Summary[]
This book examines the “empire of cotton” – the globally integrated manufacturing complex that linked slavery in America, cotton mills in Manchester, and clothing items around the world. In particular, it tracks the rise and fall of the European-dominated empire of cotton, a story of the making and remaking of global capitalism and with it of the modern world. Entrepreneurs in American and England recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry by combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers. He argues that Europeans – in particular Great Britain – united the power of capital and the power of the state to forge a global production complex, and then used the capital, skills, networks, and institutions of cotton to embark upon the creation of new technology and wealth that defines the modern work. At the core of this system was what 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." War capitalism flourished in the fields and drew its strength from slavery and led to new wealth and knowledge that in turn strengthened European institutions and states. The result of this highly aggressive oriented capitalism was that Europeans came to dominate the centuries old worlds of cotton, merge them into a single empire centered in Manchester and led to industrial capitalism. Initially tightly linked to slavery and expropriated lands, industrial capitalism, from wage labor to property rights, gained strength and enabled a new and different form of integration of the labor, raw materials, markets, and capital. Cotton thus brought together slavery and free labor, states and markets, colonialism and free trade, industrialization and deindustrialization. It was thus a global struggle, between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, farmers and merchants, workers and factory owners.
See also: Walter Johnson, Edward Baptist