Empire of Cotton, Sven Beckert
Empire of Cotton, Sven Beckert
5 Rating(s)
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Empire of Cotton
A Global History

Author: Sven Beckert

Narrator: Jim Frangione

Unabridged: 20 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/02/2014


Synopsis

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. 

About Sven Beckert

Sven Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University.


Reviews

Goodreads review by fourtriplezed on June 28, 2016

A fascinating subject and I learnt a lot. The author has backed his sources with a huge 140 pages of footnotes. The text itself is "only" 448 pages. Coming in I could not wait to start but in the end found myself happy to end. In my opinion as informative as this book is the author is not that good......more

Goodreads review by Mike on April 20, 2017

Cotton: The Fabric of our lives abject human misery In the words of the author: This book is the story of the rise and fall of the European-dominated empire of cotton. But because of the centrality of cotton, its story is also the story of the making and remaking of the global capitalism and with......more

Goodreads review by Sara on December 26, 2015

Hands down one of the best books I read this year. He shows how capitalism, slavery, cotton and colonization have all been intricately connected to one another for centuries. A must-read!!!......more

Goodreads review by Jerrod on January 09, 2017

I chose to read this book based on a glowing review from The Economist. I am unclear why the review was glowing. I have no reason to doubt the facts presented in the book. In fact, it may even be a good introductory source to the history of the cotton market. I had to abandon this book due to the co......more

Goodreads review by Marks54 on January 16, 2015

This book is a one volume history of the cotton industry from the beginning (I am not joking) up through the heydey of "King Cotton" and into the modern age. It is very thorough and the author appears to have read nearly everything of importance ever written about the industry. This is a serious his......more