Sven Beckert’s “Empire of Cotton” offers a sweeping global history of capitalism, centering cotton as the key commodity that shaped the modern world. Beckert argues that the rise of capitalism was not simply a story of European innovation, but of “war capitalism”—the violent expropriation of land, labor, and resources across continents. Cotton’s journey from India and the Middle East to the Americas and Europe reveals how state power, slavery, and colonialism underpinned the Industrial Revolution.

The book begins in 18th-century England, where fortunes from the West Indian slave trade funded the first cotton mills. By 1850, two-thirds of American cotton was grown on land seized from Native Americans since the start of the century. Nearly a million enslaved people were forcibly relocated to the Deep South to work on cotton plantations, and cotton cloth became the most important merchandise Europeans used to buy slaves in Africa. At its height, the American South supplied over 80% of the world’s cotton, fueling the textile mills of Britain and Europe.

Every step of the way, there is brutal struggle between workers and owners. Violent measures for suppression are institutionalized into systems of business and governance. Merchants create more complex systems for financialization and risk mitigation to try to control outcomes for this labor-intensive cash crop, which required various new forms of discipline and labor subjugation after the institution of slavery was abolished. In India, British colonial policy forced peasants into cotton monoculture, and in Berar alone, the percentage of land devoted to cotton rose from 21% to 35% between 1860 and 1880, contributing to famines that killed millions.

Beckert demonstrates how pivotal the role of cotton production was in powering the industrial revolution, driving patterns of urbanization built on the exploitation of particularly vulnerable labor classes (rural women and children) into urban factories; the bitter similarities between Lowell’s cotton mills in 19th Century Massachusetts, and the dormitory-packed Chinese factory girls a century later. In the 19th century, child labor was widespread in mills from Manchester to St. Petersburg, and today, up to two million children under 15 are still forced to harvest cotton in Uzbekistan.

Beckert’s research draws on archives from multiple continents, combining economic data with personal accounts to show the human cost of global capitalism. Today, some 350 million people are involved in growing, transporting, weaving, stitching, or otherwise processing cotton. The violence and inequality of the cotton empire are not relics of the past, but persist in today’s garment factories and agricultural fields. Cotton growers in Benin may earn a dollar a day or less, while U.S. cotton businesses received over $35 billion in government subsidies between 1995 and 2010. The 2013 Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, which killed over 1,100 garment workers, is a modern echo of the dangerous conditions that have long plagued the industry.

Definitely one of my favorite books this year. I have a feeling I’ll be reading this over and over again many more times, as I chase down references. It’s an enjoyable read, with many rich insights that bear fruit after second or third review.

Rewriting the Story of Capitalism

What makes “Empire of Cotton” revolutionary is how it dismantles the comfortable myth that capitalism emerged from European innovation and entrepreneurship. Instead, Beckert reveals capitalism as a global system built on what he calls “war capitalism” — the violent extraction of labor and resources from colonized peoples. Cotton becomes the perfect lens through which to examine this process because it was simultaneously the world’s most important manufacturing raw material and a crop that demanded intensive, controllable labor.

The book’s genius lies in showing how the “free” markets of Manchester were inseparable from the slave plantations of Mississippi, the colonial cotton fields of India, and the coercive labor systems that replaced slavery across the global South. This isn’t just about economic connections — it’s about how violence and coercion were foundational to capitalist accumulation, not aberrations from it.

The Geography of Exploitation

Beckert’s global approach reveals patterns that national histories obscure. When the American Civil War disrupted cotton supplies, European manufacturers didn’t just find alternative sources — they actively created new systems of coercive labor in Egypt, India, and Brazil. British colonial officials in India used tax policy and debt to force peasants into cotton production, while Egyptian cotton cultivation expanded through corvée labor that differed from slavery mainly in name.

The book traces how cotton cultivation moved across continents following the logic of labor control and profit maximization. Each new region brought innovations in exploitation: the task system in South Carolina, the gang labor of Mississippi, the debt peonage of post-Reconstruction sharecropping, the colonial taxation systems that forced Indian peasants into cash crop production. These weren’t separate developments but components of a single, evolving system of global capitalism.

War Capitalism and Its Mechanisms

One of Beckert’s most important contributions is his concept of “war capitalism” — the use of state violence to create and maintain profitable labor relations. This wasn’t just about conquering territory; it was about continuously restructuring social relations to maximize extraction. Slave patrols in the American South, colonial armies in India, and corporate militias in post-Civil War America all served the same function: maintaining the labor discipline that cotton production required.

