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