Empire of Cotton

In putting forth the book’s main thesis, Beckert argues that perhaps more than any other industry the cotton trade is at the heart of every major development in modern capitalism since the 18th century. He writes, “This book is the story of the rise and fall of the European-dominated empire of cotton. Because of the centrality of cotton, its story is also the story of the making and remaking of global capitalism and with it of the modern world” (xi). To illustrate the dominance Europe enjoyed at the height of its cotton empire, Beckert takes stock of global achievements of the British cotton industry in 1860, a year before the American Civil War would turn it on its head:

Millions of mechanical spindles—powered by steam engines and operated by wage workers, many of them children—turned for up to fourteen hours a day, producing millions of pounds of yarn. Instead of householders growing cotton and turning it into homespun thread and hand-loomed cloth, millions of slaves labored on plantations in the Americas, thousands of miles away from the hungry factories they supplied, factories that in turn were thousands of miles removed from eventual consumers of the cloth (x).

Yet only 100 years earlier, “the ancestors of these cotton men would have laughed at the thought of a cotton empire” (x).