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A review by annagrac
Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism by Sven Beckert
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.