62 pages • 2 hours read
Sven BeckertEmpire of Cotton
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Building War Capitalism”
Until the 17th century, Europe made only modest strides in cotton manufacturing. With no way of growing cotton on European soil, industries in Italy and Germany were subject to the demands and restrictions of regions like the Ottoman Empire over which they exerted little control. This would all change dramatically over the next 200 years, however. Beckert argues that “this recasting of cotton did not at first derive from technical advances, nor from organizational advantages, but instead from a far simpler source: the ability and willingness to project capital and power across vast oceans” (30). By both necessity and design, this projection of power meant subjugating large portions of the world’s population in extraordinarily violent ways—particularly through slavery, the expropriation of Indigenous lands, and militarized trade. Beckert once again defines these violent methods of subjugation as “war capitalism.”
The roots of this project to violently reshape the world as one giant marketplace centered around Europe were laid down a century earlier when Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492: “That journey set off the world’s greatest land grab” (31). Moreover, it led to a full-scale fleecing of Indigenous American gold, fortunes that would to a large extent fund Europe’s future efforts in war capitalism. Equally important to Europe’s eventual dominance of the cotton trade was Vasco da Gama’s 1497 voyage around the Southern tip of Africa, establishing for the first time an oceanic route between Europe and India.
In 1600, with both capital and intercontinental trade routes established, European merchants founded the British East India Company, the first of many heavily armed trading fleets that would forge an intricate global commerce network trading in cotton, spices, and—most consequently—human misery. To meet the demands of African traders for cotton textiles, the British East India Company used a large portion of the cloth it purchased in India to buy enslaved people. These people were then shipped to the Americas, where they toiled on vast plantations supplying sugar and other commodities to European consumers: “In the three centuries after 1500, more than 8 million slaves were transported from Africa to the Americas” (35). Five million of these enslaved people were deported in the 18th century alone.
Through projections and exercises of force, these European “soldier-traders” (33) easily dominated transoceanic trade routes and Indian port cities. Nevertheless, they exerted little direct control over the inland farmers and weavers who actually produced the textiles, relying on local traders or banias who acted as middlemen between European merchants and Indian laborers. Beckert writes, “The power of European merchants in India was hence significant, but far from all-encompassing” (34). Furthermore, the European East India Companies faced competition from Middle Eastern merchants. Nevertheless, Europe was able—in some cases quite literally—to blow these competitors out of the water “with bigger, faster, and more reliable boats, and more damaging firepower” (34).
Finally, this era marked the modest beginnings of cotton manufacturing in the British peasant countryside, where home-based spinners and weavers produced cloth using raw cotton advanced to them by merchants. By the late 17th century, this cotton export economy had grown large enough that Britain began to impose a number of protectionist tariffs and other restrictions on Indian fabric imports, testifying to the importance of the state in making Europe the center of the global cotton trade. Beckert writes:
These networks were dominated by the joint venture of private capital and increasingly robust states. Together their commitment to armed trade, industrial espionage, prohibitions, restrictive trade regulations, domination of territories, capturing of labor, removal of indigenous inhabitants, and the state-sponsored creation of territories that were then left to the far-reaching domination of capitalists had created a new economic order (52).
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Wages of War Capitalism”
In 1784, a few miles south of Manchester, a British merchant named Samuel Greg forged a new and revolutionary method of manufacturing cotton goods. Using the weight of falling water from a nearby stream, Greg powered a series of yarn-spinning machines and enlisted local orphans to operate them: “Though modest in size, Greg’s mill was unlike anything the world had seen” (56). Over the next few years, the rolling hills surrounding Manchester became a hub of innovation that Beckert likens to Silicon Valley in the 20th and 21st centuries: “From this local spark, the world as most of us know it emerged” (58).
Beckert goes on to ponder the reasons why machine manufacturing emerged at this particular time and place. Most important, he argues, was the reach of the British Empire and the power it exerted over global cotton networks, enabled of course by war capitalism. This gave British inventors both the opportunity and the incentive to find ways to boost the productivity of cotton manufacturing. Beckert writes, “They had access to uniquely dynamic markets, they dominated the transoceanic trade in cottons, and they had firsthand knowledge of the fabulous potential wealth that could come from selling cloth” (64). Moreover, despite paling in comparison to the size and skill of the Indian workforce of spinners and weavers, Britain had a sturdy ecosystem of cotton artisans in its own countryside from which to draw expertise. Britain’s looser gender roles relative to China and India also gave it an advantage in mobilizing women’s labor, which would be instrumental to the rise of cotton manufacturing in Europe.
In 1790, a mere six years after Greg’s first cotton mill, British manufacturers could spin the same amount of yarn in 1,000 hours that required Indian spinners 50,000 hours. Within five years, the amount of time dropped to 300 hours, and before long British yarn was cheaper than Indian yarn. Beckert writes, “Once Indians began using British-manufactured yarn and cloth, it signaled to all that the world’s cotton industry had been turned on its head” (67). By 1801, the cotton industry accounted for 17 percent of Britain’s economy as a whole, outpacing the iron, coal, and woolens’ industries.
The rise of the cotton mill also had dramatic impact on the organization of Western labor. As manufacturing moved out of the home and into the factory, merchants no longer scoured the countryside looking for workers; instead workers sought out factories for employment. Beckert writes, “Outside the slave plantations of the Americas capitalists for the first time organized, supervised, and dominated the production process” (69). Furthermore, most of these workers received wages, a stark departure from the earlier putting-out models in which workers earned money by selling the goods they produced directly to merchants.
