه های مختلف نقش پنبه را شرخ داده . نقشهایی گوناگون و مختلف که سبب حیرت خواننده می شوند .
پنبه و برده داری :
نقش پنبه را نمی توان همواره مثبت و هم جهت با پیشرفت و توسعه دانست ، پنبه نقش کلیدی هم در توسعه برده داری و هم در جنگ داخلی آمریکا داشت ، جنگی که با پایان برده داری ، باید فرجام پنبه ارزان را هم را اعلام می کرد .
در قرن هجدهم، پنبه یکی از محصولات اصلی ایالات متحده تبدیل شد. رشد تقاضا برای پنبه منجر به افزایش تقاضا برای نیروی کار برده شد. بردگان به دلیل ارزان بودن و انعطاف‌پذیری‌شان، برای کشت پنبه انتخاب مناسبی بودند.. در سال 1860، بیش از 3 میلیون برده در مزارع پنبه در جنوب ایالات متحده کار می‌کردند. این تعداد بیش از نیمی از کل جمعیت برده در ایالات متحده بود .
برده داری سبب شکافی عمیق میان شمال و جنوب آمریکا شد . برده داران در جنوب ایالات متحده از برده داری به عنوان منبع اصلی قدرت و ثروت خود و ایجاد یک سیستم سیاسی که از منافع آنها محافظت می‌کرد، استفاده می‌کردند در حالی که در شمال ایالات متحده، برده داری به سرعت در حال کاهش بود. این اختلافات در مورد برده داری منجر به ایجاد شکاف عمیقی بین شمال و جنوب ایالات متحده شد. در نهایت، این شکاف منجر به جنگ داخلی آمریکا شد.
در طول جنگ داخلی تولید پنبه در آمریکا به شدت کم شد ، از این جا که کمبود پنبه سبب بسته شدن انبوه کارخانه های اروپایی و خطر بیکار شدن میلیون ها اروپایی شده بود ، اروپایی ها به به دنبال منابع جدیدی برای تأمین پنبه مورد نیاز خود بودند . در این دوره، کشورهای اروپایی به کشورهایی مانند مصر، هند ، چین و مکزیک روی آوردند.
بکرت به موانع تولید در هریک از کشورها ی نام برده شده پرداخته ، موانعی مانند ابتدایی بودن شبکه حمل و نقل تا مقاومت بومیان کشورها به کاشت پنبه تا نبود بندر مناسب برای حمل و نقل دریایی . سرمایه گذاری اروپایی ها سرانجام سبب افزایش تولید پنبه دراین کشورها و حتی توسعه اقتصادی آنان شد . در نتیجه این عوامل، اروپا توانست نیاز خود به پنبه آمریکا را در طول جنگ داخلی تأمین کند.
بکرت سپس به آمریکا پس از جنگ باز می گردد ،آمریکا که برده داری در آن دیگر غیر قانونی شده بود . پس از جنگ داخلی ، پنبه مجددا به یکی از محصولات اصلی کشاورزی آمریکا تبدیل شد. با این حال، با پایان برده داری، اقتصاد جنوب دچار دگرگونی شد. برده‌داران سابق مجبور شدند برای تأمین نیروی کار مزارع پنبه خود به روش‌های جدیدی روی بیاورند. در ابتدا، آنها از کارگران آزاد سفیدپوست استفاده کردند. با این حال، این کارگران اغلب از شرایط سخت کار در مزارع پنبه ناراضی بودند و دستمزدهای پایینی دریافت می‌کردند. در نتیجه، برده‌داران سابق به استفاده ازبردگان سابق و کارگران سیاه‌پوست آزاد فعلی روی آوردند. . گرچه شرایط کار سیاهان در مزارع پنبه پس از جنگ داخلی آمریکا به طور کلی بهبود یافت. آنها دستمزد می‌گرفتند و می‌توانستند به دنبال کار دیگری باشند.. در این دوره، قوانینی نیز برای حمایت از حقوق کارگران سیاه‌پوست تصویب شد. با این حال، این قوانین به طور کامل اجرا نمی‌شدند و سیاهان هنوز هم با تبعیض و خشونت روبرو بودند.
افول امپراتوری پنبه
امپراتوری پنبه پس از جنگ داخلی آمریکا، کاهش نیاز اروپا به پنبه آمریکا و بهبود شرایط کار برده ها به تدریج رو به افول رفت . در نتیجه این عوامل، تولید پنبه در ایالات متحده به شدت کاهش یافت. این امر منجر به کاهش اهمیت پنبه در اقتصاد ایالات متحده شد و به افول امپراتوری پنبه کمک کرد . در سایر نقاط جهان، کشورهایی مانند هند، چین و برزیل به تولیدکنندگان اصلی پنبه تبدیل شدند. افول امپراتوری پنبه تأثیرات قابل توجهی بر ایالات متحده و جهان داشت. این امر منجر به کاهش اهمیت اقتصادی جنوب کشور و افزایش اهمیت شمال کشور شد.
کتاب عظیم اسون بکرت، با نتیجه‌گیری در مورد اهمیت پنبه و تأثیرات آن بر جهان به پایان می‌رسد . بکرت پنبه را یک محصول مهم و تأثیرگذار در جهان می داند که بر زندگی میلیون‌ها نفر تأثیر گذاشته است. این محصول گرچه به توسعه اقتصاد و فرهنگ کشورهای مختلف کمک کرده اما همچنین به استثمار و تبعیض کارگران پنبه‌کار نیز منجر شده است .

در پایان کتاب حجیم بکرت را تنها می توان شاهکار دانست ، او خواننده را با دگرگونی های عظیمی که پنبه و تجارت آن سبب شدند آشنا کرده . این تغییرات و دامنه اثر آنها به اندازه ای ایست که خواننده را مبهوت می کند ، گویی که هیچ بخشی از زندگی گذشتگان از گزند پنبه در امان نبوده است . هنر بکرت را باید ستود ، او با کلامی ساده و روشن و با استفاده از داده های آماری ، تقریبا تمامی ابعاد عظیم پنبه را بیان کرده است .

[zed · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating subject and I learnt a lot. The author has backed his sources with a huge 140 pages of footnotes. The text itself is "only" 448 pages.

Coming in I could not wait to start but in the end found myself happy to end. In my opinion as informative as this book is the author is not that good a writer. His lack of economy in his words and his ability to repeat himself became annoying. For example "the white gold" was used instead of just "cotton" so often it became a distraction. Very early I actually thought at times it read as a translation such was the convoluted text and the length of some sentences. To have to reread long tracts just to get the point was disappointing to say the least.

After reading the Acknowledgment's I suspect that the author may have done most of his own editing and I think that that was a mistake. I like to think that, even though a lay reader, dense tomes such as this do not bother me but sadly this one just became at times tedious.

In the end though this is no doubt a more than a useful book to any that have an interest in the global history of cotton and how it fits into the capitalist world. It is a book that is an indictment of colonialism, forced labour, slavery, child labour, etc. Unfortunately, as the author highlights towards the end of the book, there are still issues in this area in cotton production to this very day. For all my editing complaints I can see me delving into this book periodically to reinforce certain points of view I may have.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cotton: The Fabric of our lives abject human misery

In the words of the author:

This book is the story of the rise and fall of the European-dominated empire of cotton. But because of the centrality of cotton, its story is also the story of the making and remaking of the global capitalism and with it of the modern world...Following cotton, as we shall see, will lead us to the origins of the modern world, industrialization, rapid and continuous economic growth, enormous productivity increase, and staggering social inequality.

