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Reviewed by:
  • Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert
  • Thierry Drapeau
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knoff 2015)

Just a few pages in and I had already high expectations for this book. By deciding to write global history through the prism of a single commodity – cotton – as a window into “the story of the making and remaking of global capitalism and with it of the modern world,” (xi) Harvard historian Sven Beckert got me immediately thinking about, and reappreciating the value of, the opening lines of Marx’s Capital, on how the elementary form of capitalism is most apparent, and thus most tangible, in the individual commodity itself. Was Beckert about to go forward in Marx’s steps, I wondered, and really “reinterpret … the history of capitalism,” as he claims? (xxii) Was he about to do for cotton what Sidney Mintz did so remarkably for sugar a few decades ago, or what Robin Blackburn, among others, did more recently for both cotton’s and sugar’s long-time human commodity-equivalent, namely, the African slave? Let me clarify this right away and defuse all expectations: no. This is not to say, however, that Empire of Cotton is not an important contribution to global history, for it is on several fronts.

To begin with, Beckert is not only a skilled narrator. He is also a rigorous historian, who has successfully woven together, forgive the pun, a narrative based on an imposing (testified by over 130 pages of endnotes) amount of archival and other primary sources gathered and researched on every continent where cotton has been grown, spun, and/or sold historically.

His fourteen-chapter story begins in the late pre-Columbian era, when cotton had long been cultivated for household subsistence by farmers from Central and South America to Africa, Persia, India, and South Asia – in short: in the global South avant la lettre. While these [End Page 329] early world-regions were partially and unevenly integrated into long-distance market activities, cotton growers were still disconnected as workers. The rise of European expansion in the Atlantic world and beyond at the turn of the 16th century was the turning point. European capitalists and merchants imbued with their respective states’ sovereign rights inserted themselves through force into traditional cotton production processes, first into India, where they subordinated weavers’ labour to world market needs. To help fund this imperial expansion, European powers co-concurrently conquered the Americas, where gold and silver bullion served, in turn, to purchase cotton fabrics in India. This ultimately led to the development of the Atlantic plantation complex, launching the transatlantic slave trade, in which Indian cotton cloth, Beckert reminds us, served as an important exchange commodity for slaves in Africa. In Europe meanwhile, the massive arrival of cotton fabrics led to the emergence of spinning and weaving industries based on the putting-out system. As a result, cotton was for the first time at the centre of genuinely global system of production and exchange.

Precipitated by international competition in cotton textiles, the invention of water- and, later, steam-powered machines in England in the second half of the 18th century was the catalyst, Beckert argues, that triggered the Industrial Revolution, which reorganized the configuration of the cotton empire. Plantation slavery was reinvigorated as a labour system, most especially in the South of the United States, where Native Americans in the interior were gradually dispossessed from their lands to be turned into cotton plantations, feeding the hungry emerging factory system in Europe, especially in England, where a large class of dispossessed proletarians were, at the same time, increasingly pushed to work in cotton factories for a wage, most often through direct coercion. Decades later, the American Civil War combined with the rise of worker militancy for better wages and shorter working days across the North Atlantic triggered a new shift in global cotton production – one that lasted until the 1970s. The quest for new access to cotton and cheap labour following the victory of the Union propelled the return of the global South, including Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Central Asia, and Korea, as well as a new wave...

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