Empire of Cotton

According to the traditional narrative of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of factories and wage labor replaced an older system dominated by merchants, artisans, and putting-out systems. While historians acknowledge the violence and coercion at the heart of this earlier system of capitalism—particularly slavery and the expropriation of Indigenous lands—it is generally referred to as “mercantile capitalism,” a phrase that fails to capture the cruelty and inhumanity on which it relied. With Empire of Cotton, Beckert seeks to correct this by applying a new terminology to this era: war capitalism.

He writes, “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” (xv). In establishing the importance of war capitalism to Europe’s rise as a global economic power, Beckert looks to the example of the early cotton-weaving industries in Southern Germany and Northern Italy during the 15th century. While these regions enjoyed several preconditions for building successful cotton industries, Beckert maintains that they ultimately failed because they did not project power nor utilize violent coercion to control the Ottoman farmers who provided them with raw material. He writes, “Some shrewd observers surely noted that the first European cotton producers, both the northern Italians and the southern Germans, failed at least in part because they had not subjugated those people who supplied them with cotton. It was a lesson that would not be forgotten” (27).

That all changed in the 17th century, as state-sponsored armed merchant fleets populated by so-called soldier-traders exerted their power in places like India, Africa, and the Americas. In addition to fighting fierce naval battles with competitors, fleets like the British East India Company participated in a three-continent trading scheme that resulted in untold amounts of human suffering. Indian weavers were beaten by the Company’s agents if they didn’t bend to their will. The cloth these weavers produced was traded in Africa for enslaved people, who were then put to work on cotton and sugar plantations in the Americas, on land violently expropriated from Indigenous people: “In the three centuries after 1500, more than 8 million slaves were transported from Africa to the Americas” (35).

It is no great secret that the triangular trade of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries was a scheme of staggering brutality. Nor is it a secret that the early growth of the American economy was tightly wedded to the institution of slavery. Where Beckert is particularly astute, however, is in his arguments that the transition from war capitalism to industrial capitalism was far from smooth, as the two fed off one another well into the modern era. For example, the rise of cotton mills and wage labor in Britain placed ever greater demands on American plantations to supply raw cotton. Beckert writes, “In the process, a new kind of slavery (what historians have called ‘second slavery’) emerged that was tightly linked to the intensity and profits of industrial capitalism” (92). In turn, the rhythms of labor on plantations influenced how industrial markets in Europe and the Northern United States organized their own paid workforces. He writes, “The all-encompassing control of workers—a core characteristic of capitalism—experienced its first great success on the cotton plantations of the American South” (115).

While war capitalism and industrial capitalism relied on one another, history shows that they could not coexist for long in the same place. Beckert identifies Egypt as a nation where the use of enslaved labor in cotton mills decimated domestic growth, ultimately leading to the country going bankrupt. While slavery and industrial wage labor coexisted in the United States for over half a century, the tensions of maintaining both labor systems in the same country resulted in a civil war that was unprecedented in its destruction.

Even after the abolition of slavery, the vestiges of war capitalism continued to take hold around the world. In the United States, for example, former enslavers “sought to restore a plantation world as close to slavery as possible” (282). Rather than the lash, the new agent of legal coercion was credit, as financers charged sharecroppers exorbitant interest rates on land and equipment, forcing those who were newly freed to work from sunrise to sunset to meet their credit obligations, much like they did under slavery. Furthermore, many freedpeople who wished to participate in subsistence farming were met with violent reprisals by white terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. While war capitalism’s edge has been dulled in the modern era, its legacy persists in places like Dhaka, Bangladesh, where over 1,000 overworked and underpaid workers died when their building collapsed.

Near the end of the book, Beckert neatly summarizes the complex relationship between war capitalism and industrial capitalism, writing, “Slavery, colonialism, and forced labor, among other forms of violence, were not aberrations in the history of capitalism, but were at its very core. The violence of market making—forcing people to labor in certain locations and in certain ways—has been a constant throughout the history of the empire of cotton” (441).