Pulling the Threads

A good work of history is one that makes you think, expands your knowledge, and challenges preconceived beliefs or notions.  By this measure, Beckert's Empire of Cotton is excellent.  The book is exhaustively researched, well organized, and provides a veritable deluge of facts and statistics to deliver, "the biography of [cotton] as a window into some of the most significant questions we can ask about the history of our world and to reinterpret a history of huge consequence: the history of capitalism."

Beckert presents cotton as the World's original global supply chain and the commodity that became the, "launching pad for the broader Industrial Revolution."  Beckert's self-proclaimed "war capitalism" would lead, "the transition from the older world of cotton -- discontinuous, multifocal, horizontal -- to an integrated, centralized, and hierarchical empire of cotton."  What made Beckert's war capitalism distinct from industrialization was that it was much more than just mechanization and required a transformation in the role, source, and use of land and labor.  In essence, Beckert's cotton represents the sinew between land, labor and manufacturing, and in doing so would lead to a transformation in the role of and relationship between government and commerce that would become the modern World we know today.

As thorough and complete as this book is, I believe it has some problems.  First of all, while I understand the general idea Beckert is trying to reveal through his explanation of how a family crop for millennium suddenly exploded into a global economic engine in a relative snap, I find his tone to frequently be sensational, using highly emotional adjectives and verbs (e.g. violence, exploitation, inequality) to create a feel of almost evil intentions.  I am not dismissing or excusing what we now clearly understand to be inhumane and unacceptable consequences of earlier economic pursuits, but I think they need to be placed into a proper historical context.  For example, what were some of the alternative courses of development available at the time?  If not capitalism, then what?  Is a world of wool and flax really better than our world of today?

I know that is an extreme example, but for all the talk about the bad side of the rise of "white gold", there is relatively little discussion of the countless positive outcomes, both intended and consequential; nor is there sufficient acknowledgement  that the negative elements of the cotton enterprise were not exclusive from other commercial endeavors, just on a greater scale.

I do not agree with Beckert's selection of the term "War Capitalism" to represent his main thesis.  Nation's have always and continue to employ all of the elements of national power to further national interests, of which economics are commonly considered the most important, or at least first among equals.  The attachment of "war" to these ambitions seemed to me to be a stretch intended to elicit a rejection by readers of the motives, methods and outcomes.  This seems to be a rather idealistic and simple approach to a very complex situation.

An example of this is this sentence from the epilogue, "The human capacity to organize our efforts in ever more productive ways should give us hope, the hope that our unprecedented domination over nature will allow us also the wisdom, the power, and the strength to create a society that serves the needs of all the world's people -- an empire of cotton that is not only productive, but also just."  I think Braudel might argue that Beckert is neglecting the long duree and does not realize that the events so excellently described in his book are perhaps just the most recent manifestation of humanities tendency toward exploitation of others in the endless pursuit of riches and power.

Despite these criticisms, this book should be required reading in any MBA/MPA program and business ethics curriculum so that we can learn from the mistakes and pitfalls of earlier innovations and capitalist evolutions.