Empire of Cotton

[Monte Davis]

Not really responsive to Mark's "Desert Island Books," but I won't go
Crusoe this week unless I can take along and finish Sven Beckert's "Empire
of Cotton," a Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer finalist that came out 14
months ago. Pynchonians will find richer, better frames here for IG Farben
dyes, Mount Vernon slaves, Luddites and Mason's restive Golden Valley
weavers, calicos from Calicut on Portsmouth whores, transshipments at
Capetown -- and a template well-made enough for P's grandest narrative,
which is really *everything* that boiled out of Europe across five other
continents -- plus the occasional Vheissu and Vormance ventures -- from
1500 to 2000.

Cotton (1) has been among the world's largest manufactures for 4000 years,

(2) was the largest far-traded commodity throughout the second millennium
CE, and

(3) was the most important driver of both early European "war capitalism"
(East India Company usw grabbing trade routes, colonies, control of
territorries and raw materials) and its evolution into industrial
capitalism (Lancashire mills spinning and weaving Indian, West Indian, and
North American cotton into cloth with which slavers paid West African
chieftains for more slaves to grow more cotton).

40+ years ago, teaching history in Florence, I began to understand what it
meant about late medieval and early Renaissance Europe that wool from
Northern Europe could be routinely transported to Florence, processed into
dyed fabrics, shipped back and sold to Northern Europeans as cheaply as --
even in preference to -- woolens from the next parish or county. Until now,
despite reading Engels and Marx and Hobsbawm and more, I hadn't thought as
clearly about what went into this much larger version: that from 1760 to
1830, the world changed so that cotton grown in Bengal or Xinjiang or
Pernambuco or Georgia could be made into cloth in Britain and sent back as
cheaper/ more desirable than local fabric... or what it means now that the
pendulum has swung back, so that China and South Asia are again both the
largest growers *and* the largest producers/exporters of textiles and even
garments.
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