It is a truly astounding story. One that spans centuries, continents, and world orders. This simple plant turned the wheel of global commerce and kicked off the Industrial Revolution, enhanced the value of slaves, and drove Empires to expand their domain. It is a ubiquitous and oft overlooked plant product ("Cotton is as familiar as it is unknown. We take its perpetual presence for granted. We wear it close to our skin. We sleep under it. We swaddle our newborns in it."). But make no mistake, cotton was THE engine of industrial development and global commerce. "By 1900 about 1.5 percent of the human populations – millions of men, women, and children – were engaged in the industry, either growing, transporting, or manufacturing cotton."

Beckert weaves the story of cotton (pun probably subconsciously intended) through many centuries, from its humble beginnings as a domestically used product ("While some growers sold their raw cotton into markets, including long-distance markets, and many rulers forced cultivators to part with some of their crop as tribute, no growers depended on their cotton crops alone; instead they diversified their economic opportunities, hoping to lessen risk to the best of their ability.") to the fulcrum the world turned on to the present day where the sins of cotton's past persist, albeit without the bayonet of Empire to enforce its cruelty.

While this book is about the history of cotton, it is just as much about the evolution of the international capitalist order which at its inception revolved around cotton and cotton manufacturing. Take Britain for example, the origin of this revolution:

The growth of cotton manufacturing soon made it the center of the British economy. In 1770, cotton manufacturing had made up just 2.6 percent of the value added in the economy as a whole. By 1801 it accounted for 17 percent, and by 1831, 22.4 percent. This compared to the iron industry’s share of 6.7 percent, coal’s 7 percent, and woolen’s 14.1 percent. In Britain as early as 1795, 340,000 people worked in the spinning industry. By 1830, one in six workers in Britain labored in cottons.

Cotton was a major driver in wealth generation and employment (and by extension social stability). Hence the government's interest in growing this sector. But such things are easier said than done.

As late as 1791, most of the cotton grown for manufacturing purposes around the world was produced by small farmers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and consumed locally. When cotton manufacturing exploded in Great Britain, it was unclear where enough cotton would come from to feed its hungry factories.

So where was cotton to feed this ravenous beast to be found? Overseas of course:

Rapidly expanding factories consumed cotton so fast that only the exigencies of war capitalism could secure the necessary reallocation of land and labor. As a result, indigenous people and land grabbing settlers, slaves and planters, local artisans and factory owners woke to a new century clouded by a constant, if one sides, state of war…it was coercion that opened fresh lands and mobilized new labor, becoming the essential ingredient of the emerging empire of cotton...Slavery, in other words, was as essential to the new empire of cotton as proper climate and good soil. It was slavery that allowed planters to respond rapidly to rising prices and expanding markets. Slavery allowed not only for the mobilization of very large numbers of workers on very short notice, but also for a regime of violent supervision and virtually ceaseless exploitation that matched the needs of a crop that was, in the cold language of economists, “effort intensive”.

This system, to a degree, fed itself in a chain of self sustaining economic relationships:

The beating heart of this new system was slavery. The deportation of many millions of Africans to the Americas intensified connections to India because it increased the pressure to secure more cotton clothe. It was that trade that established a more significant European mercantile presence in Africa. And it was that trade that made it possible to give economic value to the vast territory in the Americas, and thus to overcome Europe’s own resource constraints...

Powerful states, rulers, and bureaucrats depended on strong national industries, which in turn depended on raw materials and markets - for such industries produced wealth that could be taxed, and provided employment for millions, all of which in turn increased social stability and further strengthened the state.

An interesting theme that permeated that book was how this primarily Western system overcame various supply chain bottlenecks, be it on the supply side, processing, manufacturing, or the distribution. Specialized roles developed within this system to ease the flow of goods and information across vast distances. Though probably the most crucial opening of bottlenecks was the cotton gin:

Overnight, his machine increased ginning productivity by a factor of fifty. News of the innovation spread quickly; farmers everywhere built copies of the gin. Like the jenny and the water frame, Eli’s gin overcame yet another bottleneck in the production of cotton textiles. As a result, in what can only be described as a “cotton rush,” land on which cotton grew allegedly trebled in price after the invention of the gin, and “the annual income of those who plant it is double what it was before the introduction of cotton.”

The impact of this development was a monumental increase in demand for land and labor (slaves):

In South Carolina, the number of slaves in the upcountry cotton growing districts grew from 21,000 in 1790 to 70,000 twenty years later, including 15,000 slaves newly brought from Africa. As cotton plantation spread, the proportion of slaves in four typical South Carolina upcountry counties increased from 18.4 percent in 1790 to 39.5 percent in 1820 and to 61.1 percent in 1860. All the way to the Civil War, cotton and slavery would expand in lockstep, as Great Britain and the United States had become the twin hubs of the emerging empire of cotton.

While Britain was the center of cotton manufacturing, America quickly ascended to the role of world supplier of raw cotton thanks to a confluence of conditions: ready supply of (forced) labor, excellent climate and soil conditions, and governments willing to support the cotton growers.

With support of southern politicians, the federal government aggressively secured new territories by acquiring land from foreign powers and from forced cessation by Native Americans...Indeed, by 1850, 67 percent of U.S. cotton grew on land that had not been part of the United States half a century earlier. The fledgling U.S. government had inaugurated the military-cotton complex.

Cotton production and manufacturing became increasing linked to the perpetuation of slavery in America. That meant that social stability in Great Britain was maintained through the subjugation of African slaves in America:

Cotton manufacturers understood that their prosperity was entirely dependent on the labor of slaves and they “dreaded the severity of the revulsion which must sooner, or later arrive.” By 1850, one British observer estimated that 3.5 million people in the United Kingdom were employed by the country’s cotton industry - all subject to the whims of American planters and their tenuous hold on their nation’s politics...

One author boldly estimated that in 1862, fully 20 million people worldwide - one out of every 65 people alive - were involved in the cultivation of cotton or the production of cotton cloth. In England alone...the livelihood of between one-fifth and one-fourth of the population was based on the industry.

Southern planters knew this and it was their presumed self-importance on the world economic stage that likely contributed to their rebellion during the American Civil War:

Southern planters, convinced of their central role in the global economy, gleefully announced that they had held ‘THE LEVER THAT WIELDS THE DESTINY OF MODERN CIVILIZATION”. As the American Cotton Planter put it in 1853, “The slave-labor if the United States, has hitherto conferred and is still conferring inappreciable blessings on mankind. If these blessings continue, slave-labor must also continue, for it is idle to talk of producing Cotton for the world’s supply with free labor. It has never yet been successfully grown by voluntary labor.”

And it wasn't just Southern Planters that benefited from slavery in America. Slavery, driven by cotton production, was a boon to northern manufactures and (most illuminating to me) Northern financial interests."...In Louisiana 88 percent of loans secured by mortgages used slaves as (partial) collateral; in South Carolina it was 82 percent. In total...hundreds of millions of dollars of capital was secured by property in humans. Slavery thus allowed not just for the rapid allocation of labor, but also for a swift allocation of capital."

