Empire of Cotton

“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.” 

Here, Beckert defines “war capitalism,” one of the most important concepts introduced in the book. Unlike other historians who refer to pre-industrial markets as “mercantile capitalism,” Beckert’s terminology lays bare the brutality at the heart of early market-making, the legacy of which persists throughout the economic history of the last three centuries.

“When we think of capitalism, we think of wage workers, yet this prior phase of capitalism was based not on free labor but on slavery. We associate industrial capitalism with contracts and markets, but early capitalism was based as often as not on violence and bodily coercion. Modern capitalism privileges property rights, but this earlier moment was characterized just as much by massive expropriations as by secure ownership. Latter-day capitalism rests upon the rule of law and powerful institutions backed by the state, but capitalism’s early phase, although ultimately requiring state power to create world-spanning empires, was frequently based on the unrestrained actions of private individuals—the domination of masters over slaves and of frontier capitalists over indigenous inhabitants.” 

Here and throughout the book, Beckert reminds readers that modern capitalism was built on a foundation of violence and lawlessness, a legacy which many modern proponents of free markets don’t always recognize.

“Unlike these commodities, cotton, however, has two labor-intensive stages—one in the fields, the other in factories. Sugar and tobacco did not create large industrial proletariats in Europe. Cotton did. Tobacco did not result in the rise of vast new manufacturing enterprises. Cotton did. Indigo growing and processing did not create huge new markets for European manufacturers. Cotton did. Rice cultivation in the Americas did not lead to an explosion of both slavery and wage labor. Cotton did.” 

This is one of the clearest arguments for why Beckert chose to focus his history of capitalism on cotton versus other industries. Because so much of this narrative focuses on the relationship between slave labor and wage labor—and the varying degrees of private and public coercion involved in each—it makes sense to focus the book on a trade that relied heavily on both forms of labor.