Empire of Cotton
Sven Beckert’s *Empire of Cotton* unspools the sweeping, brutal history of how a humble fiber reshaped global capitalism over five centuries. Starting with cotton’s independent domestication across India, Peru, and East Africa, the book traces how European powers seized control through 'war capitalism'—a system built on slavery, colonial plunder, and militarized trade. It reveals how the U.S. South’s slave-driven cotton plantations fueled Britain’s Industrial Revolution, creating an interdependent global network that enriched elites while exploiting millions of enslaved people, child laborers, and colonized farmers. The U.S. Civil War shattered this system, forcing Europe to diversify cotton sources and paving the way for industrialization in the Global South. Beckert exposes how state power, corporate greed, and worker resistance shaped every phase of the cotton empire, from its 19th-century peak to its modern iteration, where inequality and exploitation persist in global supply chains.