Empire of Cotton: A Global History

Empire of Cotton: A Global History

by Sven Beckert

Narrated by Jim Frangione

Unabridged — 20 hours, 15 minutes

Empire of Cotton: A Global History

Empire of Cotton: A Global History

by Sven Beckert

Narrated by Jim Frangione

Unabridged — 20 hours, 15 minutes

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Overview

The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality in the world economy, and its making a remaking and of global capitalism.



Sven Beckert's rich, fascination book tells how 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 the 1780's, these men captured ancient trades and skills in Asia, combined them with the expropriation of lands in the Americas and the enslavement of African workers to crucially recast the disparate realms of cotton that had existed for millennia. We see how industrial capitalism then reshaped these worlds of cotton into in empire, and how this empire transformed the world.



The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant and 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 world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with is today. The result is a book as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Adam Hochschild

In his important new book…Sven Beckert makes the case that in the 19th century what most stirred the universe was cotton. Empire of Cotton is…a major work of scholarship that will not be soon surpassed as the definitive account of the product that was, as Beckert puts it, the Industrial Revolution's "launching pad." More than that, Empire of Cotton is laced with compassion for the millions of miserably treated slaves, sharecroppers and mill workers whose labors, over hundreds of years, have gone into the clothes we wear and the surprising variety of other products containing cotton, from coffee filters to gunpowder…Beckert's most significant contribution is to show how every stage of the industrialization of cotton rested on violence.

The New York Times - Thomas Bender

Mr. Beckert's 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…[Beckert's] 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.

Publishers Weekly

10/13/2014
In his latest venture into capitalism’s past, Harvard University historian Beckert (The Monied Metropolis) has produced a hefty, informative, and engaging study of cotton. Beckert persuasively shows that nothing less than a global sweep can provide a complete understanding of how the plant’s cultivation and its thread-to-cloth production affected the growth and development of economic, political, and social systems. He examines the changes wrought by thousands of years of cotton production in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, with Europe—and England in particular—a relative latecomer to the plant’s marvels. These developments prompted the rise of “war capitalism” in the 1500s, a stage of economic development rooted in the violence associated with forcible land and labor acquisitions. This was what the Europeans excelled at: violently intruding on global cotton networks, then using their newly acquired power to further dominate and exploit the system. Moving across several millennia and touching upon every corner of the globe, Beckert’s narrative skills keep the story of capitalism fresh and interesting for all readers, especially when he introduces individuals like the British merchant Samuel Greg and Georgia plantation owner James Monroe Smith, putting human faces on sweeping historical events. Illus. (Dec.)

From the Publisher

Winner of the Alfred and Fay Chandler Book Award

“Masterly.... Deeply researched and eminently readable, Empire of Cotton gives new insight into the relentless expansion of global capitalism.  With graceful prose and a clear and compelling argument, Beckert not only charts the expansion of cotton capitalism ... he addresses the conditions of enslaved workers in the fields and wage workers in the factories.  An astonishing achievement.”—Thomas Bender, New York Times
 
“Important.... a major work of scholarship that will not be soon surpassed as the definitive account of the product that was, as Beckert puts it, the Industrial Revolution’s ‘launching pad.’” —Adam Hochschild, New York Times Book Review     
        
“Breathtakingly comprehensive, informative and provocative.” —Glenn C. Altschuler, Tulsa World
 
“Persuasive ... brilliant ... Beckert’s detailed narrative never scants the rich complexity of the cotton trade’s impact on many different societies.” —Wendy Smith, Boston Globe
  
Empire of Cotton proves Sven Beckert one of the new elite of genuinely global historians.  Too little present-day academic history is written for the general public. ‘Empire of Cotton’ transcends this barrier and should be devoured eagerly, not only by scholars and students but also by the intelligent reading public. The book is rich and diverse in the treatment of its subject. The writing is elegant, and the use of both primary and secondary sources is impressive and varied. Overviews on international trends alternate with illuminating, memorable anecdotes.... Beckert’s book made me wish for a sequel.” —Daniel Walker Howe, The Washington Post
 
“Momentous and brilliant ... Empire of Cotton is among the best nonfiction books of this year.” —Karen R. Long, Newsday
 
“Compelling ... Beckert demonstrates persuasively how the ravenous cotton textile trade in Europe was instrumental in the emergence of capitalism and draws a direct line from the practices that nourished this empire to similar elements in the production of goods for today’s massive international retailers. Those who long to know more about how and why slavery took hold in Europe, Africa and the Americas will find this book to be immensely enlightening.  Better still, those who live out the troubled legacy of the exploitation and enslavement of workers in the service of the cotton empire will find in it added inspiration for their continuing efforts to realize a just and more equitable society.” —Ruth Simmons, President Emeritus of Brown University
  
