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

Among the signal contributions of the new history of capitalism is the insistence that slavery be central to our understanding of the economic development of the modern world. Returning to and elaborating on ideas developed decades ago by Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, and others, numerous historians have argued recently that slavery and capitalism were not incompatible so much as they were mutually constitutive, with each empowering the other until the structural and political tensions that existed between them led to slavery’s demise while propelling capitalism forward into new and more advanced forms.

In keeping with the premise that the systematic exploitation of coerced workers sat at the heart of this interplay between slavery and capitalism, many authors deploy terminology that purposefully forces readers to confront the brutality, violence, and theft that made slavery specifically and modern capitalism generally what they were. In River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass., 2013), for example, Walter Johnson describes the American slave regime as a “carceral landscape” in which space was always crafted toward the goal of effectively imprisoning laborers and bending their lives solely toward agricultural production. Similarly, in The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York, 2014), Edward E. Baptist writes of the South’s “slave labor camps” rather than using the conventional though arguably euphemistic “plantations.”

The distinctive linguistic contribution of Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History, meanwhile, is the expression “war capitalism,” which Beckert employs instead of the more anodyne “merchant capitalism” to describe how Europeans came to dominate the world economically between the late eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries (pp. xv, xvi). In Beckert’s telling, what launched Europe into the Industrial Revolution and touched off the so-called great divergence between the West and the rest of humanity was not free markets, geographical good fortune, an innovative and individualistic culture, or liberal state institutions but rather European capitalists and statesmen forging an entirely new kind of global production complex. By combining slavery, territorial expropriation, and imperial expressions of market sovereignty abroad with the reorganization of free workers into a regimented wage labor force of machine operators at home, Europeans engineered productivity gains and capital accumulation that made their merchants, manufacturers, and financiers into some of the most powerful people on the planet and transformed the nation-states that enabled and supported them into the mightiest on earth.

Cotton made it all possible, Beckert maintains, because it was unique among the age’s valuable commodities for the intensity of labor required in fields and factories alike, for the global scope of its potential markets, and for its capacity to bind together producers, manufacturers, and consumers in the cities and countrysides of every continent. Cotton stimulated the massive growth of both slavery and wage labor, the cultivation of huge expanses of stolen agricultural land, the constant application of new technologies and new modes of production, and the making of European nation-states that stood behind the unleashed forces of private capital and became stronger by harnessing those forces to build their military power, geographic reach, and bureaucratic authority. Cotton, in short, was the raw material that spurred the sweeping violence of war capitalism and rearranged the economic networks of the entire planet.

Befitting its subtitle, Empire of Cotton is truly a global history that is less about any particular place, nation, or people than it is about the evolution of state-making, capital networks, industrial development, trade organization, market integration, labor systems, and the relationships among those things and with the institutions to which they gave rise. The book is accordingly wide-ranging and kaleidoscopic, including locations as far-flung as Russia, China, Turkey, Japan, Peru, Denmark, Brazil, Germany, Egypt, and Togo. Still, throughout the book certain places stand out more than others. India, for example, is a key player in cotton’s story. For centuries the center of...