But if there is one thing the history of cotton has shown is how nimble the sector can be. Even before the Civil War cotton manufacturers were looking elsewhere to supply the cotton mills with a stable supply. You may sleep, but capital never does. It is always searching for a less expensive source of raw inputs for its processes. The dominance of Southern Planters never recovered from the Civil War even if they remained a major world supplier

I think it is rather telling that the great industrial revolution kicked off by cotton was very much dependent on government involvement. From providing trade protections, to securing new land for exploitation, to enforcing slavery and favorable labor conditions, to investing in infrastructure governments, just as much as private capital, expanded the frontiers of the cotton empire. This is a story we don't often tell about economic history. It was government bureaucrats as much as merchants and industrialists that gave birth to modern industrial capitalism. The link between the state's ability to use coercive forces (both physical and legal) coupled with the wealth and social stability industrialists brought formed a very powerful force that dominated much of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

I think the most surprising thing I learned from this book was the massive shift in work patterns the advent of the cotton empire brought about. Both on the industrial side and the supply side:

The ability to move workers into factories became key to the cotton empire’s triumph...Convincing thousands of people to give up the only way of life they had known was no less complex than installing new machines. Both required...certain legal, social, and political conditions...

More often than not, though, workers lost access to land and, faced with the decline of household manufacturing, moved from the countryside into cities. Indeed, cotton industrialization led to huge migrations, often across national borders...

The vast majority of workers, however, were not skilled and were not recruited; rather, they were driven into factories by changing conditions within the countryside, and especially by the decline of goods made at home that could no longer compete with those made in factories...

Consequently, children were often the first to enter factory employment… Up to half of cotton workers were children, coerced by their parents, who in turn were coerced by the new economic reality. Children were cheap - their wages amounted to between one-third and one-fourth of those paid to adults - relatively obedient, and unlikely to object to extremely repetitive and dull tasks, and if they did they could be more easily punished than adults.

Patterns of economic life that had persisted for centuries were rapidly upended by the industrialization that cotton manufacturing had initiated resulting in a massive labor pool available to manufacturers.

On the supply side the consequences were arguably devastating. Historically cotton had been a household grown crop to provide some cash or inputs for domestically produced good. It was merely a portion of a sustenance farmer's portfolio. But the empire of cotton cannot thrive on production of those levels. Major changes in cotton production were needed to diversify the world cotton supply:

In Egypt, as in India and the United States, the expansion of cotton agriculture was a direct result of the powerful interventions of the state. A redefinition of property rights in the last third of the nineteenth century made possible a massive redistribution of land away from villages and nomadic peoples to the well-connected owners of huge estates.

Many peasants across the globe were forced off their land or required to grow some portion of their harvest as a cash crop for monetary taxes. As a result the production levels of cotton rose but at the expense of food security.

What wage workers, tenants, and sharecroppers had in common was that they had lost access to subsistence agriculture - basic production and consumption now depended on global markets. While “cotton [was once] a subordinate product” and “the ryot [did] not neglect the raising of food for the sake of cotton, however high its price may be, for in doing so he runs the risk of starvation,” by the late 19th century millions of rural cultivators became primarily dependent on cotton.

The consequences of this shift was widespread and deadly.

Their [peasant cotton farmers] incomes, and quite literally their survival, were now linked to global price fluctuations over which they had no control. All too often, the only response open to farmers with little control over the land was to grow more cotton to make up for the lost income due to falling prices - which resulted in a glut of cotton...

Specializing in cotton could result in disaster, as in the 1870’s famine, which was not caused by a lack of food (indeed, food grains continued to be exported from Berara), but by the inability of the poorest agricultural laborers to buy urgently needed food grains. In India alone, between 6 and 10 million people died in the famines of the late 1870’s...High prices made food unavailable to many peasants and agricultural laborers, and during the 1900 famine another 8.5% of the population of Berara dies, with the greatest numbers of deaths occurring in districts most specialized in cotton production. Landless agricultural workers and former weavers in particular suffered...

These escalating focus on cotton growing, as elsewhere, had a grave impact on food security. Like other cotton-growing areas of the world, central Asia now became dependent on food imports, while at the same time peasants’ incomes became “highly vulnerable to fluctuations in” the cotton market. By WWI, the recast class structure, along with a huge deficit in food crops thanks to the reorientation of local agriculture towards cash crops, produced terrible famines, resulting in significant depopulation. In Turkestan, for example, the population fell by 1.3 million people, or 18.5%, between 1914 and 1921.

Personally these numbers just boggle my mind. This was by no means a goal of the cotton empire (such as it is) but a consequence of the economic incentives that industrial capitalism can create. It may create greater wealth but it does not equally distribute gains or losses equally, cotton merely being a salient example of these consequences. And we are still seeing the devastating results of this emphasis on cotton as a monocultural crop:

Some nations...have policies in place to force farmers to produce cotton, despite its often devastating environmental and financial consequences. Uzbekistan, for instance, one of the globe’s top ten cotton exporters, continues to force its farming population to grow cotton despite the fact that the need to irrigate its dry lands has essentially drained the Aral Sea and turned much of the country into virtual salt flats.

The pursuit of cotton and profit has driven empires and expansion, enslaved millions of people, driven indigenous people of their ancestral land, altered historic work patterns of countless people, and bound together the global economy in a way never seen before in human events. It is a story that produces in awe when viewed as a whole, as well as revulsion and, at least in my case, powerlessness. The forces that drove this Empire to its very heights are not unique to cotton, but are an embedded part of a wide global flow of capital and commerce. Cotton was merely the first. Where countries once concerned themselves over securing adequate cotton supplies ("At the same time, the general notion of “raw material independence” became an increasingly important political goal for policy makers and capitalists in Europe and Japan. The idea of securing cotton on lands controlled by imperial states gained traction. As a result, the global cotton “commodity frontier” was pushed into even more numerous areas of the world.") they now concern themselves with oil and energy supplies. Where British workers and industrialists turned a blind eye to American slavery because it was convenient for them (“When the price [of cotton] rises in the English market,” he [John Brown, a fugitive slave] remembered “the poor slaves immediately feel the effects, for they are harder driven, and the whip is kept more constantly going.”) the Western consumer typically turns a blind eye to the conditions of Third World manufacturing environments because it is convenient for us. While cotton may not be the fulcrum the world turns on, its sins can still be found across the world in other industries. Even slavery, which according to our history books was banished in America in 1865 and world-wide in subsequent decades, persists and supplies the developed world with many goods and services that make up our modern consumer experience (to see how many Slaves you indirectly support, visit Slavery Footprint; the results are depressing but probably pretty accurate).

To conclude, this was a stupendous and wide ranging book. Beckert does an excellent job of walking the reader through all these interlocking relationships and changes the evolution of the empire of cotton brought about. It was understandable without being oversimplified. He had an expensive bibliography and was always quick to point to a primary source to back up his claims. He was restrained in moral judgement, letting the facts speak for themselves about the misery and subjugation that resulted from the empire of cotton. This was a highly engaging, informative, and enlightening book that made me reexamine my perspective of world history. Its place on my Six Star shelf is well deserved. I cannot recommend this book enough to anyone interested in history or economics.

[Faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can see this book being used in an economics or history class, however for the casual reader it is exhaustingly comprehensive. I had no idea that cotton has played such a significant role in the development of nations and the global economy. This book was too long, but it was certainly educational.

[Sara Salem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hands down one of the best books I read this year. He shows how capitalism, slavery, cotton and colonization have all been intricately connected to one another for centuries. A must-read!!!

[Charles Haywood · Rating 2 out of 5]

“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.

[Jerrod · Rating 2 out of 5]

I chose to read this book based on a glowing review from The Economist. I am unclear why the review was glowing. I have no reason to doubt the facts presented in the book. In fact, it may even be a good introductory source to the history of the cotton market. I had to abandon this book due to the constant historical theorizing that did not seem to hold water. My review is based on reading the first 3 chapters (plus the preface). Beckert only showed a layman’s grasp of economics and did not engage any type of counterfactual analysis, which would have been beneficial, and he seems to try to explain all of the events via singular causes (e.g. cotton or war capitalism). While I do not remember him saying it explicitly, Beckert seems to imply that “war capitalism” was necessary for the leap to industrial capitalism. Given the importance he places on war capitalism, I don’t think Beckert would refute this. It is with regard to this hypothesis (Beckert’s central claim) that counterfactual analysis would have been most useful. This book shows the weakness of mono-causal explanations of historical phenomena.

Two things stand out in the chapter "Building War Capitalism". First, it seems that had the European state-sponsored merchants not tried to create direct links to Indian fabric producers, non-state sponsored merchants would have (Beckert notes that weavers had to be monitored so that they would not sell their product to other private European merchants). Second, Beckert makes a big deal about the importance of protectionism (e.g. bans on the importation of Indian cotton fabric). He says that this is what encouraged the European infant cotton weaving industry. Yet, for some reason, European cotton manufacturers felt the need to improve their fabric and use the weaving technologies from Asia “in order to compete on price and on quality with Indian producers” (p.49). This is said in the context of Europeans’ preference for Indian cotton, but even if this were in the context of the export market, Beckert is making the claim the importation restrictions are what drove the growth of the industry. This cannot be the case if it is export market that is driving innovation.

In the chapter “Wages of War Capitalism”, Beckert provides a few reasons why he thinks the industrial revolution didn’t begin in Asia. This is quite the puzzle for Beckert since he believes cotton is central to the industrial revolution, especially since the Chinese had developed a water-powered weaving system in the 14th century. One reason that he thinks Asia did not industrialize first is that there were many intermediaries in getting cotton. This is how things started off with the Europeans, but the policy of war capitalism shortened their supply chains (so he claims). As noted above, however, it did not take the conquest of the sub-continent to get rid of the middlemen. Instead, European merchants made direct contact with cotton suppliers. It is unclear why the peoples in Asia could not shorten the supply chain, and Beckert does not give any reason for why the cotton supply chain remained inefficient for so long. Beckert also says that one reason the factory model did not originate in Asia is because of the lack of opportunities for women outside the home. Now if Beckert wants to make a cultural argument that Asian attitudes towards women were different than those of Europeans and that these attitudes forced women to stay in the home, he may be on somewhat solid ground. But this is different than his war capitalism story. If he does not want to make the cultural argument, then Beckert has to explain why an entrepreneur could not set up factory, pay slightly higher wages than the women would have earned weaving at home, and make a huge profit. He also has to explain why war capitalism was necessary to shorten the supply chain, allow women out of the house, and lead to innovation. Economists explain these phenomena with reference to different institutions, but Beckert has already disavowed that route.

One thing that is left unclear (and which may be explained later in the book) is why did the industrial revolution occur in Britain? Beckert says that it is because Britain embraced war capitalism more than any other nation, but it seems if war capitalism is the key ingredient, Spain and Portugal had a head start in that arena. The French were also adept at the war capitalism game. Also, why was it that the Europeans made the journey to Asia rather than the reverse?

Least favorite quote of the book: "northern Italians and southern Germans failed at least in part because they had not subjugated those people who supplied them with cotton" --- NO

Good blog post on the relation between slavery and the rise of capitalism:
http://bradleyahansen.blogspot.com/20...
http://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/11/10/s...
http://bradleyahansen.blogspot.com/20...

[Nei]

There is this Romanian saying according to which the forest is missed at times because of the dead weeds. This is how I felt while reading this book. Packed with very intriguing and well done research (just imagine 200 pages of footnotes). But an overkill, too many details that do not bring much value added. In the end I gave up and skimmed through it.

Some interesting things I found out:
~US acquired or simply took new territories (Louisiana, Florida and Texas) mainly as land for cotton crops.

~ In 1830, one in 13 people were cultivating cotton, mainly as slaves

~ The empire of cotton was at its heart an empire of credit and it is argued that the world economical crisis of 1825, 1837 and 1857 are due to unpaid debts in the empire of cotton. Therefore a massive scale of this business

~ Some very well knows families got rich thanks to cotton. Schlumberger, Cabot, Barings to name a few. Rothschild appears on the investors list too.

There is a documentary that uses the info in this book and other related that packs the information in a great and more digestible manner. The documentary has subtitles in English

https://youtu.be/UToTSTs1ugU

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a one volume history of the cotton industry from the beginning (I am not joking) up through the heydey of "King Cotton" and into the modern age. It is very thorough and the author appears to have read nearly everything of importance ever written about the industry. This is a serious history by a Yale professor and as a result, it does not cut many corners to obtain a broad readership. While it is an academic book and will rival PIketty's book for important long books that are rarely read, this is a well written book with quite a story to tell and filled with "aha" moments and strange pieces of trivia.

There is a lot to like here. First, it provides a comprehensive history of a material that is literally all around us but that most of us don't think much about, short of efforts at shopping for ourselves or our children. Beckert argues that despite its long history, cotton was the first and one of the most important industries to become organized on a global basis. As such it is tied with with the growth of capitalism right from the start.

Beckert's book is also about political economy, which here means the linkage between the industry and state power. He links this to the story of "King Cotton" and the US Civil War and notes how it was commonly assumed that slavery was crucial to the organization of labor by the Southern growers at the time of the war. The worldwide fear within the industry was that the fall of slavery would mean the end of the industry. That was not the case, but instead other colonial governments worked with their industries to produce arrangements to foster world cotton production under the watchful eye of colonial power. This is a strong claim regarding the centrality of cotton to the world economy and the importance of responding to the demise of slavery in the subsequent growth of European imperialism in the late 1900s. Related to this line of argument is the comparison and contrast between industrial capitalism and what Beckert calls "war capitalism"- the coercive slave economy. His argument is that these are two different ways of organizing business-government relations that place contradictory demands on the state - which ties together economic and social stories about the Civil War.

The central portion of the book concerns the rise and fall of the US Southern cotton complex and how the Europeans adapted to it. As the history moves into the 20th century, more familiar stories of decolonization and the divergence between East and West arise and are well covered. The epilog is focused and worthwhile and, of course, includes the role of Wal-Mart and the other big box retailers that discipline their global supply chains and are less tied to particular governments than their ancestors firms were.

It is a good book with a lot to digest. It is worth the trouble to work it through.

