Empire of Cotton: A Global History Paperback – Illustrated, 10 November 2015
by Sven Beckert (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 820 ratings
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WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE - A Pulitzer Prize finalist that's 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.
"Masterly ... An astonishing achievement." --The New York Times
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. Sven 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.
In a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful politicians recast the world's most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to make and remake global capitalism.
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Print length
640 pages
Language
English
Publisher
Vintage
Publication date
10 November 2015
Product description
Review
Winner of the Alfred and Fay Chandler Book Award
"Masterly.... Deeply researched and eminently readable, Empire of Cotton gives new insight into the relentless expansion of global capitalism. With graceful prose and a clear and compelling argument, Beckert not only charts the expansion of cotton capitalism ... he addresses the conditions of enslaved workers in the fields and wage workers in the factories. An astonishing achievement."--Thomas Bender, New York Times
"Important.... a major work of scholarship that will not be soon surpassed as the definitive account of the product that was, as Beckert puts it, the Industrial Revolution's 'launching pad.'" --Adam Hochschild, New York Times Book Review
"Breathtakingly comprehensive, informative and provocative." --Glenn C. Altschuler, Tulsa World
"Persuasive ... brilliant ... Beckert's detailed narrative never scants the rich complexity of the cotton trade's impact on many different societies." --Wendy Smith, Boston Globe
"Empire of Cotton proves Sven Beckert one of the new elite of genuinely global historians. Too little present-day academic history is written for the general public. 'Empire of Cotton' transcends this barrier and should be devoured eagerly, not only by scholars and students but also by the intelligent reading public. The book is rich and diverse in the treatment of its subject. The writing is elegant, and the use of both primary and secondary sources is impressive and varied. Overviews on international trends alternate with illuminating, memorable anecdotes.... Beckert's book made me wish for a sequel." --Daniel Walker Howe, The Washington Post
"Momentous and brilliant ... Empire of Cotton is among the best nonfiction books of this year." --Karen R. Long, Newsday
"Compelling ... Beckert demonstrates persuasively how the ravenous cotton textile trade in Europe was instrumental in the emergence of capitalism and draws a direct line from the practices that nourished this empire to similar elements in the production of goods for today's massive international retailers. Those who long to know more about how and why slavery took hold in Europe, Africa and the Americas will find this book to be immensely enlightening. Better still, those who live out the troubled legacy of the exploitation and enslavement of workers in the service of the cotton empire will find in it added inspiration for their continuing efforts to realize a just and more equitable society." --Ruth Simmons, President Emeritus of Brown University
"Intellectually ambitious ... a masterpiece of the historian's craft." --Timothy Shenk, The Nation
"A highly detailed, provocative work." --Booklist
"Hefty, informative, and engaging ... Beckert's narrative skills keep the story of capitalism fresh and interesting for all readers." --Publishers Weekly
"[Beckert's] close-up study of the cotton economy is a valuable model for the study of capitalism generally, an economic system in which slavery and colonialism were not outliers but instead integral to the whole ... a valuable contribution." --Kirkus Reviews
"Fascinating and profound.... Global history as it should be written." --Eric Foner
About the Author
SVEN BECKERT is the Laird Bell Professor of American History at Harvard University. Holding a PhD from Columbia University, he has written widely on the economic, social, and political history of capitalism. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including from Harvard Business School, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. He was also a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Product details
Publisher : Vintage; Illustrated edition (10 November 2015)
Language : English
Paperback : 640 pages
T. Graczewski
5.0 out of 5 stars White Gold
Reviewed in the United States on 18 April 2017
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At the heart of Harvard history professor Sven Beckert’s award-winning book, “Empire of Cotton: A Global History,” is a simple but compelling syllogism: the wealthy, capitalist world we Americans live in today was created by the Industrial Revolution; the Industrial Revolution was driven by massive productivity gains in textile manufacturing; cotton was the essential raw ingredient that powered textile manufacturing. Thus, if it weren’t for cheap and plentiful supplies of raw cotton, the world we live in today might very well look quite different.
