King Cotton: Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton

Were one asked in 2016 to name some “hot” areas of historical research in recent years, one could do worse than to put the history of commodities, global history, and the history of capitalism near the top of the list. In his important, long-awaited, and widely acclaimed 2014 book, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. Pp. 615. $35), Sven Beckert, who teaches at Harvard, hits the trifecta, making major analytical and empirical contributions to all three of these areas. In so doing, moreover, he has reached both scholarly audiences and that most elusive quarry—general readers—doing well by doing good, as it were. The fact that the book has won numerous scholarly awards and is being translated into a variety of foreign languages attests amply to this point.

Over the past thirty years—ever since the publication in 1985 of recently deceased anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s influential Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History—commodities have often been used as authorial conceits by writers, scholarly and nonscholarly, who have employed them—or purported to employ them—at least in part as prisms to shed light on other important social and cultural concerns.¹ The results of such efforts have been mixed. Some such studies focus too closely on minutiae related to a particular commodity and never shed much light on other matters, while others do so only superficially in drive-by fashion. At their best, however, such studies, following (and honoring) Mintz’s monumental work, offer fresh insights into both the history of the commodity being studied and broader issues and themes. Beckert’s Empire of Cotton does just that, not only refashioning the history of cotton but also treating that history, once refashioned, as both an expression of capitalism and globalization and as an interpretive ligature connecting these processes to the creation of the modern world.

Although Beckert begins his study with a brisk summary of the history of cotton cultivation, manufacturing, and trade prior to the period Western scholars refer to as “early modern”—ca. 1500–1800 C.E.—his heart, formidable research, and scholarly imagination are focused on the period from the seventeenth century to the present, primarily on the “long nineteenth century” stretching from about 1780 to 1920 C.E. Readers interested in a more systematic global history of cotton prior to the seventeenth century would be well served by supplementing Beckert’s work with another superb recent study, Giorgio Riello’s prizewinning 2013 book Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World, which, as we shall see below, overlaps with Beckert’s study in places but is rather more complementary than directly competitive.²

Indeed, it is difficult, if not impossible, to satisfactorily assess Empire of Cotton without a nod to and brief consideration of Riello’s Cotton as well, for, despite clear differences, the coverage and quality of the two works and the close timing of their publications ensure that their authors will often be considered together, if not joined at the hip. Such being the case, one hopes the following observations will prove helpful.

Riello and Beckert both trace cotton’s global history over the course of the last millennium, treat many similar themes, and adopt periodization schemes that are largely, though not completely, compatible. Their books differ regarding the relative amount of attention paid to various subjects (e.g., consumption patterns), world regions, and time periods, and regarding matters of interpretation. Neither Riello nor Beckert specializes in agricultural history, and as a result, neither book makes a major contribution to questions relating to the realm of cotton production per se. This is not a criticism of either book, but an attempt to position each author in the vast literature on cotton. Riello devotes much more attention than does Beckert to developments in premodern Asia and much less to cotton’s history in the Western Hemisphere. He is keenly interested in cotton’s materiality and, thus, in cotton fabrics and, more broadly, in questions relating to cotton consumption and consumption patterns, subjects on which he already has a...