Empire of Cotton: A Global History.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014) by Sven Beckert, a historian at Harvard University, is a sweeping account of the role of cotton in the development of modern global capitalism. Awarded the Bancroft Prize and named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the work traces the commodity across several centuries and multiple continents, arguing that the cotton industry served as a foundational engine of industrialization and the emergence of the world economy. Central to Beckert's analysis is the concept he terms "war capitalism" - a phase predating industrial capitalism in which European expansion depended on slavery, colonial dispossession, and coercive violence rather than on the wage labor and free markets typically associated with capitalist development. He contends that the wealth generated through enslaved labor on New World plantations and the forcible reorganization of global production were not aberrations but rather constitutive of capitalism itself. By linking the plantations of the American South, the textile mills of Lancashire, and labor regimes across Asia, Africa, and the Americas, Beckert advances a model of global history that emphasizes interconnection, state power, and the entanglement of economic progress with exploitation.