Empire of Cotton Book Summary - Empire of Cotton Book explained in key points

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Empire of Cotton summary

Name: Empire of Cotton
Rating: 4.5 (37 reviews)
Author: Sven Beckert

Sven Beckert

A Global History

4.5 (37 ratings)

22 mins

What is Empire of Cotton about?

Empire of Cotton (2014) chronicles the long and complex history of that fluffy plant – cotton. These blinks detail how the cotton industry connected the world from Manchester, England, to rural India, while describing the incredible impact that cotton production has had on the development of economic systems.

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Empire of Cotton
summarized in 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? Learn the fascinating story of cotton.

Whether a T-shirt or denim jeans, it’s likely you’re wearing some article of clothing that’s made out of cotton. It’s a basic fabric today, one that seems humbler than, say, silk or satin. But you might be surprised to learn how complexly interwoven cotton is with the development of the modern world – from Columbus’s discovery of the New World to industrialization to the American Civil War and beyond.

Before Wall Street, there was cotton – a global mover and shaker, an economic powerhouse. These blinks give the whole story.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

about the broader connection between slavery and cotton;
cotton’s role in the divide between the developed and developing world; and
who the big players of cotton are today.

Europeans discovered cotton later than others, but when they did, they made it a global phenomenon.

Today, cotton is everywhere you look. Chances are, you’re wearing some at this very moment. With such a pervasive presence in society, it’s little wonder that cotton also has a long and captivating history.

Cotton has been used by humans for thousands of years, beginning with peoples in Africa, Asia and America, who independently discovered cotton and its perfect suitability for cloth making.

By the early 1500s, people in twelve small villages on the Pacific coast of modern-day Mexico were using the plant to pay tribute to their Aztec overlords. In the same period, in Gujrat, India, and on the west coast of Africa, people were growing the plant. These growers would harvest the white fluff and make cloth by hand at home, sometimes transporting it to local markets to be sold. In fifteenth-century China, cotton cloth was even used to pay taxes!

Back then, cotton weavers were still growing and processing the plant independently. In other words, the cotton growers of Africa had no contact with those in Mexico. However, that all changed when Europeans entered the scene, elevating cotton production to a global scale.

Before this shift began, around the year 1500, Europeans wore wool and linen, totally unaware that cotton existed. As they began exploring the world and claiming new territory – as in the expeditions of Christopher Columbus – they were introduced to the wonders of cotton, which feels much better against the skin than wool or linen and is also easier to wash.

Between 1600 and 1800, European settlers, driven by their love for this new cloth, launched a violent but profitable cotton triangle that bridged three continents.

Armed merchants would go to India to buy cotton. They would then trade it with African leaders for slaves and transport these slaves to the Americas where they would work in cotton fields on newly stolen lands.

In this way, the global cotton empire was born. But in the years that followed, it would grow and transform in innumerable ways.

Mechanization split the world in two.

In the year 1784, Samuel Greg made history when he opened the first mechanized cotton mill outside of Manchester, England. The mill, which sat on the banks of the river Bollin, was powered by the flow of the river’s waters.

From that point, mechanization only improved and spread, and the world of cotton was transformed. In fact, mechanization had a major economic impact for British manufacturers as it enabled them to undercut the weavers of India.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Southern United States emerged as the world's leading exporter of cotton.

So manufacturing changed the world and, as it did, the demand for raw cotton steadily grew. By 1790, Britain was spinning six times more cotton than it had been in 1781. But where did all this cotton come from?

Well, a huge amount originated in the European colonies, but, eventually, even they couldn’t produce enough to meet demand. Here’s what happened:

Wage labor fuelled the industrial age in the United Kingdom.

Histories of the industrial revolution tend to focus on inventors like James Watt, whose steam engine transformed the face of the earth. Without a doubt, bright minds and groundbreaking inventions made progress possible. However, the real fuel of industrialization was the millions of workers whose stories didn’t make it into the textbooks.

In the United Kingdom, the first industrialized nation, working conditions were atrocious. Ellen Hooton, a woman who, as a child, worked in a cotton factory in Wigan, England, is one of the few workers whose story has reached us. In 1833, she testified during a Manchester Commission investigation into child factory labor.

Networking middlemen became indispensable to a modernizing cotton industry.

So industrialization was a major boon to cotton production and by the mid-nineteenth century, millions of people were working in the newly built factories that produced cotton goods. But that’s not the only way the cotton industry was evolving.

Merchants were also transforming the way business was done. This emergent merchant class of middlemen was increasingly necessary in the early nineteenth century, as the cotton industry became ever more global.

The American Civil War transformed the global cotton industry.

Around the same time that the cotton industry was kicking into high gear, two groups of US capitalists were also coming into heated conflict. A new class of American industrial capitalists – merchants, to be exact – were employing wage labor and wanted to expand their operations to cotton-plantation rich lands around the world.

But the old Southern planter elite wasn’t about to part with its slaves without a fight. They wanted to maintain slavery and even extend it west. Both sides worked hard to sway the government and, soon enough, the mounting domestic tensions resulted in a civil war that shook the global cotton industry to its foundations.

New economic systems emerged around cotton after the end of slavery.

As slavery ended, the American cotton workforce shrank dramatically. But the demand for cotton was rising as fast as ever. In fact, between 1860 and 1890, global consumption of cotton doubled. Who was going to toil in the fields to meet this demand?

Well, it wouldn’t be long before a new work relationship replaced slavery. Here’s what happened:

Colonial powers massively expanded cotton growing in the early twentieth century.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, new world powers – namely, Russia and Japan – had begun entering the cotton game. Both of these nations grew cotton in their colonies and, for Japan in particular, cotton demand soared in the first years of the twentieth century.

For instance, in 1893, the country imported just 125 million pounds of raw cotton. By 1902 that number had increased to 446 million, the majority of it coming from India and the United States. This trend continued and, by 1920, Japan was importing over 1 billion pounds of cotton a year.

China and India emerged in the early twentieth century as the leading cotton producers and remain so today.

The twentieth century was a time of sweeping changes and the cotton industry was no exception. In large part, that’s because during this time conditions became favorable for newly industrializing nations.

After all, old industrial countries like Britain and Germany had powerful labor unions that increased the rights and wages of workers. For instance, in Germany, spinners took home 53 percent more in 1913 than they had in 1865.

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Best quote from Empire of Cotton

By the 1790s, Europeans were exporting around 80 million yards of cloth per year from India, almost three times more than the 30 million yards they exported in 1727.

—Sven Beckert

About the Author

Sven Beckert holds a PhD in History from Columbia University and is now Laird Bell Professor of American History at Harvard University. Empire of Cotton: A Global History won the 2015 Bancroft Prize and ranked as a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for History.

Who should read Empire of Cotton?

Historians, economists and political scientists
People interested in the history of capitalism and globalization
Anyone curious about the history of their jeans and T-shirts

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