Empire of Cotton Quotes

“We associate industrial capitalism with contracts and markets, but early capitalism was based as often as not on violence and bodily coercion. Modern capitalism privileges property rights, but this earlier moment was characterized just as much by massive expropriations as by secure ownership. Latter-day capitalism rests upon the rule of law and powerful institutions backed by the state, but capitalism's early phase, although ultimately requiring state power to create world-spanning empires, was frequently based on the unrestrained actions of private individuals--the domination of masters over slaves and of frontier capitalists over indigenous inhabitants.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“Many historians have called this the age of 'merchant' or 'mercantile' capitalism, but 'war capitalism' better expresses its rawness and violence as well as its intimate connection to European imperial expansion. War capitalism, a particularly important but often unrecognized phase in the development of capitalism, unfolded in constantly shifting sets of places embedded within constantly changing relationships. In some parts of the world it lasted into the nineteenth century.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“The empire of cotton has continued to facilitate a giant race to the bottom, limited only by the spatial constraints of the planet.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“Ironically, their shocking success also awakened the very forces that eventually would marginalize them within the empire they had created.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“It was on the back of cotton, and thus on the backs of slaves, that the U.S. economy ascended in the world (p.119).”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“our journey through the empire of cotton has shown that civilization and barbarity are linked at the hip,”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“it was not so much the new machines that revolutionized the world, impressive and important as they were. The truly heroic invention was the economic, social, and political institutions in which these machines were embedded.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“Europeans united the power of capital and the power of the state to forge, often violently, a global production complex, and then used the capital, skills, networks, and institutions of cotton to embark upon the upswing in technology and wealth that defines the modern world.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“Strong European states had simultaneously created barriers to the import of foreign textiles just as they built a system for the appropriation of foreign technology. By orchestrating economic processes in Asia, Africa, and the Americas as well as in Europe, Europeans gained the paradoxical ability to direct the global trade in Indian textiles while at the same time keeping Asian cloth increasingly out of Europe, instead trading the products in Africa and elsewhere beyond Europe’s shores.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“The arrival of cotton growers in most cases displaced the indigenous inhabitants. In the antebellum decades, native peoples who had inhabited the cotton-growing territories of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi had been pushed farther west. Now pressure resumed. In October 1865, the Kiowa and Comanche were forced to give up land in central Texas, west Kansas, and eastern New Mexico—land that was turned, among other things, into cotton plantations. Shortly thereafter, many of the Texas plains Indians were pushed into reservations in Oklahoma, and so were the last southwestern Indians during the Red River War of 1874 and 1875, thereby freeing up further land for cotton growing.28 Yet Oklahoma ultimately provided little protection for these Native Americans. By the 1880s, the old Oklahoma and Indian territories came under pressure from white settlers who hoped to displace the native population from the most fertile lands.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“When “free trade” was imposed upon the Ottoman Empire in 1838 and British cloth “flooded the market in Izmir,” local cotton workers lost their ability to maintain their old production regime. In coastal southeastern Africa, cotton yarn and cloth imports also began to devastate the local cotton textile industry. In Mexico, European cotton imports had a serious impact on local manufacturing—before tariffs enabled Mexican industrialization, Guadalajara’s industry had been, as one historian found, “virtually eliminated.” In Oaxaca, 450 out of 500 looms ceased operating. In China, the 1842 Treaty of Nanking forced the opening of markets, and the subsequent influx of European and North American yarn and cloth had a “devastating” effect, especially on China’s hand spinners.22”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“When we think of capitalism, we think of wage workers, yet this prior phase of capitalism was based not on free labor but on slavery.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“India and China, or, for that matter, the Aztec and Inca empires, had not even come close to such global dominance, and even less so to reinventing how people produced things in the far-flung corners of the globe. And yet starting in the sixteenth century, armed European capitalists and capital-rich European states reorganized the world’s cotton industry.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“we prefer to erase the realities of slavery, expropriation, and colonialism from the history of capitalism, craving a nobler, cleaner capitalism.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“Slavery, the expropriation of indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed trade, and the assertion of sovereignty over people and land by entrepreneurs were at its core. I call this system war capitalism.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“The modern world, indeed, has been shaped just as much by war capitalism’s death as by its birth.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“war capitalism also nourished the emerging secondary sectors of the economy such as insurance, finance, and shipping, sectors that would become exceedingly important to the emergence of the British cotton industry, but also public institutions such as government credit, money itself, and national defense.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“Today cotton is so ubiquitous that it is hard to see it for what it is: one of mankind’s great achievements.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

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― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism

“This emphasis calls into question some of the most ingrained insights into the history of the modern world—for example, conceptualizing the nineteenth century, as is so often done, as an age of “bourgeois civilization,” in contrast with the twentieth century, which historian Eric Hobsbawm has termed the “age of catastrophe.”19 An assessment such as this can only be derived from a vision of the world that focuses its moral judgments on Europe. Looked at from the perspective of much of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, one can argue just the opposite—that the 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 people to determine their own futures and shake off the shackles of colonial domination. Without its Eurocentric distortions, decolonialization would be at the very center of the narrative we tell about the twentieth century”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“Migrant workers were often supervised by armed guards stationed in the fields. The state helped to enforce labor discipline, with towns enacting “strict vagrancy laws to keep [those workers] outside the central area when they were not working.” This resort to physical coercion was widespread in the world’s cotton-growing areas and was important in the United States, Peru, Egypt, and elsewhere. Capitalism’s awe-inspiring advances continued to rest not just on a great variety of labor regimes, but on a staggering degree of violence.70”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“One reason it is hard to see cotton's importance is because it has often been overshadowed in our collective memory by images of coal mines, railroads, and giant steelworks--industrial capitalism's more tangible, more massive manifestations (p.xviii).”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“Contemporary observers as well as modern historians have found many reasons that explain Greg's venture, and with it why the much broader Industrial revolution, 'broke out' in this place, in northern England, and at this time, in the 1780s. The genius of British inventors, the size of the British market and its unusually deep integration, the geography of Britain with its easy access to waterborne transport, the importance of religious dissenters for thinking outside the box, and the creation of a state favorable to entrepreneurial initiative have all been cited. While none of these arguments are unimportant, they omit a core part of the story of the Industrial Revolution: its dependence on the globe-spanning system of war capitalism.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“Americans tried to explain to their European customers that slavery in the United States, unlike in Saint-Domingue, was safe—not least, as Tench Coxe put it, because of the presence of a powerful white militia and because slaves have “no artillery nor arms. Tho they are numerous they are much separated by rivers, Bayos and tracts thickly peopled with whites.” But concerns remained.45”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“In 2001, the U.S. government paid a record $4 billion in subsidies to cotton growers, a cost that exceeded the market value of the crop by 30 percent. To put it another way, these subsidies amounted to triple that year’s USAID payments to all of Africa, a part of the world where production costs for cotton were only about a third of what they were in the United States. In”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“by 1905, cotton experts estimated, a full 15 million people, or about 1 percent of the world’s population, were engaged in the growing of cotton.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“The labor market as idealized in modern-day economics textbooks as often as not came about as a result of strikes, unions, and riots.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“Such preponderance of women workers resulted all too often in the invisibility of the cotton industry, overshadowed by the male-dominated coal-mining, iron-making, and railroading industries.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“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.”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“And I said to myself, what connection shall there be between Power in Manchester and Nature in America?”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History