"Empire of Cotton" changed how I thought about global economic history. Beckert views the changing relationships between state, industry, capital, and labor through the lens of the cotton industry and its role in sparking the Industrial Revolution and creating our modern, globalized world.

The first surprise in this book was dichotomy between the industrial capitalism we all read about in textbooks and the earlier "war capitalism" which provided its foundations. The coercive, appropriative, and violent war capitalism enabled European countries to use their superior state organization and military capacity to mold the world into a global capitalist system that provided the raw materials and foreign markets needed for the takeoff of large-scale industrial capitalism. Beckert ruthlessly mocks the "free market" intellectual posturing espoused by the West - pointing out their rampant protectionism of domestic industries and coercive extraction of labor and resources from their colonies.

The second revelation was what Beckert calls the "proletarianization" of the global countryside. In most regions where cotton can be grown, the local population was growing it - but intercropped with their food crops on small family plots rather than the large-scale monocultures preferred by industry. The natives much preferred it this way - the land provided for all of their subsistence needs with relatively little labor (at least compared to cotton cultivation). They didn't want to switch to cotton monoculture and work harder, lose their food security, and be at the mercy of global markets. This led the colonial powers to devise pretty nefarious ways of converting subsistence farmers to producers of a global commodity (cotton) and consumers of global goods (imperial textiles, etc), including forcing payment of taxes in cotton and exploitative credit arrangements with guileless borrowers who soon defaulted, lost their land, and were forced to become cotton wage laborers. Nasty stuff.

In its discussion of the attempts by industrializing countries to impose order and "legibility" on the chaos of nature and global markets, this book had echoes of "Seeing Like a State". In its descriptions of the role of protectionism in the industrialization process, I found it in agreement with "How Asia Works".

Full review and highlights at http://books.max-nova.com/empire-of-cotton/

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