Cotton -- an Economist book review.

[rogerashton]

I haven't looked at the book yet, but the review is worth reading.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History. By Sven Beckert. Knopf; 615 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £30. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

By 1800 mass-produced British cotton dominated world markets, including in India where the industry collapsed. In the three decades to 1820 innovation helped productivity in Britain’s new cotton factories increase 370 times. Mr Beckert, a history professor at Harvard, calls this new economic order “War Capitalism” as it is based on imperial expansion, expropriation of land, and slavery.

Deprived of raw American cotton when the civil war broke out in 1861, English manufacturers rediscovered India. Railways were built in the newly acquired state of Berar to shift raw cotton for export to Bombay. By 1862, 75% of Britain’s cotton originated in India. The industry had gone global; Egypt and Brazil also provided new sources of supply. When news of the Union Army’s victories in 1865 reached India, property prices in Bombay collapsed, anticipating the renewed competition that the end of the war might bring. In the event, as peace returned to the American South and former slaves became sharecroppers, the global industry recovered quickly, helped by a surge in demand.

[LuvNewcastle]

1. A lot of white people were

sharecroppers as well. I'm descended from some of them. Wage slavery at its most basic level.

[rogerashton]

2. I read somewhere, years ago

that in 1900, Illinois had the largest number of sharecroppers.

Not wage slavery, technically, but peonage. About halfway between feudalism and wage-slavery.