Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Knopf, 2014.

== Summary ==
This
book examines the “empire of cotton” – the globally integrated manufacturing
complex that linked slavery in America, cotton mills in Manchester, and
clothing items around the world. In particular, it tracks the rise and fall of
the European-dominated empire of cotton, a story of the making and remaking of
global capitalism and with it of the modern world. Entrepreneurs in American
and England recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry by
combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage
workers. He argues that Europeans – in particular Great Britain – united the
power of capital and the power of the state to forge a global production
complex, and then used the capital, skills, networks, and institutions of
cotton to embark upon the creation of new technology and wealth that defines
the modern work. At the core of this system was what Beckert calls, war capitalism: “slavery, the
expropriation of indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed trade, and the
assertion of sovereignty over people and land by entrepreneurs." War capitalism
flourished in the fields and drew its strength from slavery and led to new wealth
and knowledge that in turn strengthened European institutions and states. The
result of this highly aggressive oriented capitalism was that Europeans came to
dominate the centuries old worlds of cotton, merge them into a single empire
centered in Manchester and led to industrial capitalism. Initially tightly
linked to slavery and expropriated lands, industrial capitalism, from wage
labor to property rights, gained strength and enabled a new and different form
of integration of the labor, raw materials, markets, and capital.  Cotton thus brought together slavery and free
labor, states and markets, colonialism and free trade, industrialization and
deindustrialization. It was thus a global struggle, between slaves and
planters, merchants and statesmen, farmers and merchants, workers and factory
owners. 
See also: Walter Johnson, Edward Baptist