The way Beckert tells the story, it seems to me, is that there have essentially been five major epochs in global cotton production and manufacturing.
First, for most of world history, cotton was a locally produced and consumed commodity. Eastern Africa, South Asia (India, specifically), and Central America were the cradles of the early cotton industry, which Beckert writes developed independently, yet along similar lines as the raw cotton was processed and spun in close proximity to where it was grown, usually in individual households and by women.
Second, over the course of centuries beginning around 1500, Europeans radically transformed the world of cotton through what Beckert calls “war capitalism”: a violent mixture of imperial expansion, slavery, and land expropriation. To start, Europeans captured the international trade network of Indian textiles from the overland Arab traders once sea routes were mapped and key coastal port cities dominated. Control of the transportation network then reinforced the system as African slave traders demanded Indian calicoes for their human chattel that were, in turn, required to work the sugar fields of the West Indies that generated massive wealth for the semi-private companies operating out of London and Continental Europe. The last piece of the cotton process puzzle to elude Europeans was manufacturing, primarily because they had no ready access to raw cotton and the labor costs of European workers were orders of magnitude greater than that of rural Indians.
Third, and in this reviewer’s opinion the real heart of the story, is Europe’s rapid and shocking domination of textile manufacturing beginning in the 1790s, and the associated role of slavery in the American South in making that happen.
The construction of Samuel Greg’s simple little factory, Quarry Bank Mill, on the Bollin River outside of Manchester, England in 1784 might have seemed unremarkable at the time, but it set in motion “the most important event in world history,” according to the celebrated (Marxist, it must be noted) historian Eric Hobsbwam: the Industrial Revolution. Beckert argues that war capitalism – that aforementioned combination of slavery, colonial domination, militarized trade, and land expropriations – provided the foundation for industrial capitalism, and the manufacturing of cotton would be the driving commodity behind its development. Indeed, Beckert writes, “industrial capitalism was the offspring of war capitalism, the previous centuries’ great innovation.”
War capitalism had given England control over many nodes in the global cotton network, but manufacturing still eluded its grasp. The primary challenge was labor rates. The only way the British could hope to compete with the Indians who had dominated the market for centuries was through massive productivity gains leveraging new technology. British innovations like the flying shuttle (1733), spinning jenny (1760), water frame (1769), and mule (1779) combined to produce breathtaking efficiencies. For example, it took an estimated 50,000 man-hours to produce 100 lbs. of raw cotton in India in the 1750s. By 1790, water-powered British factories around Manchester had cut the time to 1,000 hours, and would drop to 300 hours by 1795.
Beckert writes that cotton manufacturing “was the first major industry in human history that lacked locally produced raw materials.” As British manufacturing skyrocketed, so too did the demand for (and price of) raw cotton. The production methods of the traditional suppliers – India and the Ottomans – simply could not keep up. Manchester traders turned to the West Indies and their large slave plantations to pick up the slack, which were effective but constrained by limited available land for expansion into cotton, fierce competition from sugar farming, slave rebellions (Haiti had provided 24% of England’s cotton before the 1791 revolt), and eventually the war with France.
As a result, cotton farming in the United States exploded in the years just after independence. Indeed, American cotton for export was almost unknown before the mid-1790s. Not only did the revolt in Haiti deprive the Manchester mills of raw material, it also dispersed experienced cotton plantation managers to the low country of the American South. Moreover, when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793 it increased productivity with American Upland cotton by a factor of 50 virtually overnight.
