EMPIRE OF COTTON
Sven Beckert, Alfred A. Knopf, 615 pages, $35
Even if you read "Empire of Cotton" in silk pajamas, you will find yourself in "the fabric of our lives" soon enough, as the industry jingle coos. Be forewarned, as this momentous and brilliant book illustrates, those ubiquitous cotton fibers we take for granted are soaked in history, money and blood.
Harvard historian Sven Beckert picks a humble but mighty commodity to illuminate global human enterprise — concentrating his book on the most recent 350 years, and particularly the 19th century, his academic specialty.
Beckert is interested in the big canvas and the frank, unsavory consequences not found in most econ books. His subtitle, "A Global History," is thrilling in its substantiation — the text jumps off five millennia ago on the Pacific coast of what is now Mexico and in the ancient Indus Valley. The author goes wide and deep in a manner that readers of Jared Diamond's 1997 book "Guns, Germs and Steel" will appreciate.
A reader expects to encounter Eli Whitney, but Beckert also introduces Ellen Hootton, a 10-year-old worker in yarn ends who "entered the historical record when, in June 1833, she was called before His Majesty's Factory Inquiry Commission, which was charged with investigating child labor." Suffice it to say the testimony is gut-churning.
Indeed, the empire of cotton was built on the backs of — not coincidentally — disenfranchised slaves, children and women. It continues apace for Bangladeshi textile workers today, and less well-known, some 2 million children under the age of 15 who pick cotton in Uzbekistan.
NEWSDAY
