Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism

ISBN-13: 9780141979984 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 640 str.

Sven Beckert

Opis

For about 900 years, from 1000 to 1900, cotton was the world's most important manufacturing industry. It remains a vast business. This book tells the history of the overwhelming role played by cotton in dictating the shape of our world. It is also a case history of how the world works.

Recenzje

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

O autorze

Sven Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of American History at Harvard University. He is also the author of The Monied Metropolis: New York and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie.