62 pages • 2 hours read
Sven BeckertEmpire of Cotton
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introduction-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
In putting forth the book’s main thesis, Beckert argues that perhaps more than any other industry the cotton trade is at the heart of every major development in modern capitalism since the 18th century. He writes, “This book is the story of the rise and fall of the European-dominated empire of cotton. Because of the centrality of cotton, its story is also the story of the making and remaking of global capitalism and with it of the modern world” (xi). To illustrate the dominance Europe enjoyed at the height of its cotton empire, Beckert takes stock of global achievements of the British cotton industry in 1860, a year before the American Civil War would turn it on its head:
Millions of mechanical spindles—powered by steam engines and operated by wage workers, many of them children—turned for up to fourteen hours a day, producing millions of pounds of yarn. Instead of householders growing cotton and turning it into homespun thread and hand-loomed cloth, millions of slaves labored on plantations in the Americas, thousands of miles away from the hungry factories they supplied, factories that in turn were thousands of miles removed from eventual consumers of the cloth (x).
Yet only 100 years earlier, “the ancestors of these cotton men would have laughed at the thought of a cotton empire” (x). In 100 more years, in 1963, the British cotton industry would be a shell of its former self, with cultivation and manufacturing having returned to its pre-industrial roots in India and China.
Beckert’s goal, he writes, is to chart this multi-generational arc, from the pre-Industrial Revolution era, during which the cotton industry was dominated by subsistence farmers and home-weavers in the global East; to the era of water- and steam-powered mills in Europe, supplied by raw cotton cultivated on vast plantations in the United States; to the abolition of American slavery and the imperial transformation of the Indian countryside to suit Europe’s needs; and finally, the resurgence of China and India as the world’s leading providers of both raw cotton and cotton goods, operating in a commodity chain that is tightly controlled by massive corporations like Walmart.
Despite Europe’s loss of its dominion over the empire of cotton, Beckert argues that its relatively brief reign helped set the stage for what historians refer to as the “the ‘great divergence’—the beginning of the vast divides that still structure today’s world, the divide between those countries that industrialized and those that did not, between colonizers and colonized, between the global North and the global South” (xiv).
Beckert also maintains that, contrary to modern conceptions of capitalism as a free market unencumbered by the state, the rise of powerful nation-states was crucial to the birth and evolution of industrial capitalism. In turn, the state’s dependence on the people’s consent to rule led to labor reforms that improved the wages and conditions of workers but also ultimately led to the renewed concentration of the cotton industry in Central Asia, where the cost of labor is much cheaper.
Finally, Beckert emphasizes the extent to which “slavery, the expropriation of indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed trade, and the assertion of sovereignty over people and land by entrepreneurs” (xv) were at the core of the cotton industry and, by extension, modern capitalism itself. Referring to these practices collectively as “war capitalism” (xv), Beckert revisits the nuanced configuration of war capitalism and industrial capitalism throughout the book.
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Rise of a Global Commodity”
Here, Beckert offers a summary of cotton’s history prior to the 17th century. According to botanists, cotton predates humanity itself, having grown on Earth for the past 10 to 20 million years. It also thrives in a remarkably wide latitudinal band, making it an ideal crop for cultivators in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. Although the archeological record around clothing is spotty at best, historians believe that humans first cultivated cotton for the purpose of weaving on the subcontinent of India around 5,000 years ago. Cotton cultivation spread independently, taking hold in the Maya civilization of Mesoamerica and in ancient Egypt.
According to Beckert, the first major expansion of demand for cotton goods came in the 8th century with the rise of Islam. He writes, “Islamic teachers taught girls to spin and boys to weave, while advocating a previously unimagined modesty of dress to peoples whose environmental conditions demanded little clothing” (10). Thus, as Islam spread throughout parts of Africa and the Middle East, so too did cotton goods. As cotton continued its slow but inexorable spread up through China, it came to be used not just for clothing but also currency and taxation. Even still, cotton was still most predominantly associated with the India subcontinent: “Indeed, one of the reasons why Christopher Columbus believed that he had reached India was that he encountered great quantities of cotton in the Caribbean” (9).
For most of cotton’s history, “Europe was nowhere to be found” (22). In Europe, where people still clothed themselves predominantly in woolens and linens, cotton was considered an exotic good. So mysterious and strange was cotton cultivation to medieval Europeans that many of them envisioned the plant as a “vegetable lamb” (22), harvested by shearing a sheep that grew out of the ground.
It was only after the Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries that European power extended into lands where cotton grew naturally. Sourcing raw cotton from present-day Syria and Turkey, Northern Italy emerged as an early European center of cotton cloth manufacturing, peaking around the 15th century. By the 1560s, however, the Ottoman Empire had emerged as a powerful state capable of restricting its raw cotton exports, thus drastically undermining the budding European spinning and weaving industries in Italy and Germany. Beckert foreshadows the attitude future European nations would take toward cotton-rich regions, writing, “Some shrewd observers surely noted that the first European cotton producers, both the northern Italians and the southern Germans, failed at least in part because they had not subjugated those people who supplied them with cotton. It was a lesson that would not be forgotten” (27).
