Empire of Cotton: A Global History
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.12 (997 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B00KAFVOUA |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 257 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-08-25 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
That’s true no matter where you live in the world. – Chris Schluep. An Best Book of the Month, December 2014: How important is cotton? For starters, there’s a good chance that you’re wearing it right now. Cotton is everywhere, has been for a long time, and was the dominant commodity during the early years of our country. The story of cotton is the story of modern capitalism, and in Empire of Cotton, author Sven Beckert shows how a worldwide crop that came in multiple forms and was cultivated and produced
How slavery, colonialism, and strong state involvement laid the foundations of modern prosperity This is an academic treatment of how the modern industrial economy was born: heavy in detail, clear in analysis, if somewhat dry at times. While much of the ground has been covered elsewhere, the synthesis, breadth, and grand themes that emerge are unavailable in a single volume, to my knowledge. For me, it was a seminal reading experience, a necessary perspective that brought things together in a way that will influence my view of modern society for the rest of my life.The principal idea of the book is that the cotton industry, which represented the first step in the developm. peterg said Improve your knowledge of history and economics. This book chronicles the spread of cotton as the dominant textile, enabled by coupled economic (low wage, or slave, labor) and technological factors (cotton gin, spinning jenny, programmed looms) and financed by capital from state and private institutions.It started with the ante-bellum American south, enabling the industrial finished cloth empire in England; when the supply from the American south was cut off by the Civil War primary production shifted to Egypt and India, where subsistence farmers lowered their standard of living as they were forced into growing cotton which . "The Darker side of the English Industrial Revolution and Western Superiority" according to Alastair MacAndrew. The reasons I really enjoyed reading this book are: a) it gives a very different view of the English Industrial Revolution, b) it is a fascinating historical account, c) it brings to light in a detailed and readable manner the darker side of capitalism.An important part of our view of the western world is that the English Industrial Revolution arose out of inventions, technological innovation, institutional and legal structures, literacy and numeracy and a few other very important advances in Western European society ( not in other parts of the world ) which led to an enormous
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. 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.. Sven Beckert’s rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world. 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. The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality to the world economy, and its making and remaking of global capitalism. Cotton is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, yet understanding its history is key to understanding the origins of modern capitalism. Here is the story of how, beginning well before the advent of machine production in the 1780s, these men captured ancient trades and skills in Asia, and combined them with the expropriation of lands in the Americas and the enslavement of African workers to crucially reshape the disparate realms of cotton that had existed for millennia, and
Holding a PhD from Columbia University, he has written widely on the economic, social, and political history of capitalism. Sven Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of American History at Harvard University. He was also a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships