Empire of cotton
The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality in the world economy, and its making and remaking of global capitalism. Sven Beckert's rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world's most significant manufacturing industry combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world. Here is the story of how, beginning well before the advent of machine production in 1780, these men created a potent innovation (Beckert calls it war capitalism, capitalism based on unrestrained actions of private individuals; the domination of masters over slaves, of colonial capitalists over indigenous inhabitants), and crucially affected the disparate realms of cotton that had existed for millennia. We see how this thing called war capitalism shaped the rise of cotton, and then was used as a lever to transform the world. The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, farmers and merchants, workers and factory owners. In this as in so many other ways, Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the modern world. The result is a book as unsettling and disturbing as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist. - Publisher.
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6recommend
12mentions
11people
2017–2023years
58% recommend42% neutral
Mentions per year
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- Yes and no. As with the current example in Russia, dangerous governments are closely allied with the economic/industrial elite. Beckert's Empire of Cotton is a good look at the history of what he calls "war capitalism", where there's a close alliance and a lot of common effort between the nominally separate spheres of government and industry.
- > I would guess the costs for most things has dropped dramatically, while the cost for professionals has relatively risen.
In a sense this is the gist of it: the price of goods is much much lower relative to the price of labor, especially when you compare with the modern West.
But that doesn’t really do justice to the immensity of the gulf that separates the pre-modern world from our lives on the other side of changes like industrialization, mass production, chemical fertilizer and mechanized agriculture, and the immense drop in the cost of shipping (railways, containerization, etc). It’s not just that prices have changed; the whole economic game is utterly different. The best example is clothing, which was astonishingly costly in relative terms because fibers and cloth had to be hand-produced at every stage of production. A laborer in the Middle Ages could probably afford only a few items of basic clothing and they would be patched and mended for as long as possible. When cotton production industrialized in the 19th century it was one of the great shifts in world history, for all sorts of reasons: see Sven Beckett’s great book Empire of Cotton. It takes a real effort of imagination (and research) to put ourselves back in that pre-industrial world: you must constantly remind yourself of things like e.g. transportation of goods over any distance over land is extremely expensive, unreliable, and slow (think an ox cart on a rutted track). Indeed transportation of people or even meaningful amounts of information could not happen faster than the speed of a horse. That also utterly changes the economic game in all sorts of ways, if you think about it.
Nothing gives the flavor of the alienness of the past like a little economic history.
- Sorry, there's no way I'm spoon-feeding you the whole history of labor. Maybe read Loomis's "A History of America in Ten Strikes" as a starting point. And then maybe Beckert's "Empire of Cotton" for the broader, systemic view.
- This is not the rose-colored answer you might be looking for, but contrary to popular belief (which usually start with Henry Ford) a lot of modern day “management techniques” were actually invented at slavery plantations [1]
I can recommend the following books on the history of capitalism (which is closely linked to the exploitation of labor aka management):
- Empire of Cotton (Sven Beckert)
- Nature’s Metropolis (Cronon)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slav...
- For people interested in the subject, I recommend "Empire of cotton" by Sven Beckert.
One thing that I learnt was how actively the British undermine the local industries on their colonies. They wanted the colonies to be only raw material exporters. The effects of that policy can be felt even nowadays.
Another thing that I had not realized before, but it's obvious in retrospective, is how important was the British manufacturing demand in consolidating slavery in the USA.
- Books I liked in 2018:
Crashed by Adam Tooze ; history of the financial crisis, goes into more detail than most of the others
The Future of Capitalism by Paul Collier; lots of ideas on how to improve our situation, most of them are good, UK focused
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou; if you've ever been in a startup you'll recognize bits of this story, but it quickly gets out of control in novel ways. Astonishing story.
What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michel Sandel
The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu
Who we are and how we got here by David Reich: ancient DNA and human history
The Book of Why by Judea Pearl; liked it but I need to reread this one a few more times to comprehend completely or go to his textbooks
Empire of Cotton: Sven Birckets; a history of the first global technology including how it made the UK & USA rich
The Away Game: The Epic Search for Soccer's Next Superstar by Sebastian Abbot