“Intellectually ambitious ... a masterpiece of the historian’s craft.” —Timothy Shenk, The Nation
 
“A highly detailed, provocative work.” —Booklist
 
“Hefty, informative, and engaging ... Beckert’s narrative skills keep the story of capitalism fresh and interesting for all readers.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“[Beckert’s] close-up study of the cotton economy is a valuable model for the study of capitalism generally, an economic system in which slavery and colonialism were not outliers but instead integral to the whole ... a valuable contribution.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“Fascinating and profound.... Global history as it should be written.” —Eric Foner

Library Journal - Audio

03/15/2015
Until the dawn of the industrial revolution, the cultivation, processing, and weaving of cotton textiles was largely a local affair. Here Beckert (American history, Harvard; History of American Capitalism) argues that the growth and development of the worldwide cotton industry not only paralleled but, indeed, shaped the industrial revolution and laid the groundwork for the modern world economic order. In a dazzlingly detailed account of events from India to Egypt to the Americas, but mostly centered on cotton's epicenter in the mill towns of Manchester and Liverpool, England, the author argues that the cotton trade spurred technological and mercantile advances that fostered the colonial aspirations of several European nations. Contemporaneously, a new breed of global capitalists began to exploit large-scale organizations of labor, particularly through slavery and then sharecropping in the rural United States and through wage labor in urban centers. Narrator Jim Frangione is solid and engaging. VERDICT While exhaustively researched and persuasive, the book suffers from a numbing surfeit of statistical data and is recommended for scholarly and specialist audiences only. ["Though replete with numbers, graphs, and tables, this book is so well written that it should be valuable to both scholars and aficionados of history," read the review of the Knopf hc, LJ 11/15/14.]—Forrest Link, Coll. of New Jersey Lib., Ewing

Library Journal

11/15/2014
This ambitious book is a mostly successful attempt to write a global history of the rise and spread of cotton. Beckert's (American history, Harvard Univ.; The American Bourgeoisie) specialty is capitalism studies. His aim here is to chronicle cotton, the dominant international trade good from the 18th century onward, and show how its dissemination created one global network of production, trading, and consumption that superseded the localized networks of earlier times. The author traces this process on every continent: what he has to say about the failure of the cotton trade in some places is as helpful as what he remarks about its successes elsewhere. This is an unusually rich look at the roots of our present-day global economy and a salutary corrective to more traditional explanations of "the Great Divergence" between the industrialized, mercantile West and the rest of the world. Beckert, a lucid explainer, never oversimplifies to clarify his points. VERDICT Though replete with numbers, graphs and tables, this book is so well written that it should be valuable to both scholars and aficionados of history. There are few historical topics as relevant as how we got to where we are now. [See Prepub Alert, 5/19/14.]—David Keymer, Modesto, CA

APRIL 2015 - AudioFile

"White gold" sparked an Industrial Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, which rippled worldwide. This isn’t quite an economics textbook, but the story of cotton involves a lot of economic concepts, such as bills of lading and futures. Narrator Jim Frangione can't make international spindle count comparisons dramatic, but he makes business concepts understandable. At the same time, he relishes more interesting topics like family business dynasties. Listeners also will learn about the brutality and poverty spawned by capitalism and colonialism. The emphasis on business won't be to every listener’s taste as the sheer mass of economic terms and concepts doesn't make for easy listening. However, Frangione ably delivers a solid primer on economics and capitalism. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2014-10-05
Beckert (History/Harvard Univ.; The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896, 2001) writes convincingly of cotton as the impetus for a world-system kind of capitalism.Cotton, of course, has been grown and worked for millennia, long before the development of capitalism. As the author observes, initially cotton required efforts so labor-intensive that cotton goods had outsized value: "Rulers everywhere demanded cotton cloth as tribute or taxes, and indeed it might be said that cotton was present at the birth of political economy as such." The shift in the Industrial Revolution to mass production removed some of the allure and value, moving cotton from household to factory and shifting cultivation from small plots to large plantations—and, importantly, forging international links among banks, markets, suppliers and shippers around the world. In one case study, Beckert weaves the stories of towns in the Black Forest of Germany, the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and the American South into a neat fabric. Market production meant the development of new systems of banking and credit, thus remaking the world of finance, with European credit in particular being instrumental in furthering the development of the slave economy in the United States. Beckert's narrative sometimes threatens to grind to a halt amid an overabundance of detail, but his conclusions and asides are fascinating—as when, for example, he puts the lie to the idea that ours is an age of deindustrialization "when exactly the opposite is true, as the greatest wave of industrialization ever has overtaken the globe." In that light, his close-up study of the cotton economy is a valuable model for the study of capitalism generally, an economic system in which slavery and colonialism were not outliers but instead integral to the whole. Of narrower interest than Monied Metropolis but a valuable contribution all the same.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940171734756
Publisher: HighBridge Company
Publication date: 12/02/2014
Edition description: Unabridged
Sales rank: 514,104

