from solder to president. a memoir by his grandson david eisenhower and david's wife, julie nix so eisenhower. on his list, eisen house the white house years. next eisenhower's personal account of strategies, battles and outcome of world war ii in, crusade in europe. and completing the list, representative tom cole recommends gene edward smith's portrait of the 34th president in, eisenhower in "war and peace." to see what other books congressman cole recommended visit cole.house.gov. . .

[inaudible conversations] >> i think we will get started. i want to thank julia ott before introducer for allowing me to say a few words. welcome the new school. welcome to one of the featured events of the harvard center for capitalism studies. for a couple of years i taught a course at eugene college, our undergraduate division, on understanding global capitalism. the first day we become in and everyone had to look at the tag of the shirt to the person, shirt of the person to their loved and tell us what country

that shirt was made in. so that was the first thing we did in understanding global capitalism. we would write the names of the countries on the board. and it was invariably 25 countries. actually remarkable that the production still quite diversified. what we learned by looking at cotton shirts in that case was about globalization of production. we learned about the modern structure of the modern corporation, about branding, fashion design, about the relationship between trade and capital movements. but what we didn't have when i taught the course was sven beckert's book "empire of cotton" which not only raises all those issues but then raises those of colonization, slavery war, agricultural, internationalization, much broader. i look forward to teaching my

course again so i will have this as a reference. these are enormous big issues about capitalism. and in a way as an economist i feel comfortable saying they could really only be told in a single tome by historian. and that was the basic rationale behind our formation of the center for capitalism that there are these major dynamic major questions about capitalism that can't be addressed by economics alone. that there are these crucial political, cultural, social logical aspects through all of these big questions. and historians can provide that bring these perspectives together. in this case, in one brilliant book, but it's not surprising that these two historians which came up with this idea, julia herself and her colleague, who are the ones who imagined the

idea of a capitalism studies center at the new school and so it's a pleasure that we have a historian before us tonight. the idea of the center for capitalism studies was precisely to take on these big questions, about economic dynamics about inequality in income distribution, the role of states, the role of social movements in relation to economic change. it was only going to be accomplished within put it was clear from the outset from all the disciplines at the new school for social research, and some even outside of it. so it's not surprising that the center sits a very comfortably at the new school for social research where all of those disciplines concerned themselves with those types of questions. bob kyle brenner after whom the center is named, who had the great fortune working with and teaching with for over a decade, he came well known not actually for the precise answers that he

gave to these questions but because he raised these questions in the first place. he argued along marxist and teensy lines the capitalism that in nature and it had a logic but -- keynesian. he also understood the economics and especially modern so-called rigorous economics could not adequately address these big questions. bob, there's many great bob stories. when was a quip that he is wasted if economics had a journal called the journal of big economic issues it's pages would be empty which was to say that economists were not taking up the big important issues around questions of the dynamics of capitalism. the profession could not take them on and so the profession retreated into course of over specialization. the question of these big issues and how do they arise them is

not just of academic interest. when the financial crisis hit in 2008, the queen of england the queen of england wrote a letter to the president of the british academy asking why did no one see it coming? and the reply i will quote from two very prominent economists was quote in the response to her, everyone seemed to be doing their own job properly on its own merit, and according to standard measures of success they were often doing it well referring to the economists. the failure was to sue collectively this added up to a series of interconnected imbalances over which no single authority have jurisdiction. so in summary your majesty, they wrote the failure to perceive the timing extent and severity of the crisis and headed off is principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people to understand the risks to the system as a whole. so the pragmatic, not just the

theoretical questions at stake really raise the need for essential for capitalism studies. and i'm pleased to ask julia ott to introducer speaker for julia is associate professor of history at the new school for social research. she is a ph.d in history from yale, is the author of the widely acclaimed book when wall street met main street, the quest for an investors democracy published a harvard university press. she is currently working on a book project that explores quote the ideas, the individuals and institutions that brought u.s. inequality. she is a codirector of the center for capitalism studies and a great colleague. julia. [applause] >> thank you, dean milberg, for the lovely introduction and marvelous comments which i hope you will e-mail to me. so it's a true honor for the

brennan center for capitalism studies at the new school for social research to welcome her fester sven beckert here tonight. e. is layered bell professor of american history at harvard university. tonight professor beckert will present his new book "empire of cotton" but always introduction i thought many of you in the audience but like to know the bit about professor beckert's own history with the new school for social research. our esteemed colleague charles tilly and eric shaped his thinking in the early stages of the project became the money metropolis. professor beckert's first book the money metropolis, new york city and the consolidation of the american bourgeoisie. published in 2000 money metropolis examined the surprise lake and it is surprising is the pricing, surprise lake unlikely social consolidation of wealthy new yorkers in the 19th century to become the most powerful social group in the united states.

working with the professors, professor beckert told me before it emboldened him to take of capitalism just as the professor was discussing, as a subject of historical and critical inquiry and to think about large social formations, large historical questions, to engage in comparative perspective, to broaden his analytic frame and to encompass the entire globe. all of these moves have fallen out of favor in the discipline of history at that time. so in the last 15 years since he published that book, professor beckert has led the emergence of a new history of capitalism as a subfield within the discipline of history. he's done that not just on account of the acclaim influence of this first book. he codirects the program on the study of capitalism at harvard where he has provided a generation of not just harvard graduate student and not just

historians but sort of a whole generation of scholars coming back to questions of capitalism, provided them with intellectual nourishment's. next year the prestigious charles warren center at hard will take up the history of capitalism as its fellowship theme under the direction of the professor beckert. he co-chairs the weather had initiative for global history at harvard, and i don't have time to list all of his awards but they do include the american council of society, the coleman center for scholars and writers at the new york public library and the guggenheim foundation. so now than to cotton. tonight, professor beckert will tell us the story of the commodity that brought us capitalism. in the process he will challenge us to rethink the the meaning and the history of that social formation and, indeed the meaning and history of the modern world itself.

thank you, everyone for coming up on back. [applause] >> thank you so much for being here tonight. i am delighted to be here and i'm very much looking forward to our discussion. as you know "empire of cotton," the book i'm going to be talking about for the next 45 or 50 minutes was published approximately two months ago and am honored to be able to present it here at the new school for the first time in new york city as julia just mentioned. the new school has indeed played a very important role in its genesis because it was here that i took seminars with other professors and for those of you have had a chance to begin

reading the book of for those of you who will eventually do you will undoubtedly be able to discern their influence. as you probably already know, or at least guessed before you want in your empire of cotton deals with more than 5000 years of history and it deals with a vast array of different places, from india to the united states, from egypt to central asia, from west africa to the united kingdom. the scope of the book is so vast that i cannot possibly give you a complete picture in the short time we have here today. i can only hope that i will be able to provide you with the taste of the importance but exciting nature of the best stories, the story of cotton and the story of "empire of cotton" which would hopefully lead you to more leisurely and carefully study of the book itself. so what kind of book is "empire of cotton"? first and foremost "empire of

cotton" is a book that is much different from most history books that you will have read. most historical studies as you know deal with typical events let's say world war i, or the deal with a particular person such as the biography of napoleon or they deal with a particular subject such as the history of industrialization. they almost always do with relatively narrow, short time frames and they limit themselves to studying the elements in one town in one region or in one country. of course there are exceptions. one only has to think of the great works of the found aboard a no or eric hobsbawm or george tilly but by and large most historic research is framed in these particular ways. i don't disagree with such framings as such. i think they are important to understand the human past the

