Empire of Cotton

This book is a must read for all history buffs.the author has done extensive research for this book.

highly recommended

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

I am a tour guide at a historic plantation that at one time profited off the work of enslaved labor farming cotton as the cash crop. This book was recommended as a good read with many pertinent resources by my employer. Albeit, as with most of history overall, some parts interest us individually more than others so this book has peaks and valleys to it that wax and wane depending on what you’re hoping to get out of it. However, I managed the first 100 pages last night rather quickly and already have my highlighter and sticky notes out. The book really lays out the beginning origin of cotton farming and the adaptations of different civilizations which ultimately thrust cotton to the forefront of the cash crops of early American history. I’ve marked five or six pieces of information within the first hundred pages that I would like to commit to memory and perhaps incorporate into my tour regarding the agricultural history of the crop. I look forward to page 101 and beyond. I feel this book is a valuable resource and I am pleased to add it to my library.

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. Both1. the theory that equates the triumph of our system with science, technology and the industrial revolution2. the theory that attributes the rise of capitalism to pluralistic institutionsare 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 both1. foster the necessary inventions to produce more / cheaper2. manipulate their times’ politics to establish institutions supportive of private (as opposed to communal) property, sanctity of contract and free movement of capital and goodsBy 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 everything technology had to offer them, but that’s a footnote here. Equally, these men (and subsequently entire states) used their power and influence to shape domestic and international institutions to further their interests. But first they got that power.The irony is that the author is quite evidently a leftie and this whole book an elegy: the focus is squarely on the many victims of this forward march. God knows there were, indeed, millions who suffered and continue to suffer. Luckily, I’m of a rather sunny disposition, so that never got me down. I read “Empire of Cotton” for what it was, a thoroughly informed, painstakingly researched life-defining project of a truly awesome historian. Oh, and an unintentional paean to capitalism.The first phase of this journey is a triangle: cotton is grown by slaves in the American South, shipped to Liverpool or le Havre, spun and woven in Manchester or Alsace and finished fabrics are sent to Africa in exchange for slaves who are shipped to the American South. As more cotton is needed to feed this mill, more land is claimed from Native Americans and more slaves are shipped from Africa to work it. Author Sven Beckert calls this “War Capitalism” and that’s a term that probably won’t stick, but it conveys the strong coercion involved.The founding father of this business is named as slave owner and plantation owner Samuel Greg, who married into the prominent Rathbone family and whose major innovation was to establish Quarry Bank Mill on the banks of the Bollin River near Manchester, where he employed 110 orphans to spin cotton into yarn with the help of machines powered by the inanimate energy of the falling water.His phase is the first phase of capitalism, which was dominated by large families. These families, the Rathbones, the Volckerts and the Rallis, took advantage of the sprawling British Empire (and its inventions such as Hargreaves’ spinning jenny, Arkwright’s water frame, Kay’s flying shuttle, Crompton’s mule, Cartwright’s loom, and later Watt’s steam engine and Roberts’ automated mule, to say nothing of telegraph connection all the way to India) to parlay an original cost advantage in spinning into the establishment of a “hub and spoke” model whereby all decisions were made centrally (in Liverpool or in Winterthur, where the capital and the market/pricing information lay), to play one cotton grower against the other, one weaver against the other and one market against the other, reaping enormous profits for themselves.The effects of the model are detailed next on trade, agriculture, labor, politics and migration patterns worldwide: world trade became “Atlantic,” with Liverpool as its epicenter, Lancashire grew the world’s first working class proletariat, the US South took over from Haiti (where the slaves had gained their freedom) as the slave labor capital of the world, overtaking India almost instantly as the world’s #1 cotton producer, also with the help of a local invention, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. The United Kingdom, suddenly a manufacturing superpower, saw for the first time in history the involvement of a government in the protection of property rights, as it became a crime to export the sundry machines and inventions that eventually made it possible to annually export more than 150 million pounds of cotton yarn by 1820, up from less than two million in 1790. The unemployed masses of the world, meanwhile, flocked to the cotton mills in New England, but not to the South, where they’d have to compete with slave labor and to Argentina rather than Brazil, for the same reasons.The US Civil War served as a wake-up call for this neat arrangement, because the world’s main supply of internationally traded cotton suddenly came to a sudden stop. Funnily enough, the main players in the game, the traders, came off the best: overproduction had led to two years’ worth of cotton lying in storage, putting immense downward pressure on prices. With the US Civil War, the price of these stored supplies quadrupled, creating vast fortunes overnight, but also putting the incentives in place for the Empire of Cotton to move to its next phase.Lancashire, Alsace, Germany and Russia had to feed their cotton mills. But prices for cotton were higher too. Beckert moves on to tell the story of the imperialist phase of cotton, the one that lends its name to the book. The story is told colony-by-colony, from India to Egypt, of how communities across the planet were first forced to stop cultivating the sustenance crops that they had been growing alongside fiber crops for centuries, how their communal land was parceled into plots, how they were forced into monoculture, how they were made to buy their sustenance from the same people who sold them their seeds and bought their cotton, how dependent this made them on the world price of cotton and how vulnerable this made them to famine after a poor harvest or cattle disease, as happened in Egypt in 1863 (p. 334) For growers, the empire of cotton became an empire of debt. That suited both capitalists and local emerging classes of landowners just fine.At the same time, the US South entered a (much easier) transition whereby the freed slaves were fast-forwarded to sharecropping, with penalties for loitering, in essence back to where things had been before the Civil War, lynchings delivering less regularly but more severely the violence that had been delivered by the whip.With the states very much in charge, rather than businessmen, the laws were put in place that made it possible for a steady flow of “white gold” to be made available to the cotton mills in Lowell, Manchester and Augsburg. It became the purpose of colonies, from India to Congo to come up with the goods, with American expertise in labor-intensive growing methods in such high demand that the newly-formed state of Germany, for example paid for the sons of freed American slaves to bring their methods to its African colony of Togo. Similarly, the Japanese colonized Korea and the Russians central Asia and set them on cotton production on a massive scale.Next in line after local cultivators to be streamed into the world of paid labor in the cotton fields became their families. In a phase he describes as “deindustrialization” (a poor name, in my view) “the importation of cheap machine-made piece goods (…) drove native spinners and weavers altogether out of the market” (p.328) and forced them for the first time ever onto the fields. While it’s an exaggeration to classify as “industry” the operation of a loom at home, this was clearly a retrograde step for the financial standing of families throughout the world and India in particular.Nationalism is the next phase in this story, with white gold at center stage as nation-states sought their freedom from colonial powers and leveraged cotton as an instrument and object of industrial policy, witness a cotton spinning wheel in the center of the Indian National Congress flag. These strategies were eventually successful. Cotton mills in Lancashire went quiet and now buzz in the Global South.But this has been a poisoned chalice, as demand for the final product is these days dominated by giants like Walmart, who have turned the empire of cotton into a “race to the bottom” with even China and Bangladesh now being undercut on price by new entrants like Vietnam.Beckert could end his book by observing that we have now run out of planet and those Vietnamese workers will very soon enjoy the working conditions that made manufacture in the UK unprofitable a hundred years ago.He chooses not to.I loved this book regardless. It distils into 400 pages a decade of research by an obsessively passionate, thorough, highly observant, first-class historian. It would be worth reading even if it wasn’t a parallel story of the origins of our economic system.

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.