Empire of Cotton

You encounter cotton every day, yet the story of this fiber weaves together nearly a millennium of human history, violence, innovation, and global integration. In Empire of Cotton, Sven Beckert shows how cotton became the spine of modern capitalism, connecting village households, empires, machines, and factories through social and political transformations that shaped our world. He argues that capitalism grew not from peaceful exchanges but from coercion—what he calls war capitalism—and later evolved into industrial and state capitalism before reentering the global South.

The Long Pre-industrial Thread

Cotton’s journey begins in diverse ancient worlds. Peasants in India, Africa, and the Americas domesticated four species—G. hirsutum, G. barbadense, G. herbaceum, and G. arboreum—developing varieties suited to local soils and climates. In Bengal, Gujarat, and West Africa, families cultivated and spun cotton at home, weaving muslin and chintz traded across continents. These household economies intertwined with politics: rulers demanded cloth as tribute; fabric circulated as currency. By the time European navigators arrived, cotton already underpinned a global network of labor and exchange.

War Capitalism and Violent Expansion

The next phase, beginning in the sixteenth century, fuses commerce with conquest. Beckert identifies this as war capitalism: an era of violent expropriation, slavery, and imperial control. European powers seize land in the Americas, enslave Africans, and militarize trade via the East India Companies. Liverpool merchants and financiers such as Barings and Tarletons fund triangular commerce—Indian cloth for slaves in Africa, slave labor for plantation cotton exported to Europe. This coercive system supplies raw cotton and generates capital for industrialization. (Parenthetical note: Beckert’s framing recalls Marx’s “primitive accumulation,” emphasizing force rather than free exchange as capitalism’s origin.)

Industrial Capitalism and the Machine Revolution

By the late eighteenth century, machines transform production. Inventions like the flying shuttle, spinning jenny, water frame, and Crompton mule move cotton spinning from cottages into water-powered mills such as Samuel Greg’s Quarry Bank (1784). Factory discipline replaces household rhythms; children and women become the heart of the workforce. Lancashire’s productivity explodes—millions of spindles whir across Britain, fed by slave-grown cotton from the American South. Industrial capitalism thus inherits war capitalism’s violence even while reinventing production through technology and wage labor.

Slavery, State Power, and the American Cotton Boom

In the nineteenth century, the United States dominates the global cotton trade. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (1793) fuels plantation expansion across the Deep South, driving enormous demand for enslaved labor. Political structures—from the three-fifths compromise to state-backed mortgages—embed cotton and slavery within national institutions. Liverpool and American financiers underwrite plantations through credit and insurance, entwining slavery with industrial growth. Cheap cotton enables factories to thrive; British mills depend on coerced American labor. Beckert insists that industrial capitalism does not replace slavery—it coexists and depends on it.

States and Markets: Building Industrial Worlds

Industrial success also requires strong states. Britain, France, the United States, and Mexico build tariffs, infrastructure, and legal protections to foster domestic mills. Napoleon’s blockades give continental industry temporary shelter; Zollverein tariffs and U.S. import duties consolidate new industrial centers. State capacity—property rights, taxation, contract enforcement—determines whether cotton manufacturing flourishes, as shown by the failure of Egypt’s factories under Muhammad Ali and Brazil’s stagnation under planter control. Industrial capitalism is thus a political achievement: technology spreads only where institutions support it.

Global Diffusion and Unequal Development

Industrialization’s spread is uneven. Lancashire leads, but regions like India, China, and Egypt face institutional and social obstacles—weak state support, coercive labor regimes, or colonial dependencies. War capitalism’s legacy both enables and cripples development: the U.S. uses slavery to build industrial capacity, while Egypt and India suffer deindustrialization under imperial control. This uneven geography becomes the foundation of global inequality.

Reorganization After the Civil War

The American Civil War (1861–1865) reveals the system’s fragility. Confederate blockades spark the “cotton famine,” paralyzing British and European mills. In response, states and merchants scramble to source cotton from India, Egypt, and Brazil. Railways, telegraphs, contract laws, and futures exchanges emerge, creating a global infrastructure that links distant rural producers to metropolitan factories. Sharecropping and debt peonage replace slavery in the U.S. South; colonial coercion integrates India and Africa into export systems. By the late nineteenth century, cotton’s countryside is reconstructed into an international web of credit, rail, and law.

State-Led Cotton Imperialism and Global South Revival

After 1865, cotton imperialism emerges as states—not just merchants—directly organize production. Russia in Turkestan, Japan in Korea, and Britain in Egypt transform landscapes through railroads, dams, and seed programs. Cotton acreage expands dramatically. Meanwhile, industrial manufacture migrates to new regions: Indian mills in Bombay and Ahmedabad, Japanese mills under the Meiji government, Brazilian and Southern U.S. factories funded by cheap labor and protectionism. These developments mark cotton’s return to its southern origins—a decentralized industrial world defined by uneven wages and labor conditions.

From Colonialism to Decolonization and Modern Global Chains

In the twentieth century, colonial grievances around cotton fuel nationalism. Gandhi’s spinning wheel symbolizes resistance to imperial exploitation; industrialists like Ranchhodlal Chhotalal and Tal’at Harb build national industries through protectionism and state banks. Postwar globalization shifts control again: merchant power yields to corporate retailers. Asia—China, India, and Japan—becomes the heart of production; modern brands and subsidies entrench new inequalities. The empire of cotton persists, embodied in global supply chains tied to cheap labor and ecological harm (e.g., Uzbekistan’s forced labor and the Aral Sea disaster).

A Unifying Insight

Cotton’s story is not just about fabric; it is a lens on capitalism itself—as a global system born of violence, sustained by institutions, and continually reinvented through technology and statecraft. Understanding cotton is understanding how modern economic power, inequality, and interdependence were spun together across centuries.

Beckert’s concept of war capitalism defines the earliest global integration of cotton through force. Rather than emerging from peaceful markets, global trade in cotton relied on conquest, slavery, and appropriation. From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, European powers used navies, chartered companies, and militarized trade routes to seize resources and monopolize cotton’s flow.

Mechanisms of Violence and Accumulation

You see the pattern clearly: Columbus and Cortés open American lands; Portuguese fleets control the Indian Ocean; and English, French, and Dutch companies enforce monopolies in India and Africa. Millions of Africans are captured and forced onto plantations to grow sugar and cotton. Merchants in Liverpool and Bristol finance slaving voyages; East India Company agents like the gumashtas flog weavers in Dhaka when contracts falter. This intertwining of slavery, finance, and empire organizes raw material flows that later feed industrial mills. (Note: Beckert’s phrase recalls Braudel’s ‘world-economy,’ but inflected with coercion.)

Building the Infrastructure of Empire

Chartered companies — East India, Dutch VOC, and French Compagnie — provide not only trade but administrative rule, merging markets and sovereignty. India’s famous textiles become currencies for buying slaves in Africa, and plantations in the Caribbean turn into vast export machines. This triangle creates Europe’s first truly global production system. Those profits finance industrial expansion: British mills, insurance firms, and banks depend on the credit and commodities born from imperial domination.

Legacy and Contradiction

War capitalism gives birth to technological capitalism while undermining freedom in colonized zones. It creates unprecedented global wealth but leaves legacies of inequality. The same coercion that enables Manchester’s mills cripples local manufacturing in India and Africa. When later industrialization attempted to emerge in Egypt or Brazil, planter and imperial structures blocked it. Beckert’s point: capitalism’s triumph carries a double-edged moral inheritance—it thrives on both innovation and expropriation.

A Key Lesson

You can’t explain markets by supply and demand alone. You must include force, empire, and slavery—the fundamental tools that wove the first world economy of cotton.

Industrial capitalism turns cotton into the symbol of mechanized modernity. You witness the eighteenth-century revolution when mills replace household looms, creating a new social order and work discipline. Machines become agents of transformation, but behind them stand the financial and political legacies of war capitalism.

The Age of Invention

You encounter dramatic innovations: John Kay’s flying shuttle accelerates weaving; James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny multiplies yarn; Arkwright’s water frame centralizes production; and Crompton’s mule combines strength and finesse. These innovations intensify productivity—millions of spindles by 1800—and pull cotton into mass consumption. Samuel Greg’s Quarry Bank Mill integrates machinery, water power, and child labor into the archetype of the factory.

Discipline and Labor Creation

Factories reconfigure society. Workers—often children like Ellen Hootton—labor sixteen-hour days under overseers, facing fines and physical punishment. Women dominate spinning floors, earning less than men. Laws such as Britain’s Master and Servant Act (1823) turn contract breaches into criminal offenses, showing state participation in enforcing labor discipline. Resistance arises through strikes and unions—the Luddites, spinners, and early labor movements—but repression and gradual reform accompany industrial consolidation.

Link to Empire and Slavery

The cotton in those mills is not neutral. It comes from U.S. plantations sustained by violence. Industrial capitalism amplifies the exploitative threads of war capitalism—it relocates labor coercion from the plantation to the factory. Wage labor replaces bondage, but both depend on compulsion. Beckert’s insight: industrial capitalism inherits imperial infrastructures—shipping, banking, state protection—that make technological revolutions possible.

Global Diffusion

Britain’s model spreads across Europe and into the Americas, powered by tariffs, banking, and railways. But success depends on state capacity—where governments protect property, enforce contracts, and build infrastructure, mills flourish; where elites resist or labor remains bound, industry stagnates. Machines alone don’t make capitalism; political institutions do.

You learn that industrial capitalism is inseparable from state power. Beckert portrays states not as passive observers but as architects—protecting industries, managing tariffs, and coercing labor. Industrialization spreads unevenly depending on whether states act decisively to support manufacturing.

State Capacity and Market Design

Napoleonic wars provide temporary protection for continental mills; later tariffs and customs zones like the German Zollverein consolidate markets. Britain bans Indian textiles to shield its own production. The U.S. tariff of 1816 nurtures New England mills. Mexico, through 1843 prohibitions, defends Puebla’s factories. Governments build docks, railways, and legal codes to create predictable markets. Industrial capitalism grows where states align with entrepreneurs and construct reliable institutional frameworks.

Failures and Constraints

Egypt under Muhammad Ali briefly industrializes, building thousands of spindles, but collapses under coerced labor and British tariff intervention. Brazil’s planters, wielding political power, block industrial protection to preserve slave-based agriculture. These examples show that institutions—not technology—determine longevity of industrial projects. (Note: similar arguments appear in Gerschenkron’s theories of late industrialization.)

War Capitalism’s Mixed Legacy

Where violent expropriation built wealth, lasting industrialization required that states repurpose those resources into institutions, not dependency. The paradox: war capitalism fuels industrial takeoff but politically cripples many regions, leaving them raw-material suppliers rather than factory societies. The result is global inequality embedded in cotton’s expansion.

The American Civil War disrupts global cotton flows and redefines production worldwide. Beckert calls it the great shock that forces states and merchants to build new infrastructure, markets, and labor systems from India to Egypt. The ‘cotton famine’ teaches economic and political elites that dependence on one region is dangerous.

Global Supply Crisis

When U.S. exports collapse (3.8 million bales to nearly none), cotton prices quadruple; Lancashire mills close, and famine relief spreads. Diplomats debate intervention, while merchants hunt for alternatives. India’s exports surge—75% of Britain’s cotton by 1862. Egypt’s output quintupled under coerced labor. These shifts reshape global geography, making Asia and Africa essential suppliers.

Institutional Innovations

Futures contracts, grading systems, railways, and telegraphs emerge to stabilize far-flung trade. Liverpool brokers codify quality standards; exchanges in New York and New Orleans institutionalize cotton futures. States extend legal frameworks—India’s contract reforms and criminalization of adulteration—to guarantee exports. These mechanisms turn cotton from a raw fiber into a globally standardized commodity.

Reconstructing Labor

Postwar rural societies undergo permanent transformation. In the U.S. South, slavery’s end produces sharecropping and convict leasing; in India and Egypt, peasants are tied to credit systems and taxes that mimic compulsion. The countryside globalizes through debt, law, and rail — slavery recedes but dependency deepens.

Cotton’s Reconstruction Insight

You see how crisis produces innovation: the Civil War spawns technologies of global trade—contracts, telegraphs, and state reforms—that still define commodity markets today.

After the Civil War, cotton expansion becomes state-led imperialism. European powers, Russia, and Japan transform colonies into cotton zones through railroads, irrigation, and forced cultivation. Beckert paints this as the culmination of the empire’s logic: military conquest blended with technical modernization.

Building Cotton States

Russia’s conquest of Central Asia turns Turkestan into a cotton commons—railways and imported seeds multiply acreage almost fiftyfold. Japan’s projects in Korea standardize varieties and markets. Britain’s occupation transforms Egypt: acreage grows sevenfold, sustained by dams and irrigation. The U.S. pushes cotton westward via railways and levees, internalizing imperial expansion. These programs mobilize millions of acres and millions of workers for metropolitan mills.

Colonial Experiments and Resistance

In Africa, colonial plans mix technical optimism and coercion. The Tuskegee mission to Togo (1900) exemplifies this effort—African-American agronomists introduce U.S. methods but face social and ecological resistance. When voluntary adoption falters, colonizers impose taxes and punishments to enforce cultivation. Peasants often prefer selling locally at higher prices, undermining export schemes. Resistance manifests in riots, famine, and withdrawal from forced cotton production.

Social Costs and Repercussions

Export specialization triggers hunger: Berar and Brazil suffer famines; the Deccan riots and Quebra Quilos revolt reveal rural frustration. Cotton imperialism thus exposes capitalism’s recurring contradiction—growth for some, deprivation for others. The global South is recast as raw material terrain, regulated by coercion and credit instead of open markets.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrial manufacture migrates back to the cotton-growing regions—the global South reenters industry. This shift reshapes global labor, trade, and politics and gives rise to nationalist and populist movements that redefine cotton production.

Southern Industrialization

Japan’s Meiji government sponsors mills and export cartels; India’s Bombay and Ahmedabad industries emerge with nationalist backing; and the U.S. South rebuilds as a low-wage industrial region. Worldwide spindle counts triple between 1865 and 1920, even as Britain’s share declines. States and entrepreneurs in Asia and Latin America combine cheap labor and tariff protection to industrialize rapidly.

Labor Movements and Populism

At the same time workers organize for better conditions—Fall River strikes, German and Russian unionization, U.S. populist farmers fighting for cotton price stabilization. These movements push legal reforms, raise wages, and limit child labor, changing states’ relationship to industry. Yet as wages rise in the North, capital pursues cheaper southern and global frontiers, rebalancing production geographically.

From Colonialism to Retail Capitalism

Decolonization transforms cotton once more. Nationalist leaders like Gandhi and Tal’at Harb mobilize cotton for sovereignty and development. By the late twentieth century, corporate retailers—Walmart and Carrefour—replace industrialists and states as global organizers. Asia’s dominance in production (China, India) and state subsidization reveal that the empire’s hierarchies persist under new branding. Cotton’s global chains still spin inequality into material comfort.