Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton, A Global History.  New York: Penguin Random House,2014.

This book inspired my idea of reviewing non-current books you may have missed that have important implications for Georgia history- despite offering no mention of Georgia in the title.

Not a read for the faint-hearted and filled with profound insights, The Empire of Cotton was chosen as one of the most influential reads of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review after months on the nonfiction bestseller list.

Cotton, Beckert maintains, lay at the heart the British mercantile system. The import/export trade in cotton-that is, of thread rendered by Asian Indian spinners- to the looms of Afghan, Iranian and Turkish and later French weavers, was then shipped in British vessels to and England, as well as  to the new markets of the west. Then cotton gave birth to western industrialization when the French and then British develop their own domestic textile mills. Many of us can recall the machines whose names we memorized in school of the innovations developed during England’s industrial revolution: the spinning jenny, the power loom, the Arkwright frame and the flying shuttle. Most of these had to do with the textile industry. They in turn inspired canal building both for water power and for England’s internal canal transport system canals.  Engineering flourished with the textile boom, just as it would later flourish in the American canal building era..

Britain wrested economic control of the Indian subcontinent from the French, then subverted household production at home and abroad by industrializing textile production in England. In the process, Britain gave birth to modern capitalism and harnessed it to create and drive factory production. We see here two outcomes critical to the history of Georgia. British factory production gave rise to the great cotton plantations in the southern U.S.  These states were reliant upon slavery, borrowed money (investment capital for joint stock companies) and inexhaustible supplies of land. These were the drivers of American westward expansion.

Beckert informs us that the plantations of the lower south spread south and west and came at the expense of Native Americans. With the help of  government, democratic white majorities assured the  deployment of military forces against native people in furtherance of the plantation system. Here we find a major motivation for the Red Stick, Creek and Seminole Wars in the Gulf borderlands. Ultimately, the southeastern Indians were removed to the west and their lands used for the expansion of the slavery-based plantation system. Others have also argued that the Cherokee, by demonstrating that cotton could be grown in the river valleys of northwest Georgia-Cherokee homelands after the American Revolution- inspired the state of Georgia to press Washington for removal, yet another illustration of how powerful were the forces unleashed by the textile-driven industrial and economic revolutions.

Two great issues were left unresolved in the formulation of our Constitution of 1789, leaving  the door open to the founding of the “Cotton Kingdom.’ These unresolved issues were: what to do about slavery and what to do about the Native Americans. It is tempting to speculate how different our history might have been had not the world- wide demand for cotton inspired both the spread of slavery and the removal of the Southeastern Indians. 

Beckert’s is not a Marxist interpretation of history. It is the story of how capitalism grew around a single product, inspired imitation, expressed itself through political processes and transformed first the West, and more recently, the East. China today occupies the place once held by Great Britain and later by the United States and Japan in producing cotton goods (once Britain’s virtual monopoly). On reading this, one comes face to face with the gigantic pressures that kindled the rise of African slavery, westward expansion and the seeming inevitability of the southern plantation system

So much of this work rings both new and true-new in perspective and true in its myriad of mounting detail that demonstrates the direct consequences of Britain’s domination of the seas after the French and Indian War, creating the vital  spheres of protection and the military/political support for the emergence of an industrial monopoly on cotton manufacturing and trade. Local, even national, history without context means little. Beckers’ intellectual construct and research is what academic history is all about. This is simply a great work and like all great work, is likely to both inspire and provoke even more original thought and research. The story of the “Atlantic Community” in the age of discovery and empire continues to explode.

Two examples will hopefully entice you to delve into The Empire of Cotton. First, recall that homespun cloth was worn by many Americans as a defiant response to both the  import tax on British cloth and the price of price of cloth goods imported from England, again, a price exacted by virtue of England’s monopoly . The spinning wheel is the symbol of the Daughters of the Revolution, just as it was of the American Revolution itself.

Secondly, remember the 1940’s picture of the leader of the Indian independence movement, Mahatma Ghandi, by photographer Margaret Bourke White from Life magazine, so often reproduced in school history books? The one that shows Ghandi during an interview, seated like a peasant and, fiddling with his small spinning wheel? What is that about? Britain’s grab of India from the French in 1763 meant that Britain, which earlier profited from most of the cotton export trade between India and France, now had a monopoly. The next step was to force villagers to move to towns, especially port cities to work in new British spinning mills, a relocation process that broke up the household- economy basis of Indian life, ending the commercial production of cotton thread in the homes of Indians. Britain would go on to replace the French textile production system and industrialize that production with power looms and specialized labor..

The new British cloth manufacturing industry with its world -wide markets required gargantuan amounts of cotton fiber, made southern planters rich. Across the sea in Ireland, Britain imposed a factory- based system on the Irish, especially in the linen growing regions of Northern Ireland (Ulster). In America, the result was African slavery on an unimaginable scale. In Ireland, the factories broke down the old cottage industry in which men grew and processed the flax from which the women spun thread for weaving. Industrialization set off a sizable migration of Ulster Irish to America in the 18th (that’s right, the 18th century) and inspired volumes of sentimental poetry by and about the cottagers who had produced the linen in their own homes in the embrace of their families. Beckert has crafted a great read and opened our minds to many fresh perspectives. Seeing the southern plantations, American slavery and the Civil War in Beckert’s light suggests clearly that the most American of our many American wars, the Civil War, must have been the consequences at least in part, of forces well beyond America’s borders.