Introduction-Chapter 1 Analysis
The heart of the book’s introduction questions why cotton is so important to the birth and evolution of modern capitalism. Indeed, several other goods and industries, from tobacco and indigo to steel and iron, were of great significance to the rise of capitalism. In response to this, Beckert writes, “Unlike these commodities, cotton, however, has two labor-intensive stages—one in the fields, the other in factories. Sugar and tobacco did not create large industrial proletariats in Europe. Cotton did. Tobacco did not result in the rise of vast new manufacturing enterprises. Cotton did. Indigo growing and processing did not create huge new markets for European manufacturers. Cotton did. Rice cultivation in the Americas did not lead to an explosion of both slavery and wage labor. Cotton did” (xvii). This last point—that the cotton industry required the mobilization of both enslaved labor and wage labor—may be Beckert’s strongest argument for the importance of cotton to the shaping of modern capitalism and, by extension, the modern world.
That’s because the cotton industry, in Beckert’s telling, acted as the bridge between two different yet intertwined eras of the global economy: war capitalism and industrial capitalism. Among the major legacies of Empire of Cotton is Beckert’s introduction of the term “war capitalism” into the cultural lexicon. Traditionally, the earliest phase of capitalism that existed prior to the late 18th century is known as “mercantile capitalism,” thus named for the network of traveling merchants—funded by small financiers—who delivered goods from areas where they are cheap and abundant to other areas where they are more rare and expensive. While accurate to an extent, the term “mercantile capitalism” ignores the incredibly violent and coercive nature of pre-industrial markets, thus Beckert’s decision to rebrand it as “war capitalism.” In the earliest mention of the term, Beckert defines it as “slavery, the expropriation of indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed trade, and the assertion of sovereignty over people and land by entrepreneurs” (xv). The idea of war capitalism, and its relationship to industrial or modern capitalism, is at the heart of virtually every development chronicled in Empire of Cotton.
In laying bare this violence, Beckert emphasizes the extent to which modern capitalism is deeply indebted to systems of coercion and brutality. He writes:
When we think of capitalism, we think of wage workers, yet this prior phase of capitalism was based not on free labor but on slavery. We associate industrial capitalism with contracts and markets, but early capitalism was based as often as not on violence and bodily coercion. Modern capitalism privileges property rights, but this earlier moment was characterized just as much by massive expropriations as by secure ownership. Latter-day capitalism rests upon the rule of law and powerful institutions backed by the state, but capitalism’s early phase, although ultimately requiring state power to create world-spanning empires, was frequently based on the unrestrained actions of private individuals—the domination of masters over slaves and of frontier capitalists over indigenous inhabitants (xvi).
While there are clear distinctions between the capitalism of yesteryear and today, Beckert will repeatedly emphasize how the legacies of violence and coercion persist to varying degrees throughout the history of the global economy, calling into question the putative freedom and fairness of capitalist systems.
Another notion Beckert seeks to debunk is the idea that capitalism thrives most in the absence of state intervention. Here and throughout the book, Beckert argues that a major precondition of capitalism is a powerful state capable of policing its borders, projecting its military and imperial might around the globe, enforcing property and contract laws, and instituting tariffs and other policies to protect domestic markets. Beckert further argues that capitalists’ reliance on a democratic state results in a precarious balance of interests between markets, the state, and labor. He writes, “The dependence of capitalists on the state, and the state’s dependence on its people, empowered the workers who produced that capital, day in and day out, on the factory floor” (xvii). In other words, labor needs employers, employers need the state, and the state needs the consent of the people to govern. It was only through this triangular arrangement of needs that the working class was able to win much-needed labor reforms, like a minimum wage and eight-hour workdays.
Many of these themes come together in the first chapter when Beckert describes the failure of early European cotton manufacturing centers to thrive. Both Southern Germany and Northern Italy possessed several preconditions for a successful cotton manufacturing industry. Each region had a long history of linen production and their respective hinterlands were full of highly skilled spinners and weavers. Moreover, German and Italian traders had access to both capital and the foreign markets which cultivated and supplied raw cotton. By the middle of the 16th century, their chief supplier of cotton, the Ottoman Empire, had grown into a powerful state with the incentive and ability to place tight controls on its raw cotton exports. With the loss of their cotton suppliers, the spinning and weaving industries of Southern Germany and Northern Italy collapsed.
Beckert argues that this is a case study proving both the importance of powerful states in developing markets and the importance of violence and coercion—in other words, war capitalism. He writes, “Some shrewd observers surely noted that the first European cotton producers, both the northern Italians and the southern Germans, failed at least in part because they had not subjugated those people who supplied them with cotton. […] Europeans took for granted that only the projection of state power would ensure success in these trade zones” (27). The example of these early European cotton markets supports two of Beckert’s most salient themes: capitalism’s reliance on powerful nation-states, and the role violence and coercion would play in forging and dominating global markets.
