Empire of Cotton

Sven Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of American History at Harvard University and author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History – a new book that highlights the ties between the cotton industry and the rise of modern capitalism.

An excerpt from the book was recently published in The Atlantic and can be found on the publication’s website.

It’s an interesting read, including facts like:

• “By the time shots were fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, cotton was the core ingredient of the world’s most important manufacturing industry. By multiple measures – the sheer numbers employed, the value of output, profitability – the cotton empire had no parallel.”

• “The industry that brought great wealth to European manufacturers and merchants, and bleak employment to hundreds of thousands of mill workers, had also catapulted the United States onto center stage of the world economy. Cotton exports alone put the United States on the world economic map.”

• “The reason for America’s quick ascent to market dominance was simple. The United States more than any other country had elastic supplies of the three crucial ingredients that went into the production of raw cotton: labor, land, and credit.”