Cotton pickers, 1800s. Miserable stoop labor, often fourteen hours a day.
Sven Beckert is not the first historian to discern the vital nexus between cotton and industrialization. An interesting analysis of the fiber’s contribution to the development of the Industrial Revolution was made by David Andress in his 2009 book, 1789, The Threshold Of A New Age (please see my previous review of this book if interested for further detail). This was only one facet of Andress’s general thesis, however. The Empire Of Cotton focuses exclusively on the issue of how the miracle fiber played a key role (the author would say crucial) in the development of mass production, modern capitalist society. He makes his analysis with a masterful command of detail gained from a vast variety of primary sources, to include mundane commercial documents, bills of lading, merchant correspondence, etc. Supported by strong evidence, Beckert carefully and logically expounds his argument for cotton as the first industry to drive, then revolutionize the mechanical miracle of the 18th and 19th centuries, at first in Northern England, then spreading to North America and the European continent, and eventually involving the entire world in a systematic web of cotton cultivation, production, export and import.
Some of the authors key points include: a division of capitalism into two phases, war capitalism and industrial capitalism. The former is the earlier form, relying on naked force to appropriate territory and resources to generate capital. Two examples would be the conquest of the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade. Industrial capitalism, the latter, more modern version, largely discards the open use of force in favor of legal and social constraints designed to implement capitalist production. An example of this would be how subsistence farmers were compelled to give up their previous traditional way of life to either share crop cotton or work in mills for wages.
One of the most interesting aspects of Beckert’s analysis is his discussion of how the pre-Civil War U.S. incorporated both war and industrial capitalism, with the former represented by the agrarian, slaveholding South and the latter by the rapidly industrializing North with its wage-based economy. Beckert shows how the two systems worked synergistically to make the U.S. the chief provider of cotton to the U.K. and Europe while simultaneously ratcheting up political and economic tensions until the country ultimately tore itself apart. His analysis of the effect of the Civil War upon the cotton industry, how U.K. and other cotton manufacturers were compelled to seek alternative sources, and how this led to the eventual complete triumph of industrial capitalism worldwide is also well done. He also shows how the cotton industry eventually inverted itself, when former powerhouses as the U.K. and U.S. lost position to a once again globally dominant South, only now integrated into a comprehensive, worldwide capital system.
I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in modern history and how globalism came about.