The combined results of these events was staggering. From 1.5 million pounds of cotton produced in 1790 (2% of total US export value), output jumped to 36.5 million pounds in 1800 and climbed to 167.5 million pounds (32% of total exports) by 1820. By the start of the Civil War cotton accounted for nearly two-thirds of total US export values. No wonder so many believed “King Cotton” might force England into an open military alliance with the Confederacy. After all, American cotton had fueled the export of British yarn from 350,000 pounds in 1794 to a staggering 200 MILLION pounds in 1860. Unlike other potential competitors, the United States possessed virtually limitless land (much of it expropriated from Native Americans), an abundance of slave labor, and the capital necessary for the development of large-scale agricultural operations. Plantation owners quickly emerged as “the world’s most important growers of the industrial age’s most important commodity”; the Mississippi Delta “a kind of Saudi Arabia of the early 19th century,” in one of Beckert’s many memorable phrases.
Dependence on American cotton was worrying to manufacturers in England. What if the rapidly industrializing, fledgling republic across the Atlantic should decide to invest in cotton manufacturing themselves? Or cut favorable deals with continental competitors? Worst still, how much longer was slave labor politically tenable? In an effort to diversify the sources of supply, the British government attempted to build experimental, southern-style plantations in India, complete with American cotton farmer managers. Every attempt failed. Growing cotton, it seemed, was only viable with slave labor.
It was during the fourth epoch in cotton history that this thesis was dramatically put to the test, a period I’d call “post-bellum cotton colonialism.” At the start of the U.S. Civil War, American cotton accounted for 75% to 90% of all European manufacturing needs. From 3.8 million bales of cotton in 1860, U.S. cotton exports to Europe fell to virtually zero two years later. Prices for raw cotton quadrupled. The world was gripped by a “cotton famine,” what Beckert suggests was “the world’s first truly global raw material crisis.” England turned again to India, this time with no alternative. By 1862, India was supplying 75% of England’s raw cotton, up from just 16% two years before. Brazilian and Egyptian cotton production also jumped. “The crisis of American slavery in effect forced and enabled the reconfiguration of the cotton growing countryside” all around the world is a way that previous attempts failed to produce. But these efforts were aided by highly inflated raw cotton prices. What would a world with cotton but without slavery ultimately look like?
The global cotton network responded with remarkable vigor and success. Raw cotton, which traded for $0.11 per pound in 1860 and remained as high as $0.24 by 1870 dropped to $0.07 per pound by 1894, all while global consumption of cotton doubled. So how were such feats of agricultural productivity achieved without slave labor? According to Beckert, it was driven by a new, powerful imperial state in partnership with industry. Between 1876 and 1915, a quarter of the world’s land surface was carved up among the industrial powers. In the wake of slavery, and reaching deep inland across the cotton growing regions of the world, a new system of credit, private land ownership, contract law and industrial infrastructure projects (railroads, canals, telegraphs) bolstered harvest yields to new heights, even across the former Confederacy where sharecroppers clawed their way back so that by 1890 they were producing twice their pre-war records and reclaimed their dominant position supplying the British mills.
“Cotton and colonial expansion went hand in hand,” Beckert writes. England in India and Egypt, Japan in Korea and China, Russia in Central Asia, and the United States in the Native American lands of the West all aggressively pushed cotton production to meet global demand while growing domestic textile industries. Between 1860 and 1920, 55 million acres (roughly the size of Minnesota) across the globe – from the German colony of Togo in West Africa to the vast steppes of Central Asia – were repurposed, often forcefully by the state, for cotton production. Powerful nation states, in league with industrial enterprises, “secured huge swaths of territory on which cotton could be grown and they their accumulated bureaucratic, infrastructural, and military might to mobile cotton growing labor,” often by recasting social arrangements similar to those used to foster the growth of industrial wage labor in the early days of the Industrial Revolution.
But what about the processing of all that raw cotton into usable yarn and thread, not to mention the manufacturing of finished products, such as the mass production of inexpensive shirts and dresses? That required an entirely different type of labor: wage labor. “It is difficult to overstate the importance and revolutionary nature of this new organization of human labor,” Beckert writes. Mobilizing large numbers of workers, perhaps thousands, paying them fixed wages and then monitoring their work and effort was an entirely novel concept in the early nineteenth century.
