Empire of cotton - Sven Beckert

Empire of cotton
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Autor: Sven Beckert

 Wydawnictwo: Allen Lane
ISBN: 9780241011713
EAN:
Format: ...
Oprawa: twarda
Stron: 640
Data wydania: 2014-12-01
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For about 900 years, from 1000 to 1900, cotton was the world's most important manufacturing industry. It remains a vast business - if all the cotton bales produced in 2013 had been stacked on top of each other they would have made a somewhat unstable tower 40,000 miles high. Sven Beckert's superb new book is a history of the overwhelming role played by cotton in dictating the shape of our world. For centuries it was central to India's prosperity - a prosperity that was devastated by Britain's imperial takeover of the industry. It formed the core of Britain and Europe's industrial revolution. It revived and modernized slavery in the American South. Essential to billions of people and easily transported, cotton made fortunes, changed geographies and was crucial to modern capitalism and globalization. Empire of Cotton is both a gripping narrative and a brilliant case history of how the world works. A masterpiece of the historian's craft: combining a global scope with concern for the nuances of individual experience, Beckert tracks the fortunes of a single commodity, cotton, across six continents and thousands of years. That sweeping project is driven by the attempt to unravel the causes and consequences of one overarching puzzle: "why, after many millennia of slow economic growth, a few strands of humanity in the late eighteenth century suddenly got much richer." On the way to his answer, Beckert uncovers a history he claims "provides the key to understanding the modern world." ... The belief that discovering the origins of economic growth might unlock modernity's secrets raises questions that are even more tantalizing -- Timothy Shenk The Nation A fascinating and profound examination of the history of a crop that played a transformative role in the making of the modern world. Beckert manages to keep in view a remarkable cast of characters, from planters and slaves in the United States to British industrialists and factory workers, and farmers in India, Egypt, and China. The Empire of Cotton is global history as it should be written -- Eric Foner

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Sven Beckert