The Fabric of Our Lives
The brutal history of cotton debunks many of the most popular myths
about capitalism.
By Eric Herschthal
Cotton pickers, 1800s.
Illustration courtesy Library of Congress
L
ess than a decade ago, a historian interested in the rise of capitalism would have a difficult time finding a
job in a history department. The closest thing scholars wrote about capitalism was called labor history, the story
of the working class. Almost no one bothered writing about the flip side, elite capitalists; to do so suggested
sympathy for the enemy. The people who took capitalism seriously became economists (or bankers). Filling the
void were popular accounts that celebrated the brilliance of tycoons like Andrew Carnegie and the Rothschilds,
or perhaps the genius of the Industrial Revolution’s inventors—think Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. If
anything like “the history of capitalism” existed, it exalted entrepreneurs and inventors, extolled the efficiency
of the factory and the free market, and suggested that the whole system thrived only in the absence of a
regulatory state.
Then came the Great Recession of 2008. Although some historians had already been piecing together parts of
the story, “the history of capitalism” suddenly began to appear on college course lists. But what was that
history, exactly? Was it just a rebranding of labor history? Did elites now matter? And if so, how would they be
cast—as heroes, villains, something else? The truth is that no one knows what “the history of capitalism” is
because its history is just now being written. But if there is any indication of what it might look like, it appears
in Sven Beckert’s remarkable and unsettling new book, Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Beckert insists
that many of the myths we tell ourselves about capitalism—how it functions best when government gets out of
the way, how it broke clean from slavery—are as false today as they were during its 500-year history. In
Beckert’s account, not only does slavery play a pivotal role in capitalism’s rise, but so does the state.
Governments supplied the guns, built the roads, enacted the tariffs, and regulated the markets that made, and
continue to make, capitalism thrive.
Beckert, a recently tenured history professor at Harvard, has also decided to bring back the elite. But they’re
cast, now, in a far harsher light. Constantly hovering at the margins are the millions of people who they
exploited to make their fortunes—to make, in other words, the capitalist world we live in today. Beckert tells
this story not through elites, exactly, but through the commodity that was central to their wealth: cotton. Before
the 18th century, cotton was a rare commodity for Europeans. Yet in places all across the globe, from Peru and
Mesoamerica to Japan, Egypt, and India, cotton grew in abundance. It was not the dominant crop it would
become by the end of the 19th century, but each of these regions had vibrant local markets. They grew their own
cotton, spun it into yarn, and then hand-wove it into textiles, with individual households doing most of the work
themselves.
Slavery was not a hidebound institution that capitalism destroyed, but an integral one that made capitalism
possible.
Cotton’s transformation into the world’s most lucrative global commodity began slowly. Beckert marks the
initial pivot with the emergence of European empires in the 16th century. Columbus’ initial encounter with the
Americas, alongside the burgeoning spice trade in the Far East, set off a centurieslong scramble that resulted in
Europe’s vast appropriation of Native American lands and, by the 18th century, the largest forced migration—
enslaved Africans—in world history. A merchant class arose to facilitate the trade in slave-grown
commodities—a class that was made possible, Beckert is at pains to emphasize, only with the aid of emerging
European states. The privately owned joint-stock companies that settled many of the first English colonies, for
instance, could only exist with a royal charter. Beckert rebrands the process traditionally called “mercantilecapitalism” as “war capitalism,” his point being that violence was at its center. Without it, there would be no
Industrial Revolution, the next and most important part of Beckert’s story.
If there is an ancestral home for the Industrial Revolution, it’s Manchester, England, where the first factories
were built. Cotton propelled the factory’s emergence, created after British inventors found a way to spin slavegrown cotton into yarn more swiftly. The man who invented the mechanized cotton mill at the center of these
new factories was Samuel Greg, the prototypical genius-inventor of capitalist lore. By tying Greg’s success to
slave-grown cotton and the ghastly conditions of factory workers, Beckert recasts him in a garish new light.
Women and children comprised the vast majority of these first factory workers, all of them expected to work
14-hour days and huddled into barracks at night. If we celebrate Greg as a genius, Beckert implies, we must also
accept that he was utterly dependent on the most coercive labor systems imaginable.
By the early 19th century, Britain, and soon all of Europe, had
robust cotton manufacturing industries. But they relied on
imported cotton—and no source for those imports was more
important than the United States. On the eve of the Civil War,
the U.S. supplied Great Britain with 77 percent of its raw
cotton, 90 percent of France’s, and 92 percent of Russia’s. At
the same time, cotton-manufacturing industries emerged in
northern U.S. cities, propelling the U.S.’s own Industrial
Revolution. In fact, Beckert writes, the United States was
unique among all other industrializing nations in that it both
grew and manufactured its own cotton. The trick, of course,
was that all these new cotton-manufacturing nations depended
on slave-grown cotton. Like other new scholars of capitalism,
Beckert drives home the point that slavery was not a hidebound
institution that capitalism destroyed, but an integral one that
made capitalism possible.
