Harvard Professor Sven Beckert shows how, in the nineteenth century, cotton captured the imaginations of the adventurous, the ambitious, and the visionary, and drew them, along with many others, into an enterprise which linked people, institutions, and economies in unprecedented ways. The revolution in the cotton industry decisively shaped the world: engendering singular new ties between different regions, and drastically altering the scale of human enterprise. In significant ways, cotton was midwife to the birth of the ...
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Harvard Professor Sven Beckert shows how, in the nineteenth century, cotton captured the imaginations of the adventurous, the ambitious, and the visionary, and drew them, along with many others, into an enterprise which linked people, institutions, and economies in unprecedented ways. The revolution in the cotton industry decisively shaped the world: engendering singular new ties between different regions, and drastically altering the scale of human enterprise. In significant ways, cotton was midwife to the birth of the world as we know it. The Empire of Cotton stands in distinct contrast to recent books that argue for particularities of culture, climate, or religious beliefs as determinants in the shape of global networks, proposing instead that unequal access to capital and social power was the defining force in the distribution of economic power in the world. Based on wide-ranging research in international archives, and told through the lives of a range of colourful characters, it reminds us that any story of global transformation is really a mosaic of many individual tales.
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