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Cotton empireb Problems to rewrite the history of capitalismCapitalism began not in factories but in fields!bWhere did capitalism begin today? The book traces how the seemingly insignificant crop of cotton is transformed into an empires commodity, supporting capitalism and supporting growth. Cotton played a central role for European merchants and politicians in a very short period of time creating and reshaping global capitalism by combining empire expansion, slave labor, new machines and wage workers. At the heart of this new approach was war slavery, plundering natives, expansion of empires, and trade with force. Born in the fields of the sixteenth century, not in factories in the eighteenth century, and relying on the violent plunder of land and labor, not on machines, war capitalism was a powerful foundation on which capitalism is today. The book examines the process of capitalist formation and reorganization from a global perspective through the rise and fall of the cotton empire, once dominated by Europe, and breaks the notion that capitalism has emerged with the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century.