Read an Excerpt

Empire of Cotton

A Global History


By Sven Beckert

Random House LLC

Copyright © 2014 Sven Beckert
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-375-41414-5


CHAPTER 1

In 1935, while living in Danish exile, a young German writer sat down to consider how the modern world had come into being. Bertolt Brecht channeled his thoughts through the voice of an imaginary "Worker Who Reads." That worker asked many questions, including:

Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the name of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished.
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
Of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?


Brecht might as well have been talking about a very different empire, that of cotton. By his time, the legend of cotton was well documented; history books were filled with the stories of those who harnessed the plant's unique gifts, Richard Arkwright and John Rylands, Francis Cabot Lowell and Eli Whitney. But as with any industry, the empire itself was sustained by millions of unnamed workers, who labored on cotton plantations and farms, and in spinning and weaving mills throughout the world, including in Brecht's hometown of Augsburg. Indeed, it was in Augsburg, as we have seen, that Hans Fugger had accumulated his riches in the nonmechanized production of cottons more than half a millennium earlier.

Like Brecht's haulers and builders, few cotton workers have entered our history books. Most left not even a trace; too often they were illiterate, and almost always their waking hours were occupied with holding body and soul together, leaving little time to write letters or diaries, as their social betters did, and thus few ways for us to piece their lives together. One of the saddest sights to this day is St. Michael's Flags in Manchester, a small park where allegedly forty thousand people, most of them cotton workers, lie buried in unmarked graves, one on top of the other, "an almost industrial process of burying the dead." Ellen Hootton was one of these rare exceptions. Unlike millions of others, she entered the historical record when in June 1833 she was called before His Majesty's Factory Inquiry Commission, which was charged with investigating child labor in British textile mills. Though only ten when she appeared before the committee and frightened, she was already a seasoned worker, a two-year veteran of the cotton mill. Ellen had drawn public attention because a group of middle-class Manchester activists concerned with labor conditions in the factories sprouting in and around their city had sought to use her case to highlight the abuse of children. They asserted that she was a child slave, forced to work not just in metaphorical chains, but in real ones, penalized by a brutal overseer.

The commission, determined to show that the girl was a "notorious liar" who could not be trusted, questioned Ellen, her mother, Mary, and her overseer William Swanton, as well as factory manager John Finch. Yet despite their efforts to whitewash the case, the accusations proved to be essentially true: Ellen was the only child of Mary Hootton, a single mother, who was herself a handloom weaver barely able to make a living. Until she turned seven, Ellen had received some child support from her father, also a weaver, but once that expired her mother brought her down to a nearby factory to add to the family's meager income. After as many as five months of unpaid labor (it was said that she had to learn the trade first), she became one of the many children working at Eccles' Spinning Mill. When asked about her workday, Ellen said it began at five-thirty in the morning and ended at eight in the evening, with two breaks, one for breakfast and one for lunch. The overseer, Mr. Swanton, explained that Ellen worked in a room with twenty-five others, three adults, the rest children. She was, in her own words, a "piecer at throstles"—a tedious job that entailed repairing and reknotting broken threads as they were pulled onto the bobbin of the mule. With constant breakage, often several times a minute, she only had a few seconds to finish her task.

It was all but impossible to keep up with the speed of the machine as it moved back and forth, so she sometimes had "her ends down"—that is, she had not attached the loose and broken ends of the thread fast enough. Such errors were costly. Ellen reported being beaten by Swanton "twice a week" until her "head was sore with his hands." Swanton denied the frequency of the beatings, but admitted using "a strap" to discipline the girl. Her mother, who called her daughter "a naughty, stupid girl," testified that she approved of such corporal punishment, and had even asked Swanton to be more severe to put an end to her habit of running away. Life was hard for Mary Hootton, she desperately needed the girl's wages, and she begged Swanton repeatedly to keep on the girl, despite all the troubles. As Mary said, "I cries many a times."

The beatings, however, were not the worst treatment Ellen experienced at Swanton's hands. One day, when she arrived late to work, Swan- ton penalized her even more severely: He hung an iron weight around her neck (there was no agreement about whether it weighed sixteen or twenty pounds) and made her walk up and down the factory floor. The other children heckled her, and as a result, "she fell down several times while fighting with the other hands. She fought them with the stick." Even today, nearly two hundred years later, the pain of the girl's life, from the tedium of her work to the violence of her abuse, is hard to fathom.

