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Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert
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WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST
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. 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.
- Sales Rank: #7715 in Books
- Published on: 2015-11-10
- Released on: 2015-11-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.97" h x 1.29" w x 5.18" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 640 pages
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, December 2014: How important is cotton? For starters, there’s a good chance that you’re wearing it right now. That’s true no matter where you live in the world. Cotton is everywhere, has been for a long time, and was the dominant commodity during the early years of our country. It fostered “war capitalism” among European nations. It helped launch the industrial revolution in England. It drove slavery. The story of cotton is the story of modern capitalism, and in Empire of Cotton, author Sven Beckert shows how a worldwide crop that came in multiple forms and was cultivated and produced in many different ways came to be dominated by the late coming Europeans, and later Americans, often through violent means, reshaping both the world economy and the world itself—for better or worse—along the way. – Chris Schluep
Review
“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
“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.
Most helpful customer reviews
29 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
How slavery, colonialism, and strong state involvement laid the foundations of modern prosperity
By Robert J. Crawford
This is an academic treatment of how the modern industrial economy was born: heavy in detail, clear in analysis, if somewhat dry at times. While much of the ground has been covered elsewhere, the synthesis, breadth, and grand themes that emerge are unavailable in a single volume, to my knowledge. For me, it was a seminal reading experience, a necessary perspective that brought things together in a way that will influence my view of modern society for the rest of my life.
The principal idea of the book is that the cotton industry, which represented the first step in the development of the modern industrial economy, was created by slavery and brutal and ever-more-efficient state coercion in cooperation with private capital. Global in scale, this convergence of factors would re-fashion the everyday lives of a majority of people on the planet - subordinating their working days to the rhythms of machines that replaced human muscle labor, opening the way to unprecedented prosperity for many, and enabling decisionmakers far from their homes to control the lives of people they will never meet.
Beckert sees several steps in these developments. In the beginning, there was the development of "war capitalism". In a nutshell, this was the forcible appropriation of land and labor, with the cooperation of a primitive form of the state. While cotton had been in use for millenia, it was limited to small, very local, networks at this time. As demand grew and new forms of mechanized manufacture began to appear, war capitalism vastly increased the scale of cotton cultivation, employing slaves to undertake the backbreaking work of clearing the land and then the thankless task of harvesting the cotton - their utility was cheap labor that could be forced to work by any means necessary. Meanwhile, the state aided in the acquisition of land - because it exhausted the soil quickly, cotton cultivation required continual land appropriation - and the displacement or elimination of whomever was unfortunate enough to occupy that land, in most cases Amer-Indians. For their part, capitalist traders emerged in Manchester, a mercantile capital that gained tremendous market influence and political power to bring the state into alignment with their interests.
The next phase opened with the invention of new means of production, in particular in the harnessing of chemical power in mills of ever-expanding scale and with elaborate forms of administrative innovation. At the same time, the state got involved with the protection and establishment of markets for their goods, both in supply but also for selling, i.e the distribution of goods. Industry was national and nationalistic. The natural culmination of this was the colonial enterprise. This was the second great legacy of the cotton empire: the de-industrialization and control of vast new territories. For example, the skills required for the production of the fine muslin of India were completely and forever destroyed. The native populations were subjugated to this order, fitting integrally into a hierarchy that exploited them while enriching captains of industry and politicians in colonial capitals. Meanwhile, manufacturing facilities became the source of massive employment, drawing people from the countryside to urban agglomerations that grew to then-incredible proportions.
Furthermore, the state remained intimately involved in the development of the economy in the major colonial states, not only in the development of supporting infrastructure, but in the legal subjugation of workers for the protection of the evolving industrial practices. This was the crucial step in the virtuous circle that arose of self-reinforcing economic development, resulting in a far more intricate and complex industrial economy that emerged in the product cycles of related manufactures. It can only be described as a revolution that changed our lives so fundamentally that it is on a par with the neolithic revolution.