Finally, we are today living in a world of global, post-modern cotton. “The empire of cotton has continued to facilitate a great race to the bottom”… as “capitalism both demands and creates a state of permanent revolution.” A mere century ago, a typical, middle-class American’s cotton dress shirt would have been produced from a cotton boll grown in Mississippi, woven and spun into thread in a Massachusetts mill, and then sewn into the final product in a New York City workshop. Today, we (Americans) wear cotton shirts from fibers likely grown in Uzbekistan or Senegal, spun and woven into thread in China or Pakistan, and manufactured into our hip, “Casual Friday Appropriate”, GAP buttoned-down Oxford in Bangladesh or Vietnam.
Beckert stresses that cotton production has exploded in growth while moving almost effortlessly to the lowest cost producer. In 1860, when the American South ruled with “King Cotton,” the territory of the former Confederacy produced a relatively astounding 5 million bales of cotton, the vast majority of the world’s supply at the time. Yet, by 2012, the heavily federally subsidized United States cotton growing industry (which received $35 billion in subsides between 1995 to 2010), mostly based in Texas and Arizona, produced over three times that amount, some 17 million bales of cotton, or just over 14% of the world’s production. Meanwhile, cotton growing and manufacturing has returned to its roots, such as China, whose factories today account nearly half of the world’s spindles and looms, and whose fields generate nearly a third of the global annual cotton crop (India, another pre-industrial cotton society, has also re-emerged as a leading producer, accounting for a fifth of global raw cotton production today). Cotton has been a globalized industry since at least the late 19th century, but today’s globalization is different in some remarkable ways, according to the author, namely that modern multinational corporations, such as Walmart or the French retailing giant Carrefour, are both enormously influential buyers of finished cotton goods and yet, unlike before, largely independent from any insurmountable coercive pressure from specific nation states.
In sum, “Empire of Cotton” is a brilliant history of an indispensible commodity, easily on par with such classics as Daniel Yergin’s “The Prize” history of petroleum or Peter Bernstein’s “The Power of Gold.”
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Athan
5.0 out of 5 stars The history of the origins of modern capitalism
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 February 2020
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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.
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royal_guju
4.0 out of 5 stars Economic History: War Capitalism, Merchant Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism, & Global Capitalism: Its all Capitallism to me
Reviewed in the United States on 28 April 2015
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Global history is very much the fashion in leading university history departments today. Some of them seek to replace courses in Western civilization with classes in global history, Ex ' The Transformation of the World by Jurgen Osterhammel — but usually such courses have to be team-taught by a variety of specialists, since so few individual academics have such a broad reach. “Empire of Cotton” proves Sven Beckert one of the new elite of genuinely global historians.
“Empire of Cotton” starts by describing cotton cultivation and the trade in cotton textiles going back to the Bronze Age. India and China were the most important early locations, but the continent with the least cotton in early times, Europe, was destined to play the major role in the cotton manufacturing that sparked the Industrial Revolution.
The Harvard historian Sven Beckert makes the case that in the 19th century what most stirred the universe was cotton. “Empire of Cotton” is not casual airplane reading. Heavy going at times, it is crowded with many more details and statistics (a few of them repeated) than the nonspecialist needs. But it is a major work of scholarship that will not be soon surpassed as the definitive account of the product that was, as Beckert puts it, the Industrial Revolution’s “launching pad.”
More than that, “Empire of Cotton” is laced with compassion for the millions of miserably treated slaves, sharecroppers and mill workers whose labors, over hundreds of years, have gone into the clothes we wear and the surprising variety of other products containing cotton, from coffee filters to gunpowder. Today some 350 million people are involved in growing, transporting, weaving, stitching or otherwise processing the fibers of this plant.
“Until the 19th century,” Beckert explains, “the overwhelming bulk of raw cotton was spun and woven within a few miles from where it was grown.” Nothing changed that more dramatically than the slave plantations that spread across the American South, a form of outsourcing before the word was invented. These showed that cotton could be lucratively cultivated in bulk for consumers as far afield as another continent, and that realization turned the world upside down. Without slavery, he says, there would have been no Industrial Revolution.