[Ava Cairns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alexander Hamilton engaged in espionage…

[Maryam · Rating 4 out of 5]

از نظر بکرت، صنعت پنبه در توسعه سرمایه داری و در نتیجه جهانی که امروز  می‌شناسیم، نقش مهم و مرکزی داره. ابتدا پنبه یک کالای محلی بود که در خانواده‌ها و معمولا توسط زنان تولید و مصرف می‌شد.آفریقا،آمریکای جنوبی و آسیا به ویژه هند مهدهای اولیه صنعت پنبه بودند. با افزایش تقاضا و ظهور اشکال جدید تولید، سرمایه داری جنگی مقیاس کشت پنبه را به شدت افزایش داد، «سرمایه‌داری جنگی» که ترکیبی از امپریالیسم، برده‌داری و سلب مالکیت زمین میشد پایه و اساس سرمایه داری صنعتی را فراهم کرد. انقلاب صنعتی نیازمند دولتی قوی و مداخله‌گر بود. بدون یک دولت قدرتمند که بتواند از نظر قانونی، بوروکراتیک، نظامی، حفاظت از صنعت و تولید داخلی، ایجاد ابزارهایی برای افزایش درآمد، نظارت بر مرزها، و ایجاد تغییراتی که امکان بسیج کارگران مزدبگیر را فراهم می‌کرد،صنعتی شدن غیرممکن بود. در حقیقت بکرت معتقده پیشرفت علم و فناوری عامل اصلی انقلاب صنعتی نبود بلکه سرمایه‌داری جنگ زمینهٔ تسلط اروپا بر پنبه و تغییر کل جهان شد.


امپراتوری پنبه یک تاریخ جهانی رو بررسی میکنه و بکرت نقش مهمی در بازنگری ما به نقش دولت و ایجاد سرمایه‌داری مدرن، سازمان‌دهی تجارت و سیستم کار و روابط بین کشورها داره.

[Kenneth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book, I'm very interested in economic history, and international trade and finance and the history of cotton includes all three. Alas, as a work of economic history the book is a total failure. The book contains not a single economic argument, market forces are almost nowhere to be found. Neither the price of cotton, nor the price of any of its inputs, nor products, nor processes are ever referenced or tracked within the book. From an economic perspective it is nearly impossible to discover why anything that is discussed in the book has actually happened. So in this regard, the book is a failure.

As a case study in the myopia of structural marxism however, the book is a masterpiece. The author is a structural marxist and for him the reasons for the rise of the cotton industry primarily have to do with the racism and violence of Europeans. This is why there are very few economic arguments in the book, the author began the book looking to prove a particular case and then goes about looking for evidence of it, and ignores everything else he encounters. This makes the book quite fascinating to read because the main arguments the author makes are repeatedly refuted by facts disclosed within the book itself. Yet the ideology of the author completely blinds him to them.

Take for example his assertion that modern capitalism could never have developed without slavery. He spends about 200 pages on this argument. He begins in the idyllic pre-industrial world in which all industry is artisanal then the European navigators round the Cape of Good Hope and begin trading directly with the Indian Ocean. At the time Indian technology was producing the most desirable cloth in the world at a cost that was much lower than Europeans could match and so Indian cloth was in strong demand in Europe and European traders also imported it to Africa.

Then some clever Britons hit upon the idea of sinking a wheel into a river in Northern England and using it to turn spindles rather than by hand. This single invention increased the productivity of English yarn spinners by hundreds of times. Once cotton cloth could be produced in Europe close to markets at low cost demand exploded and with it, demand for cotton itself. The author then spends 100 pages arguing that Indian cotton growers, so satisfied with their lives as they were, simply refused to alter it. Same goes for cotton growers in Egypt, Anatolia, Africa, and elsewhere. The only way to keep the looms fed was to transport Africans to the Southern colonies in the US and put them to work growing cotton. No economic arguments for this are made, no reference to what the price of cotton was, the relative cost of production of the various methods, Egyptian, Indian subsistence farmers or American slaves. Numerous racists tracts at the time are cited and the assumption of European racism and greed are relied on and over and over the assertion is made that none of this would be possible without slavery.

The fascinating thing about this is that history provides a natural experiment for this thesis on account of the Union strategy in the Civil War. The Union imposed a remarkably effective naval blockade on the Confederacy that took virtually all the slave grown cotton off the world market in about six months. Was the result the total collapse of the cotton industry? No! Within 18 months the looms were once again operating at capacity. Where was the cotton coming from? From Egypt, Anatolia, and India, the places where it was an impossibility that social structures would ever change and thus provide the cotton for European looms. How is this possible? The question is never answered because it is never asked. For the author racism and violence explain everything about capitalism. The true answer involves neither: there is a price for everything and everything has its price. Ottoman, Egyptian, and Indian social structures could be altered if the price was high enough but because racism and violence have to do all the work for the author, price is never referenced.

The book is rife with questions that are unanswered because they are unasked. If industrial capitalism was totally dependent on European Imperialism as the author claims, how can he explain the fact that the number one, three and four cotton producers in the world in 1900 had no colonial empires to speak of? Unanswered because unasked. If the postbellum system for growing cotton in the US was so inherently racist as to make slaves virtual slaves of the former actual slaves why did so many white people enter the trade such that 44% of cotton cultivators in that system were white? Unanswered because unasked. If British colonial policy was so effective at destroying the Indian economy as the author claims, how can he explain the near total displacement of British cloth in India by Gujarati and Bombay cotton mills between 1915 and 1940? Unanswered because unasked. If British Imperial Trade policy was totally dominated by British Capital as the author claims, how does he explain the fact that by 1940 Japan was the destination for twice as much Indian cotton as Britain? Unanswered because unasked. What is amazing is that the author makes so many assertions that are refuted by facts he himself discloses. But it never occurs to him to ask because for him the answer is always the same.

And these questions are all unasked and unanswered because the answer is something that the beyond the ken of the structural marxist. There is a more powerful force than European racism and violence in the world: markets mediated by prices determined by people exercising individual choice.

[Mehrsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though it's dense and detailed, this book is expansive and fascinating. By tracing cotton through the ages, Beckert describes the roots of capitalism, war, slavery, and empire. Not to mention contracts and debt and trade. I think this book should be read with Graeber's Debt and Armstrong's Fields of Blood. I love the rethinking of world history contained in these new books.

[Cynda · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the mid 1980s, I lived in Mississippi where there were large cotton farms, large agricultural departments at universities, and garment factories. Cotton was the fabric of our lives. In the 1980s, whether in Mississippi or Texas, I could walk out the door wrapped in cotton from a cotton sun hat to cotton sundress to cotton espadrilles. I loved cotton. It sat lightly on my skin, rinsed out cleanest in the washer, calmed my sometimes sunburned/sometimes eczema-irritated skin. Cotton was my skin's friend.

Some interconnections learned of when reading this book:

* I learned of the interconnections of war capitalism, of industrialization, and of the enslavement of unpaid and underpaid cotton and cotton cloth producers in US and across globe. Here's an apt way to describe cotton capitalists' view of the American Civil War:

Some [possible allies] even began to see the obstinacy of the South, in its demands for independence and its attachment to slavery, as the real cause of disruption to the world economy. After all, cotton merchants and manufacturers, unlike southern planters and their government, were not invested in a particular system of labor to produce it--slavery. All they required was a secure and predictable supply of inexpensive cotton in quantities they desired.

These capitalists were not joking. Millions would come to starve trying to earn enough money to survive while the capitalists would buy buy buy on the proceeds done at cost of many.

* I learned of the interconnections of capitalists and governments. As Beckett notes: . The most successful entrepreneurs were British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company which had charters had own or access to military enforcers. We can see the remnants of such power in business and labor dispute being addressed by government representatives

There is more to be gleaned from a second read. Will I make time? If someone asks for a buddy read. Otherwise, the book can be painful to read alone.

Having read this book, I have considered a couple of questions:

* The cotton in my household towels represent energy of the Earth and her people. How will I honor that energy? Might being more gentle in my use or wash of these towels honor that energy?

* Paying more for garments might improve the lives of humans. How much am I really able to afford for my clothes and household items?

Thought provoking.

[Athan Tolis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Empire of Cotton is a monument of a book. In the manner (but decidedly not the style) of a business school case, it tells the history of modern capitalism via the story of its first major product, cotton. In the process, and without even trying, it demolishes two conventional theories of how capitalism took hold. Both

1. the theory that equates the triumph of our system with science, technology and the industrial revolution

2. the theory that attributes the rise of capitalism to pluralistic institutions

are convincingly shown here to be ex-post rationalizations. Or rather, author Sven Beckert argues, first came the capitalists and then they used their newfound powers to both

1. foster the necessary inventions to produce more / cheaper

2. manipulate their times’ politics to establish institutions supportive of private (as opposed to communal) property, sanctity of contract and free movement of capital and goods

By telling the history of the cotton trade (and almost entirely omitting any mention of the steam engine, for example), the author explains that powerful merchants drove these changes. Yes, these men did take advantage of everything technology had to offer them, but that’s a footnote here. Equally, these men (and subsequently entire states) used their power and influence to shape domestic and international institutions to further their interests. But first they got that power.

The irony is that the author is quite evidently a leftie and this whole book an elegy: the focus is squarely on the many victims of this forward march. God knows there were, indeed, millions who suffered and continue to suffer. Luckily, I’m of a rather sunny disposition, so that never got me down. I read “Empire of Cotton” for what it was, a thoroughly informed, painstakingly researched life-defining project of a truly awesome historian. Oh, and an unintentional paean to capitalism.

The first phase of this journey is a triangle: cotton is grown by slaves in the American South, shipped to Liverpool or le Havre, spun and woven in Manchester or Alsace and finished fabrics are sent to Africa in exchange for slaves who are shipped to the American South. As more cotton is needed to feed this mill, more land is claimed from Native Americans and more slaves are shipped from Africa to work it. Author Sven Beckert calls this “War Capitalism” and that’s a term that probably won’t stick, but it conveys the strong coercion involved.

The founding father of this business is named as slave owner and plantation owner Samuel Greg, who married into the prominent Rathbone family and whose major innovation was to establish Quarry Bank Mill on the banks of the Bollin River near Manchester, where he employed 110 orphans to spin cotton into yarn with the help of machines powered by the inanimate energy of the falling water.

His phase is the first phase of capitalism, which was dominated by large families. These families, the Rathbones, the Volckerts and the Rallis, took advantage of the sprawling British Empire (and its inventions such as Hargreaves’ spinning jenny, Arkwright’s water frame, Kay’s flying shuttle, Crompton’s mule, Cartwright’s loom, and later Watt’s steam engine and Roberts’ automated mule, to say nothing of telegraph connection all the way to India) to parlay an original cost advantage in spinning into the establishment of a “hub and spoke” model whereby all decisions were made centrally (in Liverpool or in Winterthur, where the capital and the market/pricing information lay), to play one cotton grower against the other, one weaver against the other and one market against the other, reaping enormous profits for themselves.

The effects of the model are detailed next on trade, agriculture, labor, politics and migration patterns worldwide: world trade became “Atlantic,” with Liverpool as its epicenter, Lancashire grew the world’s first working class proletariat, the US South took over from Haiti (where the slaves had gained their freedom) as the slave labor capital of the world, overtaking India almost instantly as the world’s #1 cotton producer, also with the help of a local invention, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. The United Kingdom, suddenly a manufacturing superpower, saw for the first time in history the involvement of a government in the protection of property rights, as it became a crime to export the sundry machines and inventions that eventually made it possible to annually export more than 150 million pounds of cotton yarn by 1820, up from less than two million in 1790. The unemployed masses of the world, meanwhile, flocked to the cotton mills in New England, but not to the South, where they’d have to compete with slave labor and to Argentina rather than Brazil, for the same reasons.

The US Civil War served as a wake-up call for this neat arrangement, because the world’s main supply of internationally traded cotton suddenly came to a sudden stop. Funnily enough, the main players in the game, the traders, came off the best: overproduction had led to two years’ worth of cotton lying in storage, putting immense downward pressure on prices. With the US Civil War, the price of these stored supplies quadrupled, creating vast fortunes overnight, but also putting the incentives in place for the Empire of Cotton to move to its next phase.

Lancashire, Alsace, Germany and Russia had to feed their cotton mills. But prices for cotton were higher too. Beckert moves on to tell the story of the imperialist phase of cotton, the one that lends its name to the book. The story is told colony-by-colony, from India to Egypt, of how communities across the planet were first forced to stop cultivating the sustenance crops that they had been growing alongside fiber crops for centuries, how their communal land was parceled into plots, how they were forced into monoculture, how they were made to buy their sustenance from the same people who sold them their seeds and bought their cotton, how dependent this made them on the world price of cotton and how vulnerable this made them to famine after a poor harvest or cattle disease, as happened in Egypt in 1863 (p. 334) For growers, the empire of cotton became an empire of debt. That suited both capitalists and local emerging classes of landowners just fine.

At the same time, the US South entered a (much easier) transition whereby the freed slaves were fast-forwarded to sharecropping, with penalties for loitering, in essence back to where things had been before the Civil War, lynchings delivering less regularly but more severely the violence that had been delivered by the whip.

With the states very much in charge, rather than businessmen, the laws were put in place that made it possible for a steady flow of “white gold” to be made available to the cotton mills in Lowell, Manchester and Augsburg. It became the purpose of colonies, from India to Congo to come up with the goods, with American expertise in labor-intensive growing methods in such high demand that the newly-formed state of Germany, for example paid for the sons of freed American slaves to bring their methods to its African colony of Togo. Similarly, the Japanese colonized Korea and the Russians central Asia and set them on cotton production on a massive scale.

Next in line after local cultivators to be streamed into the world of paid labor in the cotton fields became their families. In a phase he describes as “deindustrialization” (a poor name, in my view) “the importation of cheap machine-made piece goods (…) drove native spinners and weavers altogether out of the market” (p.328) and forced them for the first time ever onto the fields. While it’s an exaggeration to classify as “industry” the operation of a loom at home, this was clearly a retrograde step for the financial standing of families throughout the world and India in particular.

Nationalism is the next phase in this story, with white gold at center stage as nation-states sought their freedom from colonial powers and leveraged cotton as an instrument and object of industrial policy, witness a cotton spinning wheel in the center of the Indian National Congress flag. These strategies were eventually successful. Cotton mills in Lancashire went quiet and now buzz in the Global South.

But this has been a poisoned chalice, as demand for the final product is these days dominated by giants like Walmart, who have turned the empire of cotton into a “race to the bottom” with even China and Bangladesh now being undercut on price by new entrants like Vietnam.

Beckert could end his book by observing that we have now run out of planet and those Vietnamese workers will very soon enjoy the working conditions that made manufacture in the UK unprofitable a hundred years ago.

He chooses not to.

I loved this book regardless. It distils into 400 pages a decade of research by an obsessively passionate, thorough, highly observant, first-class historian. It would be worth reading even if it wasn’t a parallel story of the origins of our economic system.

