Empire of Cotton : : a Global History

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Call Number: 338.476 Be, Adult Book / Nonfiction / History / General / Beckert, Sven
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Traverwood Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	338.476 Be	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / History / General / Beckert, Sven	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / History / General / Beckert, Sven	4-week checkout	Due 04-27-2024
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / History / General / Beckert, Sven	4-week checkout	Due 05-12-2024

Introduction -- The rise of a global commodity -- Building war capitalism -- The wages of war capitalism -- Capturing labor, conquering land -- Slavery takes command -- Industrial capitalism takes wings -- Mobilizing labor -- Making the global -- A war reverberates around the world -- Reconstructing the empire of cotton -- Creative destructions -- The new cotton imperialism -- The return of the global south -- Epilogue : the weave and the weft.
"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."-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

a turning point for the history of capitalism submitted by topraks on June 5, 2015, 7:49pm An excellent account on the importance of cotton in the development of capitalism with the emphasis given to slave labor. My only question is while discussing capitalism the author makes no reference to "Das Kapital" even Karl Marx have many attributions to cotton industry in England in his work . Let us not forget F. Engels who provided the information and data to Marx due to his connection to the textile industry in England, his family owned factories in Manchester. In his work " The Condition of the Working Class" Engels too gives examples of workers in the cotton mills of victorian Manchester: As an early advocate of workers cooperatives, George Jacob Holyoake writes in the secularist paper "Reasoner": "As you enter Manchester from Rusholme, the town at the lower end of Oxford road has the appearance of one dense volume of smoke, more forbidden than the entrance to Dante's inferno". In writing the ills of capitalism Engels admits that he was shocked: "I have never seen so systematic a shutting out of the working class from the thoroughfares, so tender a concealment of everything which might affront the eye and the nerves of the bourgeois as in Manchester" "..in such dwellings only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home" Likewise Robert Owen, an utopian socialist, was a textile manufacturer himself tried to change the conditions of his workers by introducing a model of equitable employment and community cohesion in his factories. Furthermore on the impacts of American Civil War on cotton industry in England the author misses hundreds of thousands Lancashire laborers enthusiastically supporting Abraham Lincoln's ideals and the anti-slave North being fired, cut back to part-time and earnings reduced. As a result food riots broke out. (See "History of Cotton Famine." by R. Arthur Arnold) In addition to all this, no reference is given to John Hobson and his work on "Imperialism". Hobson's focus on industrial capitalism as the driving force of imperialism and his great influence on V.I Lenin and his work "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism" is well known. These references would have only enriched the argument in the context of "war capitalism". Despite the shortcomings mentioned above I should still consider it as an important work about the history of cotton industry especially in connection with slave trade and development of industrial capitalism.