While the city of Manchester sports a Rylands Library, Harvard University a Lowell student dormitory, and while every grade-school student learns about Richard Arkwright and Eli Whitney, there is of course no library or school named for Ellen Hootton. No one but a handful of historians knows anything about her life. Yet when we think about the world of cotton manufacturing, we should think of Ellen Hootton. Without her labor and that of millions of children, women, and men, the empire of cotton would have never been built. Neither Rylands nor Lowell would have accumulated their riches, and Arkwright's and Eli's inventions would have collected dust in the corner of a barn. Ellen's story highlights the physical violence of punishment, but as important, the more banal violence of economic desperation, which brought ever larger numbers of people into factories, where they spent their lives, quite literally, in the service of the empire of cotton.

Like Ellen Hootton, thousands and, by the 1850s, millions of workers streamed into the world's newly built factories to operate the machines that produced cotton thread and cloth. The ability to mobilize so many women, children, and men to work in factories was awe-inspiring. Many a contemporary was overwhelmed by the sight of hundreds or even thousands of workers walking to and from their places of toil. Every morning before sunrise, thousands of workers walked down narrow paths in the Vosges to the factories in the valley, crawled out of dormitory beds just up the hill from Quarry Bank Mill, left their struggling farms above the Llobregat River, and made their way through crowded Manchester streets to one of the dozens of mills lining its putrid canals. At night they returned to sparse dormitories where they slept several to a bed, or to cold and drafty cottages, or to densely populated and poorly constructed working-class neighborhoods in Barcelona, Chemnitz, or Lowell.

The world had seen extreme poverty and labor exploitation for centuries, but it had never seen a sea of humanity organizing every aspect of their lives around the rhythms of machine production. For at least twelve hours a day, six days a week, women, children, and men fed machines, operated machines, repaired machines, and supervised machines. They opened tightly packed bales of raw cotton, fed piles of cotton into carding machines, they moved the huge carriages of mules back and forth, they tied together broken yarn ends (as did Ellen Hootton), they removed yarn from filled spindles, they supplied necessary roving to the spinning machines, or they simply carried cotton through the factory. Discipline was maintained through petty fines and forced forfeiture of contracts: A list of dismissal cases from one early-nineteenth-century mill had official justifications ranging from banal disciplinary issues, such as "using ill language," to idiosyncratic charges, like "Terrifying S. Pearson with her ugly face." Maintaining a disciplined labor force would prove consistently difficult. In one English mill, of the 780 apprentices recruited in the two decades after 1786, 119 ran away, 65 died, and another 96 had to return to overseers or parents who had originally lent them out. It was, after all, the beginning of the era of William Blake's "dark satanic mill."

Winter or summer, rain or shine, workers ventured into buildings rising several stories high, usually made of brick, and labored in vast rooms, often hot, and almost always humid, dusty, and deafeningly noisy. They worked hard, lived in poverty, and died young. As political economist Leone Levi put it in 1863, "Enter for a moment one of those numerous factories; behold the ranks of thousands of operatives all steadily working; behold how every minute of time, every yard of space, every practiced eye, every dexterous finger, every inventive mind, is at high-pressure service."

It is difficult to overstate the importance and revolutionary nature of this new organization of human labor. Today we take this system for granted: Most of us make a living by selling our labor for a certain number of hours a day; with the result—our paycheck—we purchase the things we need. And we also take for granted that machines set the pace of human activity. Not so in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries: If we look at the world as a whole, the number of people who would exchange their labor power for wages, especially wages in manufacturing, was tiny. The rhythm of work was determined by many things—by the climate, by custom, by the cycles of nature—but not by machines. People worked because they were compelled to do so as slaves, or because they were the feudal dependents of worldly or ecclesial authorities, or because they produced their own subsistence with tools they owned on land to which they had some rights. The new world of making yarn and cloth, as one of the innumerable cogs in the empire of cotton, was utterly, fundamentally different. Cotton manufacturing rested on the ability to persuade or entice or force people to give up the activities that had organized human life for centuries and join the newly emerging factory proletariat. Though the machines themselves were stunning and world-altering, this shift in the rhythm of work would be even more consequential. They may not have known it, but as Ellen Hootton and untold others streamed into the factory, they were looking at the future, the very industrial capitalism that their labor was building.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert. Copyright © 2014 Sven Beckert. Excerpted by permission of Random House LLC, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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