Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert (review)

In the past decade, two new fields have altered the study of history—the history of U.S. capitalism and world history. Sven Beckert had already made a seminal contribution to the first with his book The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (2001). His new book, Empire of Cotton, promises to be a classic in both fields.

Beckert begins by explaining how cotton became the center of capitalist industrialization. Supply limited cotton textile production across the world before the late eighteenth century. Peasants refused to abandon “safety-first” agriculture to specialize in any cash crop. The emergence of “war capitalism”—“slavery, the expropriation of indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed trade, and the assertion of sovereignty over people and land by entrepreneurs”—broke this bottleneck (xv). Industrial capitalist production of cotton textiles was the fruit of war capitalism. Slavery and colonialism created large-scale commercial plantation production of sugar, tobacco, and cotton and generated markets for textiles and the capital to finance early industrialization.

Once established, industrial capitalism allowed Europeans to dominate the world market, with Britain displacing India as the premier producer of cotton textiles by the early nineteenth century. Initially, cotton was cultivated in both Saint-Domingue and the U.S. South. In the wake of the Haitian revolution, the ability of U.S. slaveholders to expand production through the expropriation of native populations allowed the U.S. South to become the main source of cotton for Britain’s industrial revolution.

Although physically coerced and legally bonded labor produced the raw materials for capitalist industry, European manufacturers pioneered a new method of mobilizing labor—the growing market for labor power. Beckert roots this innovation in European states’ destruction of peasant agriculture and the creation of a landless population compelled to sell their ability to work for wages in order to survive. While most advanced in Britain, Beckert argues that Japan and continental European states were able to create masses of propertyless workers and conquer new markets, resulting in the uneven spread of capitalist textile production in the early nineteenth century.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Britain was the epicenter of the global cotton empire. British bankers, merchants, and manufacturers traded raw cotton and processed it into thread and cloth, and financed both cultivation and manufacture across the world. However, as industrial capitalism matured, it outgrew its dependence on war capitalism. Where war capitalism, in particular plantation slavery, dominated, industrial capitalist development was limited by coerced labor’s lack of motivation and skill and the resulting narrow domestic markets. In the one nation-state where war capitalism and industrial capitalism coexisted—the United States—these contradictions led to civil war and abolition.

The U.S. Civil War initiated a radical reorganization of global cotton cultivation. While cotton cultivation resumed in the U.S. South on the basis of sharecropping, textile manufacturers in the United States, Europe, and Japan sought alternative sources. Industrial capitalism had created states capable not merely of colonizing large swatches of the global South and controlling trade, but of transforming the countryside in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The history of the “new imperialism” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has often been told as a tale of industrialists in new industries (steel, rubber, machinery) seeking reliable and cheap supplies of industrial raw materials. The result was the transformation of the traditional social structures of the global South, creating masses of wage workers for mines and plantations. Beckert’s account brings to light how colonial states used taxes, land tenure laws, and forced labor to transform peasants into sharecroppers specializing in cotton in India, Egypt, West Africa, Mexico, Brazil, and China.

Cotton imperialism also transformed trade and production in the global empire. On the one hand, independent, specialized cotton merchants in the global North effectively became purchasing agents for manufacturers. On the other hand, domestic merchants and small-scale cotton textile producers in the global South...