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Cotton, Capitalism, and Coercion: Some Comments on Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton
- Journal of World History
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Volume 28, Number 1, March 2017
- pp. 131-140
- 10.1353/jwh.2017.0006
- Article
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While Empire of Cotton is an impressive, highly praised, and highly readable book, it is better as a story about cotton than as an analysis of capitalism. Beckert pays little attention to defining capitalism or to analyzing how capitalist states functioned. Neither does he explicitly confront his claims with claims by other scholars. His work can and should play a major role in the debate on the origins and driving forces of modern economic growth and the emergence of the Great Divergence. A follow-up that explicitly engages with the main positions in that debate would be most welcome.