Of particular interest is the evolution of the political economy of slavery. It was seen as a necessity for cotton production in the American South - a phenomenally profitable enterprise that created capital for further industrial investment that benefited all free Americans regardless of location - and as a crucial basic resource for all the new manufacturing powers. When the American Civil War began, it severely disrupted the world economy, based as it was on cotton, and the industrialized nations desperately sought to increase the supply of raw cotton. After that war, it was proven that low-wage sharecroppers could be counted on to produce cotton in a profitable way, supported as it was by state and private repression of the newly freed slaves. The colonial powers took note of this. In the US South, this arrangement was to survive for almost a full century, when automated cotton picking was finally perfected in the 1940s.
The most recent phase of the industry is its globalization, a shift of manufacturing to the former colonies. The real power gravitated to transnational corporations - predominantly retailers like Walmart or Gap - that were no longer subject to coherent national legal jurisdictions, hence largely disconnected from nationalistic considerations. While this caused the precipitous decline of once-prosperous cities like Liverpool, it is part of the ebb of flow of 21C capitalism. Organizational innovation extended to the development of massive logistical networks to handle getting cotton to manufacturers and then distributing their low-cost products in developed nations at a hefty profit. As this is so new, it is the least developed portion of the book. I suspect it decisively locks Third World producers and manufacturers into a lower-value added position, where design and brand generate greater profits for transnational corporations and their shareholders that no longer need to worry about employees in their home base of operation.
The implications of the book are of great interest and relevancy. First, it proves that the free classes all benefited directly and lastingly from slavery as an enabler of the first phase of industrialization. Without slaves (and subsequently share croppers or colonial serfs), both investment capital and the self-reinforcing and expanding product base of consumer capitalism would have accumulated far more slowly, perhaps over centuries rather than decades. This is the best argument for reparations that I have yet seen - the line from slavery and colonialism to prosperity for most of us is direct, while the descendants of slaves and serfs remain exploited and oppressed. Second, the state functioned as a crucial support for the development of private enterprise, from protecting nascent industries to enforcing laws that favored the manufacturing class. This flies in the face of neo-liberal ideology, which argues for a "free trade" that locks the developing world into an inferior status.
This book is a wonderful intellectual adventure, its ideas are far more subtle than I could ever express here. It is a bit too academic for my taste, covering developments in exhaustive detail, but on the whole it is a page turner. Recommended with the greatest enthusiasm.
73 of 83 people found the following review helpful.
A History of Capital and the Industrial Revolution for the 21st Century
By Jonathan M. Soffer
Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton continues on a global scale his project in his first book, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896, in demonstrating that the US is not an exceptional Arcadia emancipated from the repressive political, economic, & ideological forces of global capitalism. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the evolution of our global system of political economy, indeed for anyone seriously interested in the development of the 19th and twentieth century world. Beckert, a professor of history at Harvard University, creates a history of capitalism for the 21st century, decisively demonstrating that older Marxist scholars notably Eugene Genovese, were wrong to argue that slavery was a pre-capitalist mode of production, with the implication that Southern US slaveowners were somehow more benevolent "paternalist" employers than Northern industrialists. He also definitively challenges classical liberal lines of scholarship that argue that superior western institutions (other than the military) and free markets led to the economic expansion of the West. Unfreedom had far more to do with the rise of capitalism than freedom, liberty, or democracy. Even after the post-emancipation shift to industrial capitalism, capitalist enterprise remained tied closely to, and probably could not continue to expand without strong exercises of state, particularly military power. In line with recent scholarship by Walter Johnson, and Edward Baptiste, Beckert demonstrates that slave labor and state action on behalf of private interests were integral to the establishment of capitalism and to the industrial revolution.
Conducting research in the archives of every major country that produced cotton or finished cotton goods, and consulting local scholars where he doesn't have the languages, this book is also a model of transnational scholarship. Beckert traces the global evolution of cotton production and consumption, noting that in the early modern period, Western Europe was notable as a non-cotton producing region, making it even more remarkable that in the 19th century that it should become the center of the cotton trade.