Finally, Beckert reiterates the importance of the state to the growth of Britain’s cotton industry: “This state was capable of forging and protecting global markets, policing its borders, regulating industry, creating and then enforcing private property rights in land, enforcing contracts over large geographical distances, forging fiscal tools to tax populations, and building a social, economic, and legal environment that made the mobilization of labor through wage payments possible” (76). More than the ingenuity of its inventors or the skill of its artisans, it was these traits that allowed Britain to industrialize so quickly and effectively while other countries did not.
Chapters 2-3 Analysis
While Beckert already defined war capitalism in earlier chapters, it is here that the era of violent and coercive capitalism is first explored thoroughly. Arguably the most emblematic example of early war capitalism is the British East India Company. Founded in 1600, the East India Company was awarded by Queen Elizabeth I a formal monopoly over all territories east of Africa and west of the Americas, underlining once again the importance of state power to the rise of early capitalists. In many ways, the company’s fleet was indistinguishable from a navy, consisting of heavily-armed warships that engaged in frequent sea battles against Dutch and Portuguese rivals. It is here that the term “war capitalism” emerges in its most literal form.
The importance of the British East India Company, however, went far beyond the ability to literally blow its competitors out of the water. Without the ability to grow cotton on its own land, European markets relied on the aggressive tactics of these trader-soldiers to subjugate to varying degrees the laborers in places where raw cotton could be grown. This subjugation is what would set apart the new centers of cotton manufacturing in Europe from the earlier failed experiments in Italy and Germany. Again, Beckert is quick to debunk various themes of capitalism dogma, pointing out that the origins of modern capitalism came not from healthy and fair competition or the ingenuity of individual inventors, but from force. He writes, “With increasing frequency, Europeans inserted themselves, often violently, into the global networks of the cotton trade—within Asia as well as between Asia and the rest of the world—before using that same power to create entirely novel networks between Africa, the Americas, and Europe” (30).
These networks found their purest and most brutal expression in what is known by historians as triangular trade. In describing this network, Beckert writes, “What all these European trading companies had in common was that they purchased cotton textiles in India, to trade for spices in Southeast Asia, and also to bring to Europe, whence they might be consumed domestically or shipped to Africa to pay for slaves to work the plantations just beginning to take root in the New World” (32).
The human cost of this trade and the level of brutality needed to maintain it were unprecedented. According to scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, an estimated 12.5 million enslaved people were transported from Africa to the Americas between 1501 and 1866, peaking between the years of 1776 and 1850—a period that roughly coincides with the Antebellum height of the European cotton industry. (“Transatlantic Slave Trade — Estimates.” The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.) Before the late 18th century, however, enslaved people’s primary role in the cotton trade was one of currency, exchanged between African traders and European merchants, then put to work on sugar plantations in the Americas. It would not be until the late 18th century that enslaved people became the dominant labor source for cotton cultivation.
The Indigenous peoples of the New World also suffered immensely at the hands of European traders during this period. To feed Europe’s appetite for arable land and gold, untold millions lost their lives, their homes, and their wealth. Beckert writes, “As Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and Dutch powers captured huge territories in the Americas, they took away the continent’s movable wealth: gold and silver. It was indeed some of these stolen precious metals that had funded the purchase of cotton fabrics in India in the first place” (35).
While Europeans met few obstacles in their efforts to subjugate enslaved Africans and Indigenous Americans, their efforts to dominate markets on the Indian subcontinent were successful only to a point. As the historical center of cotton manufacturing for centuries, India was highly resistant to Europeans’ attempts to insert themselves into its cotton commodity chains. At first, Europe’s influence was largely limited to the coast, where English and other Western merchants were forced to work through banias who acted as middlemen to the highly-skilled spinners and weavers that dotted the subcontinent’s countryside: “In this system of production, the weavers themselves had control over the rhythm and organization of their work, owned their tools, just as they had for centuries, and even retained the right to sell their products to whomever they pleased” (33).
Nevertheless, the British East India Company in particular was successful in encroaching on much of this system, putting some of these middlemen on their own payroll as “agents.” Here, war capitalism once again rears its ugly head. Beckert writes, “The company also increasingly resorted to violence, including corporal punishment. When a company agent complained that a weaver was working illegally for a private merchant, ‘the Company’s Gumashta seized him and his son, flogged him severely, painted his face black and white, tied his hands behind his back and marched him through the town’” (44). As later chapters will show, the desire among Indian weavers to maintain their ancient traditions in the face of European intervention will be a major point of contention throughout the country’s evolution as a British colony and later an independent state.
While war capitalism found its greatest expressions on the high seas of the Indian Ocean and the plantations of America, it was also a crucial—if indirect—ingredient to the rise of factories on British soil. In describing Greg’s monumental achievement in establishing history’s first-recorded cotton mill, Beckert is quick to point out that “Greg had deep roots in war capitalism, its violent appropriation of territory and slave labor, as well its reliance on the imperial state to secure new technologies and markets. He had secured his part of the family fortune through Hillsborough Estate, a profitable sugar plantation on the Caribbean Island of Dominica, where he held hundreds of enslaved Africans until the final abolition of slavery in British territories in 1834” (60). Beckert also notes that much of the technology used in early cotton mills came as a result of imperial expansion on the Indian subcontinent, along with state-sponsored espionage. Even though British cotton mills relied primarily on paid laborers rather than enslaved people, these mills—bellwethers of the Industrial Revolution as a whole—could not have existed without the wages of global war capitalism.
