Empire of Cotton: A Global History

Extract

Sven Beckert's long-awaited study of cotton's global history stands as a great achievement of historical scholarship. Beckert's intellectual breadth, revealed in this truly global history, has received wide and richly deserved praise. In contrast to many earlier chronicles of industrialization, Empire of Cotton does not identify the West's rise to global economic hegemony as the result of some sort of inherent cultural merit. Instead, Beckert depicts the process by which an empire of cotton emerged as both an illustrative example—and the central historical cause—of the modern capitalist world economy.

The empire emerged for two major reasons. The first was the adoption by European states of a complex of techniques and institutions that Beckert calls “war capitalism”—“Slavery, the expropriation of indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed trade, and the assertion of sovereignty over people and land by entrepreneurs” (p. xv). Within the shadows of the empires that war capitalism had already cast upon the global map by 1750, many new commodities circulated. But cotton—and here is the second major theme of the book's story—became more significant than all the others. War-capitalist states—especially the settler-colonial state that emerged in the middle latitudes of North America—assisted in the collection and exploitation of forced labor in the cotton fields, undercutting free laborers in cotton's original south Asian core. Unlike with sugar, tobacco, and other crops, the intensive labor processes that gave cotton added value took place not just in the field but in manufacturing the fiber into a crucial trade good. That extraction of the additional value could take place not just in the empire but in the metropole as well.