Beckert’s most significant contribution is to show how every stage of the industrialization of cotton rested on violence. As soon as the profit potential of those Southern cotton fields became clear in the late 1780s, the transport of slaves across the Atlantic rapidly increased. Cotton cloth itself had become the most important merchandise European traders used to buy slaves in Africa. Then planters discovered that climate and rainfall made the Deep South better cotton territory than the border states. Nearly a million American slaves were forcibly moved to Georgia, Mississippi and elsewhere, shattering many families in the process.
Beckert does deftly show how the Civil War became “a turning point for the history of capitalism.” The momentary collapse of cotton imports from the U.S. during the Civil War led Britain to turn its attention toward the Middle and Far East for new sources of cotton. In short, capitalism came to places like India and Egypt because of the Civil War. Though Great Britain colonized India in 1853, it was only during the Civil War that Britain took India seriously as a source of national wealth. The British colonial government carved up the land into taxable plots that essentially forced Indians to grow the only commodity with any financial worth: cotton. In no time, India’s countryside was sucked into a global cotton economy, with devastating consequences for India’s population. Indians suffered repeated famines when the price of cotton plummeted on global exchange markets. As many as 10 million Indian cotton farmers died from famines in the 1870s, and another 19 million in the 1890s.
The colonial system that Britain perfected in India—all in the name of cotton and capitalism—other non-European states would soon emulate. By the end of the 19th century, Japan colonized Korea and parts of China, turning them into their own raw cotton providers. The Ottomans did the same in parts of the Middle East. But the rise of these new cotton powerhouses would steadily weaken Britain’s own cotton industry. It was not only the competition, Beckert argues, but the growing power of the working class within Britain and Europe that undid Europe’s cotton capitalists. By the early 20th century, the European states became increasingly receptive to labor reform; once cotton capitalists’ ally, the state turned into its enemy. By the end of World War I, cotton’s importance to Europe’s economy dwindled significantly. But cotton would play a central role in the birth of emerging non-European states. In colonial India, cotton became both the symbol of colonial exploitation and the hope for its postcolonial future. The small elite of native-born cotton capitalists that emerged under British rule had, by the 1930s, united with cotton growers to overthrow imperial rule. Gaining control of their cotton industry became their unifying objective. To this day, the cotton wheel remains the emblem on India’s state flag. Beckert’s point is that, even into the 20th century, capitalism and the state were mutually constitutive. Nationalizing the cotton industry could even mask the conflicts that capitalism produced between rich and poor, capitalist and worker. Even Gandhi could find common cause with India’s rapacious cotton industrialists, spinning a cotton wheel in public as a show of national solidarity.
Today, most of our cotton continues to be grown in India, as well as in Uzbekistan, Senegal, Pakistan, China, and other developing countries. China has become the manufacturing juggernaut, turning all that raw cotton into the T-shirts, shorts, and jeans you may be wearing as you read this. Beckert, perhaps forgivably, spends little time exploring how this happened—there’s only so much you can devote to that past 40 years, when this new trend emerged, in a book that covers half a millennium. Yet he still finds the state, even Communist China, as doing more or less exactly what Europe and the U.S. did in the 19th century. In the name of national wealth, China has colonized vast new regions and exploited millions of laborers—only with more ruthless efficiency.
In conclusion, this makes “Empire of Cotton” read a bit like two stories combined, with one of them incomplete. Cotton’s story Beckert more than fully tells, but his analysis of capitalism really requires a big-picture analysis of other industries as well. And here, his two categories are not so easily separated. For example, we no longer go to war over cotton, but would America have spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting in Iraq if that country had no oil?
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panchatzi
5.0 out of 5 stars Interessante Darstellung
Reviewed in Germany on 3 August 2023
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gute Darstellung der Weltgeschichte aus dem Blick der Baumwolle und seiner Verarbeitung
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