Quotes from Sven Beckert

The empire of cotton has continued to facilitate a giant race to the bottom, limited only by the spatial constraints of the planet.

Many historians have called this the age of 'merchant' or 'mercantile' capitalism, but 'war capitalism' better expresses its rawness and violence as well as its intimate connection to European imperial expansion. War capitalism, a particularly important but often unrecognized phase in the development of capitalism, unfolded in constantly shifting sets of places embedded within constantly changing relationships. In some parts of the world it lasted into the nineteenth century.

It was on the back of cotton, and thus on the backs of slaves, that the U.S. economy ascended in the world (p.119).

it was not so much the new machines that revolutionized the world, impressive and important as they were. The truly heroic invention was the economic, social, and political institutions in which these machines were embedded.

our journey through the empire of cotton has shown that civilization and barbarity are linked at the hip

Ironically, their shocking success also awakened the very forces that eventually would marginalize them within the empire they had created.

When we think of capitalism, we think of wage workers, yet this prior phase of capitalism was based not on free labor but on slavery.

Europeans united the power of capital and the power of the state to forge, often violently, a global production complex, and then used the capital, skills, networks, and institutions of cotton to embark upon the upswing in technology and wealth that defines the modern world.

Strong European states had simultaneously created barriers to the import of foreign textiles just as they built a system for the appropriation of foreign technology. By orchestrating economic processes in Asia, Africa, and the Americas as well as in Europe, Europeans gained the paradoxical ability to direct the global trade in Indian textiles while at the same time keeping Asian cloth increasingly out of Europe, instead trading the products in Africa and elsewhere beyond Europe's shores.

The modern world, indeed, has been shaped just as much by war capitalism's death as by its birth.

India and China, or, for that matter, the Aztec and Inca empires, had not even come close to such global dominance, and even less so to reinventing how people produced things in the far-flung corners of the globe. And yet starting in the sixteenth century, armed European capitalists and capital-rich European states reorganized the world's cotton industry.

Slavery, the expropriation of indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed trade, and the assertion of sovereignty over people and land by entrepreneurs were at its core. I call this system war capitalism.

we prefer to erase the realities of slavery, expropriation, and colonialism from the history of capitalism, craving a nobler, cleaner capitalism.

Today cotton is so ubiquitous that it is hard to see it for what it is: one of mankind's great achievements.

by 1905, cotton experts estimated, a full 15 million people, or about 1 percent of the world's population, were engaged in the growing of cotton.

One reason it is hard to see cotton's importance is because it has often been overshadowed in our collective memory by images of coal mines, railroads, and giant steelworks--industrial capitalism's more tangible, more massive manifestations (p.xviii).

The labor market as idealized in modern-day economics textbooks as often as not came about as a result of strikes, unions, and riots.

Such preponderance of women workers resulted all too often in the invisibility of the cotton industry, overshadowed by the male-dominated coal-mining, iron-making, and railroading industries.

Americans tried to explain to their European customers that slavery in the United States, unlike in Saint-Domingue, was safe—not least, as Tench Coxe put it, because of the presence of a powerful white militia and because slaves have "no artillery nor arms. Tho they are numerous they are much separated by rivers, Bayos and tracts thickly peopled with whites." But concerns remained.45

By 1830, one in six workers in Britain labored in cottons.

summit of prosperity by persisting for centuries in the system of protection and prohibition."37 Indeed, in the end, it was not so much the new machines that revolutionized the world, impressive and important as they were. The truly heroic invention was the economic, social, and political institutions in which these machines were embedded.

And I said to myself, what connection shall there be between Power in Manchester and Nature in America?

In 2001, the U.S. government paid a record $4 billion in subsidies to cotton growers, a cost that exceeded the market value of the crop by 30 percent. To put it another way, these subsidies amounted to triple that year's USAID payments to all of Africa, a part of the world where production costs for cotton were only about a third of what they were in the United States. In

Cotton manufacturers understood that their prosperity was entirely dependent on the labor of slaves and they "dreaded the severity of the revulsion which must sooner, or later arrive.