"Empire of Cotton: An Exploration of Global History Through the Lens of Cotton" by Sven Beckert

Katja: highly recommended

Canada on Feb 17, 2024

Ronald W. Cox: This is an impressive achievement. I use the book as the first assignment in my graduate seminar that I teach on The Politics of Globalization.

United States on Jan 14, 2024

panchatzi: gute Darstellung der Weltgeschichte aus dem Blick der Baumwolle und seiner Verarbeitung

Germany on Aug 03, 2023

Athan: Empire of Cotton is a monument of a book. In the manner (but decidedly not the style) of a business school case, it tells the history of modern capitalism via the story of its first major product, cotton. In the process, and without even trying, it demolishes two conventional theories of how capitalism took hold. Both

1. the theory that equates the triumph of our system with science, technology and the industrial revolution

2. the theory that attributes the rise of capitalism to pluralistic institutions

are convincingly shown here to be ex-post rationalizations. Or rather, author Sven Beckert argues, first came the capitalists and then they used their newfound powers to both

1. foster the necessary inventions to produce more / cheaper

2. manipulate their times’ politics to establish institutions supportive of private (as opposed to communal) property, sanctity of contract and free movement of capital and goods

By telling the history of the cotton trade (and almost entirely omitting any mention of the steam engine, for example), the author explains that powerful merchants drove these changes. Yes, these men did take advantage of...

United Kingdom on Feb 16, 2020

T. Graczewski: At the heart of Harvard history professor Sven Beckert’s award-winning book, “Empire of Cotton: A Global History,” is a simple but compelling syllogism: the wealthy, capitalist world we Americans live in today was created by the Industrial Revolution; the Industrial Revolution was driven by massive productivity gains in textile manufacturing; cotton was the essential raw ingredient that powered textile manufacturing. Thus, if it weren’t for cheap and plentiful supplies of raw cotton, the world we live in today might very well look quite different.

The way Beckert tells the story, it seems to me, is that there have essentially been five major epochs in global cotton production and manufacturing.

First, for most of world history, cotton was a locally produced and consumed commodity. Eastern Africa, South Asia (India, specifically), and Central America were the cradles of the early cotton industry, which Beckert writes developed independently, yet along similar lines as the raw cotton was processed and spun in close proximity to where it was grown, usually in individual households and by women.

Second, over the course of centuries beginning around 1500,...

United States on Apr 18, 2017

Amazon Customer: In my opinion there's much more to tell in a history of cotton, e.g. the trading companies that started in the middle 1800s and exists until today, the techniques of cotton production that evolved greatly in the last 150 years.

Brazil on May 06, 2016

Jean-Paul Azam: Comment le cotton a tissé la trame de l'histoire du capitalisme. Sven Beckert le décrit d'une main de maître avec souvent des fulgurances qui font apparaître des liens aussi convaincants qu'inattendus. Mon bémol vient de ce que parfois il tombe dans une "réification" du capitalisme qui me rappelle certains travaux français des années 1960 et 1970 dont je suis content de m'être débarrassé après mes études. Malgré ça, je place ce livre parmi les grands textes de l'histoire économique contemporaine.

France on Feb 04, 2016

royal_guju: Global history is very much the fashion in leading university history departments today. Some of them seek to replace courses in Western civilization with classes in global history, Ex ' The Transformation of the World by Jurgen Osterhammel — but usually such courses have to be team-taught by a variety of specialists, since so few individual academics have such a broad reach. “Empire of Cotton” proves Sven Beckert one of the new elite of genuinely global historians.

“Empire of Cotton” starts by describing cotton cultivation and the trade in cotton textiles going back to the Bronze Age. India and China were the most important early locations, but the continent with the least cotton in early times, Europe, was destined to play the major role in the cotton manufacturing that sparked the Industrial Revolution.

The Harvard historian Sven Beckert makes the case that in the 19th century what most stirred the universe was cotton. “Empire of Cotton” is not casual airplane reading. Heavy going at times, it is crowded with many more details and statistics (a few of them repeated) than the nonspecialist needs. But it is a major work of scholarship that will not be...

United States on Apr 28, 2015