Empire of Cotton: A Global History

WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST

Winner of the Alfred and Fay Chandler Book Award

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.

• Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Early American Studies)
• The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
• Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
• River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom
• Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350
• Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants
• Borrow: The American Way of Debt
• The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World
• Worlds Together, Worlds Apart (Fifth Edition) (Vol. Volume 2)
• Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination