Sven Beckert -- Empire of Cotton: a global history
====================================================

If you want a special view of how capitalism, capitalist economies,
and much of Western economies were created, then this is a
fascinating book.  In fact if you want a story that explains how the
industrial revolution was created and, especially, what supplied the
energy that enabled it to take off, then read this book.  I'm
tempted to call it a "founding myth" for our modern, industrial,
capitalist civilization, except that Beckert has not written
mythology; he has written a history, and it's one filled with
supporting facts and data.

If that kind of story or theory or explanation interests you, then
you may also want to read "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and
the Making of American Capitalism", by Edward E. Baptist.  It
focuses on the production of raw cotton in the United States,
whereas raw cotton is just a part of Beckert's broader story.
Beckert covers a broader picture that includes the growing and
production of raw cotton, as well as how it was delivered to the
mills in England, how it was turned into yarn, how it was woven into
textiles, and how it was shipped and sold.  And, since his story is
a history, Beckert describes how those processes developed and
changed.

So, let's suppose that you agree with this story about how
capitalist was created.  Perhaps you even are coming around to
believing, as Beckert suggests, that capitalism could not have
happened without cotton.  An even stronger claim is the one that
this economic and industrial system that depended on cotton could
have been created without slavery, and that there were other
options.  The use of slave labor for the planting, growing, and
harvesting of raw cotton could have been done with wage labor.  If
you accept *that* claim, then there is no easy exoneration, even a
partial one, through the claim that without a brutal slave regime,
the industrial revolution could not have gotten started and the
incredible improvement in the standard of living for so many people
would have been delayed for so many years.

The word "global" in the subtitle of Beckert's book is significant.
This was perhaps the first industry where the production of raw
material, the processing of that material to turn it into goods for
end users, and the marketing and sale of those goods took place at
locations separated by vast distances.  And so, as Beckert phrases
it, the industry based on cotton "meant building the first globally
integrated manufacturing industry".  We take that kind of globalism
for granted now.  We see nothing new, strange, even noteworthy about
a production and manufacturing process that is spread across the
world.  But, Beckert can make you see it for the amazing thing that
it was and still is.

Another aspect of this story is that this system of production was
created through war and violence and through the use of military
force, and some of the military forces that committed that violence
were private militias.  Beckert summarizes this by saying that the
solution to the problem of producing the needed raw material, raw
cotton, was "slaves in the southern United States growing cotton on
land expropriated from Native Americans.  I've picked one of the
more sanitized and milder descriptions by Beckert.  He, and Baptist
especially, give you a vivid picture of how brutal and violent that
process was.  It's not a pretty picture, except for those who admire
brutality and conquest, I suppose.

And, by the way, the Wikipedia page on the cotton gin is very
informative on the changes that occurred due to the increased
production of cotton in the southern U.S. in the first half of the
19th century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin.

In a large part, that rapid increase in cotton production in the
U.S. was enabled by two conditions: (1) the depopulation of large
areas of land and the destruction and elimination of Native American
cultures and (2) the strong political power of Southern planters.
That political story is described in detail in Baptist's book (see
above).  You can also get another perspective of that political
struggle in "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham
Lincoln", by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Growing cotton exhausts the soil it is grown in rather quickly,
which encouraged planters to seek new land that had not yet been
depleted.  And, that led Southern cotton growers to apply  political
pressure on the U.S.  Federal government to open more land to
planters and to allow the use of slaves in those areas.  So, for
those of us in the U.S., this is part of our foundation story,
though it's an aspect of our story that most of us are not proud of.
Since Native Americans were often removed from their land by the
U.S. military, this was actually an early version of a
military-industrial complex, this one based on the production of
cotton.

I'd say that Beckert's book can be an important part of
understanding our country and its history and its creation.

04/18/2015

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