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BOOKS

Capitalism, as Woven Through Cotton

Empire of Cotton, by Sven Beckert
DEC. 29, 2014

Books of The Times

By THOMAS BENDER

After a quarter-century of tightly focused studies, historians are addressing

extended periods of time and the global dimensions of history. As Thomas Piketty
did in Capital in the 21st Century, his excellent recent study of wealth and
inequality, Sven Beckert takes the long view in Empire of Cotton: A Global
History. Mr. Beckerts book is more broadly framed and more readable, but at its
heart, as in Mr. Pikettys book, is inequality.
Instead of statistical distributions of wealth, Mr. Beckerts focus is on
planters and enslaved workers, manufacturers and wage laborers, the center of
the British Empire and colonies and, later, developing nations. What both books
bring out are the structural sources of disempowerment and inequality.
Mr. Beckerts masterly narrative of cotton production within the framework
of state power and capitalism shows how much has been missed in studies
focused on the vulnerable (slaves, women and the like) without incorporating the
structural advantages of the powerful. Deeply researched and eminently readable,
Empire of Cotton gives new insight into the relentless expansion of global
capitalism.
Cotton has been cultivated and valued since ancient times, and Mr. Beckert,
a professor of American history at Harvard, begins there. His story, though,
effectively commences in the 16th century when, as both Adam Smith and Karl
Marx insisted, the voyages of discovery revealed that the oceans, rather than
being barriers, were actually highways giving birth to modern capitalism. Smith

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Empire of Cotton, by Sven Beckert - NYTimes.com

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hailed this development, but he pointed out that while it brought enjoyments
and industry to Europe, it entailed dreadful misfortunes in Asia and the
Americas.
In Mr. Beckerts view, the cotton revolution was partly the fortuitous product
of a sequence of inventions flying shuttle (1733), spinning jenny (1764), water
frame (1769) and Samuel Cromptons spinning mule (1779).
In the 1780s, cloth manufacture was powered by nonhuman forms of energy
for the first time, and Britain became the first industrial nation. Yet invention was
only part of the story. Empire was central; it enabled the accumulation of capital
for rapid expansion and controlled markets, and it ensured a supply of cotton.
Slavery and the expropriation of native lands, Mr. Beckert writes, fueled by
European capital, combined to feed raw materials relentlessly into Europes core
industry.
Soil exhaustion from tobacco agriculture in the American South combined
with Eli Whitneys invention of the cotton gin (1793), prompting a shift there to
cotton cultivation. The South became the principal source of cotton for British
mills.
Until 1865 this production depended on slave labor, and it required a vast
increase in the importation of enslaved Africans. One-third of all slaves imported
into the United States came between 1793 and 1808, when the further
importation was banned by Congress at the earliest date allowed by the
Constitution.
But this is not entirely a Southern story. Northerners provided the insurance,
brokerage, financing and shipping, making New York the financial capital of the
Americas.
By the middle of the 19th century, Manchester, England, became the center
of cotton manufacture. At first unable to match the quality of Asian production,
Manchesters machines and the citys labor force women and children as well
as men gradually caught up.
But there were human costs in the factories as well as in the fields. To make
this point, Mr. Beckert quotes Alexis de Tocqueville, who was shocked on a visit
to Manchester: Here humanity attains its most complete development and its
most brutish; here civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned
back almost into a savage.
Mr. Beckert sees the hand of the state in both the accomplishments and
shameful sides of industrial capitalism. He repeatedly attributes the darker side

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of his story to war capitalism. But his usage lacks definition and can seem
arbitrary. Empire, another phrase that runs prominently through the book,
provides the actual framework for this capitalist enterprise. In some cases it is
formal empire, but it is also British command of capital and trade routes, what
historians call free trade imperialism. Thus I would put it the other way around:
Empire was the foundation of cotton capitalism, with warfare being one of its
instruments.
The 19th-century story Mr. Beckert tells is global in scale. The American
South was the greatest single source of cotton, yet was just one of many. Egyptian
cotton was the finest, but cotton production also soared in India, Brazil, Africa
and China. Not all American cotton went to Manchester. Some went North, and
young women from New England farms, later replaced by immigrants, tended the
spindles and looms in a massive factory complex in Lowell, Mass., and elsewhere.
Throughout the century, and around the world, millions of people were turned
into proletarians.
Mr. Beckerts research was done in archives on every continent, and his skill
in pulling together the elements of the global world of cotton is an astonishing
achievement. With graceful prose and a clear and compelling argument, he not
only charts the expansion of cotton capitalism, with its bankers, brokers and
manufacturing magnates, but also addresses the conditions of enslaved workers
in the fields and wage workers in the factories.
With the American Civil War and the end of slavery, the labor question
became urgent. Southern planters turned to sharecropping and tenant farming
rather than a wage system. The formerly enslaved agricultural workers, eager for
autonomy, preferred this arrangement to one with a former master as boss. This
solution to the labor question became the global standard. It shifted considerable
risk from capital to labor.
Crop failures, whether caused by weather or insect infestation, were the
burden of the tenant farmer, not the planter. Moreover, the financial structure
kept agricultural workers chronically in debt. Everywhere the state favored
capital at the expense of labor, notably vagrancy laws and crop lien protocols.
Large landowners and merchants dominated.
The development of cotton manufacture represented a knowledge transfer
from Asia to Europe. Today North Atlantic capital, managed by giant and
powerful retailers like Walmart or Carrefour, exploits the workers of Asia and the
Global South. It sets the terms of production and price, encouraging brutal

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exploitation of labor that amounts to a brutal race to the bottom. In global cities
bidding on commodity exchanges, trade in derivatives and bets on price
movements transform labor and cotton into an abstraction. At a time when many
believe in unregulated capitalism, this history may suggest reconsidering that
faith.
EMPIRE OF COTTON
A Global History
By Sven Beckert
Illustrated. 615 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
Thomas Bender is a professor of humanities and history at New York University and
the author of A Nation Among Nations: Americas Place in World History.
A version of this review appears in print on December 30, 2014, on page C1 of the New York edition
with the headline: Capitalism, as Woven Through Cotton.

2015 The New York Times Company

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