The book shows how legal systems evolved to serve this function. Property law that treated humans as capital, contract law that bound Indian peasants to cotton cultivation, vagrancy laws that criminalized unemployment in the post-slavery South — all of these legal innovations served to maintain labor control when direct coercion became politically or economically unfeasible.

The Industrial Revolution Reconsidered

Perhaps the book’s most striking insight is how it reframes the Industrial Revolution. Rather than a story of technological progress liberating human potential, Beckert shows how industrial capitalism depended on intensifying labor exploitation across the globe. The cotton mills of Lancashire weren’t just connected to slave plantations — they were part of the same system of accumulation.

The book reveals how industrial “progress” often meant more sophisticated forms of worker control. The factory system didn’t replace coercive labor; it refined and systematized it. The young women working in Lowell’s mills faced different constraints than enslaved cotton pickers, but both groups experienced capitalism as a system that subordinated their lives to the demands of profit and production schedules.

Continuities Across Time and Space

What’s most unsettling about Beckert’s analysis is how it reveals continuities between historical and contemporary forms of exploitation. The dormitory system that housed Chinese factory workers in the 2000s echoes the barracks that housed enslaved workers in the 1800s. The debt relationships that bind contemporary garment workers to factories mirror the credit systems that trapped sharecroppers in perpetual poverty.

These aren’t coincidences but structural features of how capitalism organizes production. The book suggests that what we often see as “development” or “modernization” might be better understood as the continuous refinement of techniques for extracting maximum value from human labor.

The Power of Archival Research

Beckert’s methodology demonstrates the power of truly global archival research. He draws on sources from corporate records in Manchester, plantation accounts from Mississippi, colonial administrative documents from India, and worker testimonies from across the cotton-producing world. This allows him to trace the same economic processes from multiple perspectives and reveal connections that would be invisible from any single national or regional viewpoint.

The book’s extensive use of quantitative data — production figures, trade statistics, wage records — grounds its arguments in material reality while its attention to personal accounts and worker testimonies keeps the human costs of these systems visible. This combination of macro-economic analysis and micro-historical detail makes abstract concepts like “primitive accumulation” concrete and visceral.

Implications for Understanding Contemporary Capitalism

Reading “Empire of Cotton” in 2021, during a period of renewed attention to racial capitalism and global supply chains, feels particularly urgent. The book provides historical context for understanding how contemporary forms of exploitation — from fast fashion sweatshops to migrant agricultural labor — connect to longer histories of coercive labor relations.

Beckert’s analysis suggests that the violence and coercion we often associate with capitalism’s “primitive” phase never really ended; they just became more sophisticated and geographically dispersed. The book challenges readers to see contemporary global capitalism not as a system that has evolved beyond its violent origins but as one that has refined and systematized them.

A New Framework for Global History

Beyond its specific insights about cotton and capitalism, the book offers a model for how to write truly global history. Rather than comparing separate national developments, Beckert shows how to trace the connections and interdependencies that shaped different regions’ experiences. His approach reveals how local histories are always embedded in global processes of accumulation and exploitation.

This methodology has implications beyond economic history. It suggests ways of understanding how contemporary global challenges — from climate change to migration to inequality — might be better understood through attention to the global systems that connect seemingly disparate local experiences.

Why This Book Matters Now

“Empire of Cotton” arrives at a moment when many of the systems Beckert analyzes are under renewed scrutiny. The book provides historical depth to contemporary debates about reparations, global inequality, and corporate responsibility. It shows how current distributions of wealth and power are the products of specific historical processes rather than natural or inevitable outcomes.

For readers grappling with questions about how to build more just economic systems, the book offers both sobering analysis and implicit hope. By revealing how current arrangements were constructed through human action, it suggests they can be reconstructed through different choices. Understanding the history of how capitalism developed globally is essential for imagining how it might be transformed.

A Masterwork of Historical Scholarship

“Empire of Cotton” represents historical scholarship at its finest — rigorous, comprehensive, and transformative. Beckert has produced a book that will reshape how we understand not just the history of capitalism but the relationship between local and global, past and present, economic and political. It’s the rare academic work that manages to be both methodologically sophisticated and genuinely readable, both historically specific and broadly relevant.

This is a book that rewards multiple readings and continued engagement. Each chapter opens new questions and connections, making it a resource for ongoing learning rather than a text to be consumed and forgotten. For anyone seeking to understand how our current global economic system developed and how it might be changed, “Empire of Cotton” is essential reading.