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A review by devinayo
Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert
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.