[Mal Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here’s a new take on the history of capitalism, recasting the Industrial Revolution as a natural extension of the European mercantile expansion that preceded it. In Empire of Cotton, Harvard historian Sven Beckert asserts that the more familiar industrial capitalism that came of age in the nineteenth century was grounded in what he terms “war capitalism” — the relationships forged by the European conquest of the Global South by force — and, in particular, on slavery.

“Slavery, colonialism, and forced labor, among other forms of violence,” he writes, “were not aberrations in the history of capitalism but at its very core.” Thus, powerful nation states were crucial to the development of industrial capitalism, first, because of their ability to subdue the peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, where the industries of Europe and the United States obtained their raw materials, and, later, because they were able to bring force to bear to prevent workers from organizing.��� Beckert goes on: “[T]he nineteenth century was an age of barbarity and catastrophe, as slavery and imperialism devastated first one pocket of the globe and then another. It is the twentieth century, by contrast, that saw the weakening of imperial powers and thus allowed more of the world’s peoples to determine their own futures and shake off the shackles of colonial domination.”

For Beckert, the cotton industry was central to the development of capitalism and thus of the world as we know it today. “The empire of cotton was, from the beginning,” he writes, “a site of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, farmers and merchants, workers and factory owners. In this as in so many other ways, the empire of cotton ushered in the modern world.”

To prove this provocative thesis, Beckert documents the history of the cotton industry in great detail. He writes convincingly. The cotton industry, he explains, was by far the largest manufacturing industry in the world from the beginning of the Second Millennium to the dawn of the twentieth century. Even in the nineteenth century, once the Industrial Revolution (literally) got up to steam, the cotton industry dwarfed the railroad, steamship, and telegraph operators so often held up as emblematic of that era.

Empire of Cotton dwells at length on the American Civil War and its impact on the rest of the world. When the war broke out in 1861, the European yarn and textile manufacturers who dominated their economies were heavily dependent on raw cotton from the slaveholding U.S. South. In key countries, the South had a near-monopoly on the cotton trade. Once the federal government imposed a blockade on southern ports, shipments of cotton across the sea slowed to a mere trickle, the product of the very few successful blockade runners. As a result, the Civil War led the European powers to build substantial new capacity to grow cotton in their rapidly expanding colonies in the Global South. This proved to be a seminal development in the history of cotton (and thus of the world), introducing the unfamiliar concept of wage labor to traditional societies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Brazil in particular) and laying the groundwork for the emergence of the anti-colonial movements that would rock the twentieth century.

Fair warning to the reader who is easily bored and isn’t a speed-reader: there’s more here than you ever might have wanted to know about cotton (assuming you wanted to know anything at all). Beckert is such a careful historian that, when he sets out to illustrate a point, he includes not one, two, or even three examples but a laundry list of them. Yes, Empire of Cotton truly is A Global History, as its subtitle promises. There’s no mistaking that, because the author repeatedly cites examples from all over the globe. However, to my mind, it’s all worth it, if only for the pleasure of reading such a radical interpretation of economic history from a Harvard professor.

This is powerful stuff and must reading for anyone who wishes to understand the true history of capitalism.

[Porter Broyles · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is everywhere. The odds are that you are wearing something made of cotton right now. It has been a basic part of life for the past two hundred years.

It is hard to imagine a world without cotton, but up until the late 1700s, cotton was a luxury or something people grew for personal use. Heck, despite the fact that the first millionaires in the United States derived their wealth from cotton; the uniforms of Confederate soldiers were made of wool---not cotton. (Of course, this stems from the fact that wool can keep people warm when wet, whereas cotton clothes doesn’t and the risk of hypothermia during the Civil War exceeded the risk of heat stroke.)

But still.

Prior to the Civil War it was more profitable for people to use their land to grow cotton than it was to build factories to process it! Thanks to Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin, the ability to harvest and utilize cotton grew exponentially.

What had been a luxury, became common place. The first half of this book reminded me a lot of the Edmund Morris’ classic “American Slavery, American Freedom.” Many of the ideas and concepts discussed there were touched upon here. For example, the idea that children (particularly sons) were expected to live with their parents through their mid-20s to offset the costs of their upbringing. Or the notion that people were expected to commit to working for their employer for 2-5 years to make the efforts mutually beneficial was the norm. Sharing cropping was the norm long before the Civil War (although it had started to fade from Northern practices before then.) Or the idea that raising cotton, while potentially more lucrative than tobacco, sugar, or other products had a much steeper entry fee---one couldn’t make a profit with cotton without investing in the technology first.

About half way through this book, I described it as the Reader’s Digest version of Morris’s book.

Morris’s book, however, ends with the Civil War and is very Virginia-centric. Beckertt’s book is truly global in its perspective. I do not recall if he mentioned Australia, but he spends a significant portion of the time discussion the history and usage of Cotton on the other 6 continents (and the Middle East.)

While I prefer Morris’s book over Beckertt’s, it is in the global perspective that his book has significant value. Beckertt discusses how Cotton truly was and is a global phenomenon. How certain areas have dominated the cotton trade and have each had success doing so. Despite the fact that Cotton was THE cash crop of the Confederate States, most cotton products are made elsewhere today.

The discussion of how (and where) these markets arose had a significant affect on how and why European countries (namely France and England) got involved in the United States Civil War!

The periods after the Civil War, as share cropping developed its negative connotations in America are also interesting---as are the part of the book that discusses industrialization and the role of cotton.

Over all, the book is very interesting and worth reading.

That being said, I have two negative comments that apply to the audio book:

1) I listened to this book via Audible. There is a faint recurrent sound in the background that drove me bonkers. I did not hear it if I was listening via my headphones, but if I was simply playing the audio I kept hearing what sounded like somebody letting out a sigh. It was not the narrator, but it really distracted from the quality of the book.

2) There are a lot of sections wherein the author cited growth rates/costs between regions and time periods. I suspect that these were tables/charts in the book, but on the audio the encompassed large segments that made it hard to digest.

Had I read this book, it probably would have gotten 4 stars, but the audio is lucky to get 3.

[Bill S. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't often quit on a book half-read but in this case I made an exception.
Long-winded, dense, repetitive, and much more of an academic exercise than remotely interesting. By the time I hit the fourth or fifth chapter learning nothing more (over and over and over again) than the idea that economics & military power has the ability to shape commerce (gee, really?) I moved on.
I'm sure there are those who'll find this a worthy read, I'm just not one of them.

[Bfisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an exhaustive review of the role of the cotton trade as the leading edge of globalization. It's very detailed, to the point of numbness in many cases. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of fodder for thought here; just who is it who really benefits from "free" trade?

[Son Tung · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those books helps me understand the world better.

Cotton industry was the king of industries in the past, it paved the way for the development/de-development of many regions across the globe with war-capitalism, land appropriation, slavery, wage labor, protectionism. I enjoy the comparison of different countries and thier conditions for cotton industry to thrive over the time span around 1800 to modern day.

[Darko Doko · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although there are some things to remember, the book is by far tooooo long while recyclng one idea over and over. Its just too much details and data that its too much boring

[Thomas Kalokyris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Με επίκεντρο το κατεξοχήν βιομηχανικό αγαθό του βαμβακιού, το βιβλίο αυτό μυεί τον αναγνώστη στους τρόπους διαμόρφωσης του νεωτερικού κόσμου μέσω των μοχλών του βιομηχανικού καπιταλισμού.

