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socraticgadfly's review against another edition
5.0
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.
devinayo's review against another edition
4.0
"Too often, we prefer to erase the realities of slavery, expropriation, and colonialism from the history of capitalism, craving a nobler, cleaner capitalism." Sven Beckert in Empire of Cotton: A Global History
The book is an attempt to retrace the history of capitalism through one of its most ubiquitous commodities: cotton. In explaining how some countries began modernization and embraced capitalism faster than others, thus starting the global inequality we have today, Beckert pointed to cotton and how it encouraged private enterprises to rise up and states decision in pursuing colonialism and later imperialism.
Beckert argued that the rise of cotton industry in Europe was backed by war capitalism, which involved at its core slavery, land expropriation, armed trade and colonial expansion. While cotton was traded freely, the labor and land whence it came were not. Take the cotton plantations in the present-day United States, for instance, whose lands were taken through coercion and violence, and relied on slavery to tend the crops. Beckert also explained the global network of war capitalism in the early period of cotton empire, showing that even at its early stage, capitalism had been a global phenomenon and as with now, relied on the exploitation of the many by the few.
What is striking to me perhaps is the link between colonialism and capitalism that Beckert elaborated on great length in the book. Not only that cotton capitalists in Europe managed to secure raw materials from its colonial territories, colonialism also allowed the massive restructuring of native ways of life -- from deindustrialization (turning traditional weavers into planters) to proletarianization through land distribution that again, favored only the few, effectively turning people into labor since they lost the commons that used to be a source of livelihood before wage labor became the only option.
This is by no means an all-encompassing book, since it focuses only on one commodity and therefore can only explain the world through a single lens. And yet, through the story of cotton, Beckert manages to weave the history of colonialism and capitalism together, and provides an explanation of the global inequality in our world today.
The book is an attempt to retrace the history of capitalism through one of its most ubiquitous commodities: cotton. In explaining how some countries began modernization and embraced capitalism faster than others, thus starting the global inequality we have today, Beckert pointed to cotton and how it encouraged private enterprises to rise up and states decision in pursuing colonialism and later imperialism.
Beckert argued that the rise of cotton industry in Europe was backed by war capitalism, which involved at its core slavery, land expropriation, armed trade and colonial expansion. While cotton was traded freely, the labor and land whence it came were not. Take the cotton plantations in the present-day United States, for instance, whose lands were taken through coercion and violence, and relied on slavery to tend the crops. Beckert also explained the global network of war capitalism in the early period of cotton empire, showing that even at its early stage, capitalism had been a global phenomenon and as with now, relied on the exploitation of the many by the few.
What is striking to me perhaps is the link between colonialism and capitalism that Beckert elaborated on great length in the book. Not only that cotton capitalists in Europe managed to secure raw materials from its colonial territories, colonialism also allowed the massive restructuring of native ways of life -- from deindustrialization (turning traditional weavers into planters) to proletarianization through land distribution that again, favored only the few, effectively turning people into labor since they lost the commons that used to be a source of livelihood before wage labor became the only option.
This is by no means an all-encompassing book, since it focuses only on one commodity and therefore can only explain the world through a single lens. And yet, through the story of cotton, Beckert manages to weave the history of colonialism and capitalism together, and provides an explanation of the global inequality in our world today.
yosoytico's review against another edition
4.0
Extremely dense, but a very important and well-researched text.
annagrac's review against another edition
2.0
This book is a bit of a mess. It jumps around between time spans and countries so that it is impossible to follow the thread of development in one country over time or across the world at any one moment. Confusingly also, sometimes narratives are presented as continental and sometimes national e.g. "Europe" or "Britain", "Asia" or "India". The attempt to generalise across whole continents for decades at a time falls somewhat flat.
I can see that the author was trying to be thematic in his telling, but the groupings in each chapter don't seem to enhance each other. If he had done a chapter on, say, working conditions - looking at the mix of slavery/free labour on plantations and worker's conditions there; working conditions, wages and child labour in spinning factories; and profits made by investors - that would shine light into relative exploitation/enrichment by cotton - instead all those elements get covered somewhat superficially in bits of chapters and its rather difficult to tell if Lancastrian spinners were really getting a good or bad deal compared to, say, sharecroppers during reconstruction. Similarly, a chapter on the technical advances in spinning in Lancashire, the cotton gin in the US etc... and how those played into which regions were most productive & best quality and the knock on effects for imports/exports would have made the story more comprehensible.
I thought that the inclusion of charts to show the trends was a good idea as some of the lengthy description of growth rates and proportions of the markets for each producers were rather tedious. Unfortunately in my PB copy, the charts are somewhat scattered throughout the book and with such tiny fonts that they are simply unreadable.
I can see that the author was trying to be thematic in his telling, but the groupings in each chapter don't seem to enhance each other. If he had done a chapter on, say, working conditions - looking at the mix of slavery/free labour on plantations and worker's conditions there; working conditions, wages and child labour in spinning factories; and profits made by investors - that would shine light into relative exploitation/enrichment by cotton - instead all those elements get covered somewhat superficially in bits of chapters and its rather difficult to tell if Lancastrian spinners were really getting a good or bad deal compared to, say, sharecroppers during reconstruction. Similarly, a chapter on the technical advances in spinning in Lancashire, the cotton gin in the US etc... and how those played into which regions were most productive & best quality and the knock on effects for imports/exports would have made the story more comprehensible.
I thought that the inclusion of charts to show the trends was a good idea as some of the lengthy description of growth rates and proportions of the markets for each producers were rather tedious. Unfortunately in my PB copy, the charts are somewhat scattered throughout the book and with such tiny fonts that they are simply unreadable.
cupiscent's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
4.25
This book is full of hard truths and clear-eyed erudite outrage. At its heart sits a truth the author explicitly states in his final pages: "the importance of coercion and violence to the history of capitalism." The strongest thing I draw from this book is how fundamentally modern capitalism - our modern world - is not just built but dependent on breaking and trampling a great many people, whether through colonialism, expropriation, market-building or outright slavery. The author's ability to present history without comment, while actually commenting hugely, was very impressive. I'm not sure I could say I enjoyed this book, but it's an important and interesting topic.
(Note: there's about 200 pages of notes and index at the end of this book - I didn't whizz through it all in a day!)
(Note: there's about 200 pages of notes and index at the end of this book - I didn't whizz through it all in a day!)
madison_o's review against another edition
4.0
Required reading for anyone who wants to understand the origins, past, and present state of global capitalism.