I was born in Liverpool and so from an early age knew all about King Cotton, who reigned in Manchester next door but whose realm was really Dixie, the antebellum American South of black slaves and Gone with the Wind, fine manners and horrible cruelty all rolled into one.I first saw giant bales of real cotton heaped up by the side of the road in Tajikistan, where Soviet collective agriculture had ploughed an area the size of Lancashire billiard-table flat and run ugly concrete irrigation channels from one end of the barren, monotonous landscape to the other.And indeed, from Samuel Greg’s mill at Quarry Bank to Kokhand in Central Asia, there are few places which seem to have escaped the ambitions of this material monarch, now elevated by Harvard history professor Sven Beckert into the
15 January 2015, The Tablet
Empire of Cotton: a new history of global capitalism
Ripping yarn
Get Instant Access
Continue Reading
Register for free to read this article in full
Subscribe for unlimited access
From just £30 quarterly
Complete access to all Tablet website content including all premium content.
The full weekly edition in print and digital including our 179 years archive.
PDF version to view on iPad, iPhone or computer.
Already a subscriber? Login