I am of course late to the party on this one; The New York Times named it one of its ten best books of 2015. It's a bestseller on Amazon, #1 in Fashion and Textile Business, which category seems to be heavier on the fashion than the textiles. It was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Undoubtedly it's destined to win some other awards. The book provides a global history of the cotton industry, from about the mid seventeenth through the twentieth century. But what it really provides--and what I found fascinating--was a history of the birth of modern capitalism. Here I'll go ahead and provide a blurb courtesy of Amazon:
The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Sven Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today.
In a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful politicians recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to make and remake global capitalism. 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.(Incidentally, as usual the one-star reviews on Amazon are worth reading if you're bored and looking for some amusement).
Rather than review the book--which frankly I'm not well suited for, on account of my own limitations as well as a failure to take notes and highlight and all of the attendant stuff that goes along with reading a book one intends to review--I'll just provide three things I took away that I thought were worth further considering.
The rise of modern capitalism was linked to and enabled by the rise of the modern state
Briefly, Beckert's history begins in the late mercantile error. Mercantilism was the dominant economic theory of the time; it emphasized net gold flows (inward flows good, outward flows bad) as the metric by which an economy's health should be judged. During this era most gold flows came by seizing it from the New World. Beckert describes this transitioning to what he dubs "War capitalism," which still had violent expropriation at its heart, but was directed increasingly by and for the benefit of growing industrial interests, specifically in England, and--at least so far as his narrative is concerned--specifically for the burgeoning cotton industry.
The cotton industry required three things, and the state was grown and employed to obtain two of them. The first was land upon which to grow cotton. The second was labor, both for the growing of cotton and for its processing. The third was capital: the machines and later financial instruments needed to convert cotton into thread, and thread to cloth. War capitalism was instrumental in acquiring the first two. The British of course administered India as an imperial holding, and it was India that at the dawn of the narrative provided the bulk of the world's supply of raw cotton. But Indian cotton production was unable to keep up with the voracious demands of the burgeoning industry in England and continental Europe. Of course India was supplanted by the US South, which embodied war capitalism in that the labor of millions of African slaves was violently expropriated by slaveholders, with support (tacit and overt) of the government. Beckert documents elsewhere how nations (primarily European) grew in state power, and exercised that power to acquire land and labor for the growing of cotton. The goal in all cases was to induce a population to practice something approaching agricultural monoculture: to focus on the growth of cotton above all other crops, including those needed for survival. The foods and other goods required for survival would be purchased with revenue paid for the production of cotton. Of course in many cases the populations in question resisted, and I'll return to that resistance later in this post.
Beckert then describes how war capitalism transitioned into industrial capitalism. Imperialism solved the problem of finding territory on which to grow cotton, and slavery in the United States (at least temporarily) solved the problem of finding labor to cultivate the plant. But of course cultivation was only the first step; the plant needed to be turned into thread, and thread into cloth. This process was originally performed by individual households, a process known as "putting out" work in which individuals (usually women) were employed to perform spinning and weaving at home. Putting out work provided some small supplementary income for those practicing subsistence agriculture. However the production of cotton on a truly industrial scale was impossible to achieve with putting out work; labor had to be marshaled to serve in factories, many of which ran day and night (Two twelve-hour shifts was the norm).
As with the acquisition of land, the marshaling of labor on an industrialized scale was accomplished by the state. States were given increasing power to push individuals into these factories. In some case the push was indirect: in the form of taxes levied that compelled households to send members to a factory in order to earn cash wages with which to pay the tax. In other cases the push was direct: laws against vagrancy and idling were passed in order to create a convict population that could be put to work in the factories. On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and in both England and continental Europe, state power was employed to marshal the labor necessary to power the looms and gins and spinners.
Finally the state aided the growth of the empire via the development of infrastructure. One recurring theme of the history was the difficulty in getting agricultural populations to practice cotton monoculture; Beckert documents how the British government created railroads in India that allowed the extension of imperial power such that they were able to push previously resistant Indian farmers into cotton monoculture. Railroads, canals, and other forms of transportation infrastructure expanded both the depth and breadth of the empire, and were all managed and provided by increasingly powerful states.
Needless to say, this history of modern capitalism--one in which the state plays a central role in marshaling necessary resources--is contra the laissez-faire version of capitalism promoted in the modern era. And in fact Beckert shows at the end of his history that the modern corporations that now dominate the Empire of Cotton have by and large slipped state controls, operating in a laissez-faire wold in which prices--both those paid for labor, and for the empire's titular raw product--are pushed ever further downward.
Capitalism is adaptable and ever-changing
The empire described by Beckert was not static, and at different time in its history the profits were distributed to different players. In the Antebellum era, merchants pocketed a disproportionate share of the profits generated by cotton production. These merchants purchased cotton in ports in the United States, and ensured its safe delivery to ports in England in Europe. Later they were supplanted by more modern financial instruments--futures contracts--that allowed producers to purchase cotton in the abstract and drove the merchants out. Financiers of course profited, both by selling these contracts, and by offering loans to the planters who were responsible for producing the raw crop. Cotton factories in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century were fantastically profitable; but eventually were squeezed out by production in India and China. Antebellum plantation owners in the U.S. South enjoyed great profits by violently seizing the labor of black slaves, though their profits evaporated in the wake of the US Civil War as the broader empire sought and found other sources of cotton. In the modern day, the current rulers of the empire are the large corporations that purchase finished cotton goods: clothing designers and retailers like Wal-Mart. Today the planters and even the producers of cotton goods see their profits tightly squeezed. The history of which players were "winners" in the global empire provides a reminder that the specific configuration of an economic market is always a transitory thing, that even powerful players can fall by the wayside as circumstances around them change.
Furthermore, capitalism as embodied in the Empire of Cotton was able to adapt to changing circumstances. On the eve of the United States Civil War there was a widely-held belief that cotton monoculture was not possible without slave labor; the U.S. South dominated the market. But as a blockade choked off the supply of cotton from this region and sent the price of raw cotton skyrocketing, the empire was able to adapt, finding new sources of cotton and new ways to push agricultural monoculture into hitherto unreachable territories such as India and China. This in defiance of the "Cotton is King" predictions on both sides of the Atlantic that the South would be able to eventually win the war, owing to European industry's dependence on slave-cultivated cotton.
Individuals resisted being brought into the market
A few times now I've mentioned the continuous push toward agricultural monoculture, and the degree to which it was resisted by farmers. The reason for this was simple: despite the promise (rarely realized) of wealth to be had by raising cash crops, agricultural monoculture came with significant risks. Subsistence agriculture (with perhaps a side helping of putting out work) was tedious and provided a standard of living best described today as intolerable, but it also came with a great deal of risk mitigation. To wit: the failure of a single crop was not catastrophic. On the contrary, for a farmer raising only cotton, failure of a crop represented a disaster, perhaps a fatal one. Throughout the world farmers ranging from Egypt to India to China resisted pressure to practice agricultural monoculture.
And it turns out they did this with good reason. With the exception of antebellum slave plantations, most cotton agriculture was not profitable. Farmers were squeezed both by the ever-falling price of cotton and by high interest rates charged for borrowing money to purchase seeds, equipment, food, and clothing. As I mentioned above, eventually this resistance was overcome, often via the direct application of government force. Nonetheless, I found this resistance--this rejection of modern market capitalism--to be a powerful reminder that capitalism is not the natural order of things; that markets are man-made creations and subject to human influence.
Obviously the book has a lot more to take from it, especially if you geek out on the details of the textile industry (I don't). But for those of us interested in economic history it's a remarkably well-researched, fascinating take on the rise of industrial capitalism and the modern nation-state. Very highly recommended!
edit 1: edited to reflect the correct spelling of "laissez-faire," this edit also reflecting my lacking as both a speller of french and also probably as an economist.
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