‘Empire of Cotton,’ by Sven Beckert reviewed by By ADAM HOCHSCHILD

Eric Calistri

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The history of an era often seems defined by a particular commodity. The 18th century certainly belonged to sugar. The race to cultivate it in the West Indies was, in the words of the French Enlightenment writer Guillaume-Thomas de Raynal, “the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs the Universe.” In the 20th century and beyond, the commodity has been oil: determining events from the Allied partitioning of the Middle East after World War I to Hitler’s drive for Balkan and Caspian wells to the forging of our own fateful ties to the regimes of the Persian Gulf.

In his important new book, the Harvard historian Sven Beckert makes the case that in the 19th century what most stirred the universe was cotton. “Empire of Cotton” is not casual airplane reading. Heavy going at times, it is crowded with many more details and statistics (a few of them repeated) than the nonspecialist needs. But it is a major work of scholarship that will not be soon surpassed as the definitive account of the product that was, as Beckert puts it, the Industrial Revolution’s “launching pad.”

Photo
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Tinted lenses: A nostalgic vision of harvesting cotton from the postcard series “Dixie Land,” produced around 1900. Credit Print Collector, via Getty Images

From NY Times Review of Books:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/b...d=nytcore-ipad-share&smprod=nytcore-ipad&_r=0
 
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