He divides capitalism into two periods--war capitalism, which lasts until the US Civil War, was the first system. "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." He then demonstrates the close ties of supply, transport, communication, and credit with plantation forced labor. The knowledge and wealth that war capitalism expropriated, he argues, were "crucial preconditions for Europe's extraordinary economic development."
But expropriation and slavery, along with the deindustrialzation of the original producers of finished cotton goods in Asia and South America were not stable bases for bourgeois property and production. The revolution in St. Domingue in 1793 disrupted the English cotton industry and shifted production the American South, until the US Civil War ended the southern states' near monopoly of world cotton exports. This second American revolution, fought over the issue of free labor, shifted much of the cotton business back to Asia, Egypt, and Central America. Britain and other cotton-military- industrial complexes expanded their penetrations of colonies, such as India, where peasant labor had resisted the complete replacement of subsistence crops by cotton that Manchester demanded.
The new system, industrial capitalism, based on wage labor, both created political openings for workers in the West. "The dependence of capitalists on the state, and of the state on its people, empowered the workers who produced that capital. . . By the second half of the nineteenth century, workers organized collectively, both in unions and political parties, and slowly, over multiple decades, improved their wages and working conditions." The increased production costs eventually made the reindustrialization of the global South possible, and the center of the cotton industry has shifted there.
Empire of Cotton is surely one of the most significant works of history published this year. It is not impossible that in ten years that historians will consider it one of the most significant works of the decade.
71 of 87 people found the following review helpful.
"Vast sphere of war capitalism"
By evolveape
"...starting in the sixteenth century, armed European capitalists and capital-rich European states reorganized the world's cotton industry. It was this early embrace of war capitalism that was the precondition for the Industrial Revolution that eventually created an enormous further push toward global economic integration and continues to shape and reshape our world today..."
An excellent account on the importance of cotton in the development of capitalism with the emphasis given to slave labor. My only question is while discussing capitalism the author makes no reference to "Das Kapital" even Karl Marx have many attributions to cotton industry in England in his work . Let us not forget F. Engels who provided the information and data to Marx due to his connection to the textile industry in England, his family owned factories in Manchester. In his work " The Condition of the Working Class" Engels too gives examples of workers in the cotton mills of victorian Manchester: As an early advocate of workers cooperatives, George Jacob Holyoake writes in the secularist paper "Reasoner": "As you enter Manchester from Rusholme, the town at the lower end of Oxford road has the appearance of one dense volume of smoke, more forbidden than the entrance to Dante's inferno". In writing the ills of capitalism Engels admits that he was shocked: "I have never seen so systematic a shutting out of the working class from the thoroughfares, so tender a concealment of everything which might affront the eye and the nerves of the bourgeois as in Manchester" "..in such dwellings only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home" Likewise Robert Owen, an utopian socialist, was a textile manufacturer himself tried to change the conditions of his workers by introducing a model of equitable employment and community cohesion in his factories. Furthermore on the impacts of American Civil War on cotton industry in England the author misses hundreds of thousands Lancashire laborers enthusiastically supporting Abraham Lincoln's ideals and the anti-slave North being fired, cut back to part-time and earnings reduced. As a result food riots broke out. (See "History of Cotton Famine." by R. Arthur Arnold) In addition to all this, no reference is given to John Hobson and his work on "Imperialism". Hobson's focus on industrial capitalism as the driving force of imperialism and his great influence on V.I Lenin and his work "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism" is well known. These references would have only enriched the argument in the context of "war capitalism". Now that the cold war is over and Soviet Union has been disintegrated the historians should not hold themselves from exploring the classical works out of the fear of being labeled as "marxist".
A fair review of this book appeared in slate.com by Eric Herschthal entitled: "The Fabric of Our Lives"
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/12/empire_of_cotton_a_global_history_by_sven_beckert_is_a_great_history_of.html
Despite the shortcomings mentioned above I should still consider it as an important work about the history of cotton industry especially in connection with slave trade and development of industrial capitalism.
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