Why, then, did northern U.S. industrialists insist that slavery
end? Beckert’s answer isn’t all that persuasive: He says that
“forward-looking” capitalists saw that they could get cheaper,
more reliable sources of cotton from emerging growers in
places like India, Egypt, and Brazil—and that with the profits
industrialists accrued from their cotton businesses, they could
reinvest in heavy industry (railroads, iron works) and create new avenues of wealth. But that hardly explains
why so many British capitalists continued to support the Confederacy, distancing themselves only when it
became clear they would lose. Nor does it make sense in light of how difficult it had been, up until the Civil
War, to penetrate other global cotton-growing regions.
More troublingly, Beckert evades a core problem that historians of slavery have cut their teeth on for decades:
Why did the British government, at precisely the moment cotton was fueling its Industrial Revolution, back the
anti-slavery movement? Between 1787 and 1833, the year Britain abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies,
no state became more involved in the anti-slavery crusade than Britain. Scholars are still divided over this
question. Beckert doesn’t even ask it.
Beckert does deftly show how the Civil War became “a turning point for the history of capitalism.” The
momentary collapse of cotton imports from the U.S. during the Civil War led Britain to turn its attention toward
the Middle and Far East for new sources of cotton. In short, capitalism came to places like India and Egypt
because of the Civil War. Though Great Britain colonized India in 1853, it was only during the Civil War that
Britain took India seriously as a source of national wealth. The British colonial government carved up the land
into taxable plots that essentially forced Indians to grow the only commodity with any financial worth: cotton.
In no time, India’s countryside was sucked into a global cotton economy, with devastating consequences for
India’s population. Indians suffered repeated famines when the price of cotton plummeted on global exchange
markets. As many as 10 million Indian cotton farmers died from famines in the 1870s, and another 19 million in
the 1890s.
The colonial system that Britain perfected in India—all in the name of cotton and capitalism—other nonEuropean states would soon emulate. By the end of the 19thcentury, Japan colonized Korea and parts of China,
turning them into their own raw cotton providers. The Ottomans did the same in parts of the Middle East. But
the rise of these new cotton powerhouses would steadily weaken Britain’s own cotton industry. It was not only
the competition, Beckert argues, but the growing power of the working class within Britain and Europe that
undid Europe’s cotton capitalists. By the early 20th century, the European states became increasingly receptive
to labor reform; once cotton capitalists’ ally, the state turned into its enemy.
By the end of World War I, cotton’s importance to Europe’s economy dwindled significantly. But cotton would
play a central role in the birth of emerging non-European states. In colonial India, cotton became both the
symbol of colonial exploitation and the hope for its postcolonial future. The small elite of native-born cotton
capitalists that emerged under British rule had, by the 1930s, united with cotton growers to overthrow imperial
rule. Gaining control of their cotton industry became their unifying objective. To this day, the cotton wheel
remains the emblem on India’s state flag. Beckert’s point is that, even into the 20th century, capitalism and the
state were mutually constitutive. Nationalizing the cotton industry could even mask the conflicts that capitalism
produced between rich and poor, capitalist and worker. Even Gandhi could find common cause with India’s
rapacious cotton industrialists, spinning a cotton wheel in public as a show of national solidarity.
Today, most of our cotton continues to be grown in India, as well as in Uzbekistan, Senegal, Pakistan, China,
and other developing countries. China has become the manufacturing juggernaut, turning all that raw cotton into
the T-shirts, shorts, and jeans you may be wearing as you read this. Beckert, perhaps forgivably, spends little
time exploring how this happened—there’s only so much you can devote to that past 40 years, when this new
trend emerged, in a book that covers half a millennium. Yet he still finds the state, even Communist China, as
doing more or less exactly what Europe and the U.S. did in the 19th century. In the name of national wealth,
China has colonized vast new regions and exploited millions of laborers—only with more ruthless efficiency.
-Krain
If there’s a role the West still plays in the cotton story, it’s in the power of new corporations like Gap, Adidas,
and Walmart, which sell finished cotton goods to consumers around the globe. What’s different now is that
these corporations have been, as Beckert puts it, “emancipated from the state.” They are far less reliant on their
home countries, dealing directly with the developing nations that produce our cotton goods.
Some will likely argue that Beckert romanticizes preindustrial societies; others that, for all his sympathy for the
enslaved and workers, he gives them far too little ability to accommodate the system to their own advantages.
But the history of the downtrodden has been told, even if it remains incomplete. We need new histories that
explain how the system that came to oppress them—in a word, capitalism— emerged in the first place, with all
the inequalities, wealth, and violence that it produced. Beckert’s version will not be the final word in this new
history of capitalism, but it is an exceptional start.
--Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert. Knopf.