Η ενδυνάμωση του κράτους, η μεταστροφή του αγροτικού κόσμου από την καλλιέργεια για αυτοσυντήρηση στην καλλιέργεια για τις αγορές, η δουλεία και η μετέπειτα παρακίνηση της ελεύθερης εργασίας, τα παγκόσμια δίκτυα, καθώς και τα εμπορικά, εργατικά και βιομηχανικά συμφέροντα αναδιαμορφώνουν επαναστατικά τον κόσμο σε μια διαδικασία αέναη.

Η αυτοκρατορία του βαμβακιού είναι, πράγματι, η πρώτη παγκόσμια αυτοκρατορία.

[WaldenOgre · Rating 4 out of 5]

作者自身的文笔和对全书结构的掌控力都并不出色：一旦脱离了具体的案例或数据，他那些宏观的陈述往往显得拖沓而无力；尤其是在前半本书里，很多同样的论点常常在不同的页码或章节里反复出现。然而，他的宽阔视野以及对史料的梳理深挖，当可弥补这些缺憾。

在他笔下的这个“棉花帝国”里，很多由阿马蒂亚·森、弗朗西斯·福山和詹姆斯·C. 斯科特各自深耕过的领域，渐渐出现了某些遥远却密切的联系。通过他的仔细回溯，“自由市场”的源头既显示出了国家构建的强烈痕迹，也揭露了其充满强制和暴力的那个“非自由”的阴暗面。

因此，本书虽然作为一部聚焦于过去200多年来的资本主义的全球史，但在事关对资本主义的道德评价、思考自由市场和政治干预的权衡关系时，它对于我们当代读者而言，仍旧是颇有助益的。

[Balasubramaniam Vaidyanathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

300 years back, world was a different place. Most of the countries were self sufficient. They had land for their people, food grown from the land, a shelter, customs, culture and entertainment. Yes there were wars to satisfy the ego of few powerful individuals. But common man was very much affected by them. There were merchants. Some of them wanted to trade with distant shores. Some of them brought a commodity back home. It was a fancy item and people started loving it. This commodity changed the world order. This book is about that commodity - Cotton.

In the course of 3 centuries of its interesting journey, the world metamorphosed to the one in which we live today. We got all the -isms which govern our life today, predominantly capitalism. No other commodity would have explained the birth and growth of capitalism like cotton. Form War Capitalism to industrial capitalism to imperialism to current market - an interesting journey. It explains the birth of commodity trading, futures trading and the need for it. It also deals with the labour movements, slavery, colonialism, freedom struggles etc.

When we read history of countries, we get very narrow view and often we don't get the view from the other side. This book is a ringside view of world. Make no mistake, it is very detailed and thoroughly researched ( the book lists just 120 pages for references). This book exposes the blood stained history of capitalism. Capitalism as we know today talks about free markets. But it depended on state support and protectionism for reaching today's stage. Even the concept of State got strengthened by the revenue brought in by Capitalism. This book is an accurate attempt to portray the history of world using the commodity - Cotton.

Some of you might have read the book by Jared Diamond - 'Guns, Germs and Steel' which is trying to reason out the success of few countries (races) over others. I would say that this book is giving better reasons why some countries are successful than others. As it comes out open - treachery, exploitation, double standards.

I would rate this book is one of the best books I've ever read.

[Boudewijn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A highly detailed history of the worldwide cotton industry and the role it played in the creating of Capitalism

There is a close relation between the history of cotton and the history of Capitalism. The concept of War Capitalism was created by privately owned joint stock companies forced, with much violence, local peasants into the forced growing of cotton for the European markets. According to Beckert, War Capitalism was a prerequisite of the following Industrial Revolution, without it, there would have been no revolution at all. At the end of the nineteenth century Europe had a large cotton manufacturing industry, completely changing the lives of the European people and the structure of the society.

The American civil war changed the forced labor concept in the United States and the cotton exports dropped. This forced Brittain to look for other cotton growing countries, such as Egypt and above all India, which set in motion the colonial systems.

At the end of the First World War, the cotton industry disappeared and cotton would start to play a central role in uniting the former less developed countries against their colonial masters.

Today's empire of cotton continues. Just as it happened for the last 250 years, connects growers, traders, spinners, weavers, manufacturers and consumers over hugh geographical distances in ever changing spacial arrangements. This fundamental innovation, the connection across space, was first forged by connecting slavery and waged labor in the concept of War Capitalism, and has remained at the core in the empire of cotton ever since.

This is a very detailed, sometimes bordering to the dull, history of the cotton empire. The fact that it is so detailed, may be to your liking if you have a serieus interest in this commodity, but paradoxically may cause you to lose your interest after a time. For me I'd gave it 2.5 stars.

[Ken Larsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a disappointing book about a compelling subject. The author clearly needed a stronger editor; the writing is convoluted and tiresome. Sentences often exceed 40 words, and you get the sense that three or four sentences in a row have said exactly the same thing. I finally gave up on the book with about two chapters to go and skimmed to the end.

The scholarship in the book is notable. The author offers compelling evidence that the history of the Industrial Revolution is about the mechanization of the spinning and weaving of cotton. It's also clear that slavery at the time of the Civil War was not a dying economic system; it could have been sustained for decades. The book seeks to persuade the reader that colonialism was driven by cotton interests; I remain unconvinced, but hope to do further reading.

I'm glad I read this book. I learned a great deal, even as one who spent much of his childhood in the cotton belt, and who worked for a cotton broker between high school and college. But reading the book was a great slog.

[Jeremy Silverman · Rating 5 out of 5]

In telling the powerful and sad story of cotton across centuries and around the globe, Beckert describes the history of capitalism in all its ruthless detail. Furthermore, he shows that cotton is not simply a convenient tool - one commodity among many he might have chosen - to depict this sad history, but a key driver of slavery, exploitation of workers, colonialism, and capitalism as a whole. Despite some moments when one might feel somewhat bogged down in detail, the writing is mostly clear and engaging. It is one of those books that one finishes with a sense of gratitude and a feeling of having obtained a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of human history.

[Kevin Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are someone who likes to learn about how the world works or how we got to where we are , read this book. It is a searing tale of the cotton industry and how the quest for the mastery of a superior textile laid a groundwork for the international economy we live in today.

A damning indictment of wage labor, it is particularly interesting and infuriating as a history of how humans moved from the farms to the factory. You also come to understand how the British - a relatively small group of people- ruled the world for several hundred years.

[Claudio Martel · Rating 2 out of 5]

En cuanto a estudio, se lleva el palmarés, pues estamos ante un exhaustivo análisis del algodón y sus consecuencias, dondequiera que se presenten. Sin embargo, resulta ilegible; los primeros capítulos son amenos, pero una vez que pasamos a hablar sobre el período de la Revolución Industrial en adelante, se vuelve tedioso. Hay saltos temporales en cada página, con datos completamente irrelevantes, y con gran cantidad de números. Le doy 2 estrellas por el estudio y los datos, aunque frecuentemente cueste entenderlos.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book about how the "fabric of our lives" became the backbone of the original Industrial Revolution. Why global commercialized cotton became associated with the Industrial Revolution of the modern West, and not India, and much more. Insights on slavery, colonialism, cash-cropping and monocrop culture, etc.