"empire of cotton" breaks with these traditions and it tries in a radically different way to think about history. namely, to look at history from a global perspective and at the same time try to analyze what of the greatest issues of our contemporary moment, capitalism and by doing so by putting a physical commodity, the physical thing, cotton, at the center of the story that it is telling. so what kind of book is empire of cotton? "empire of cotton" is of course as its title suggests first and foremost a history of cotton. instead of putting events people are things and at the center of its narrative it circles around a commodity, a fluffy white fiber with extraordinary properties that allow humans to manufacture textiles for approximate 5000 years. the book follows that cotton

from the peasants, the slaves, the sharecroppers who grew it to the merchants who traded in cotton, to the spinners and weavers who manufactured cloth then on to the consumers who use it to dress themselves. it traces the history of that fiber over a period of 5000 years, from the moment when it emerged as a household-based industry of hand operated spindles and looms strung between trees and what is today pakistan to the industrial revolution in england and then all the way to the modern arab and to the rising dominance of china. this is of course a fascinating story to research but more importantly, a focus on the commodity, focus on cotton allows me to disentangle connections between agriculture and industry but also connections between wage workers and slaves, the twin and pasteurization and

deindustrialization. in some ways a commodity history helps us see what i call the unity of the diverse. industrialization of one part. importantly cotton is not any commodity but one, this is one of the court argued of the book is a significant the global history and especially for global history of capitalism as julia mentioned early. all the bearish -- only very few of us know can imagine that for about 900 years from the year 1000 to the year 1900 approximately the growing, spinning and we have gotten was the most important manufacturing activity that human engaged in. in very large areas of the word from central asia to east africa from anatolia to china a large number of people kept themselves busy growing, spinning and weaving cotton. it was indeed the importance of cotton previous to the industrial revolution that

eventually motivated traffic improvements in its production techniques their very large market existed for the industrial relations after the 78 these and the possibilities for profit seemed an unending for anybody engaging in the manufacture of cotton textiles in new and productive ways. as a result the cotton industry was at this enter of the revolution. during the 19th century there were no interest that employ as many people as the cotton industry. as you a huge swath of the traneighteen from a slave plantations of the south to the daschle city of new england were dominated by cotton. the advent of mechanize cotton production indeed in many ways was the symbol of countries entering the modern world. a world that is recognizable to us today as a result no other

manufactured good stood at the cradle of so many revolutionary technical innovations ma organizational shows, social changes, or as many conflict. by him into effect as the most efficient way of producing textile, cotton manufactures recast the way humans work. by searching for ever more staff to staff their factors english presenting, japanese cotton manufactures among others include an unprecedeunprecede nted from people of the countryside into cities. by demanding ever more cotton to feed their hungry factors can manufactures encouraged dieters to vastly expand their cotton land and the need for cheap labor to work that land led to the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of slaves as well as the globalization of new territories, especially in africa and asia. the factory productioproductio n of cotton in fact pioneered a new relationship between industry and the countryside by

producing ever more context us, ever more efficiently and selling them to markets throughout the world. cotton traders discovered more efficient ways and in the process moved the center of the industry from asia would have been for about 4 million years to western europe and then on to the united states. and in their search for labor, capital and land, these capitalists wove together different regions of the globe creating in fact when the earliest waves of globalization. as you might no cotton was important to many different places. in britain and became the most important manufacturing industry early in the 19th century while. rock on was most important import. in india ships within issues can't industry away from spinning and towards the growing of cotton for export, combined to create tectonic upheavals in the indian economy.

incontinent europe top manufacturers everywhere became the first manufacturing industry. in the united states rock on exports established the young nations place in the global economy, the first was exactly because it provided raw cotton to the factors of knitting with the in mexico and each of them brazil, steps were taken towards industrialization and all of them in cotton. egyptian agriculture was turned upside down to the celtic cotton production for export. by the late 19th early to centuries peasants are africa and northern argentina and australia and elsewhere turned their fields into cotton plantations. huge profits were accumulated in cotton. the bearings, the boards the browns many other manufactured

families all profited from cotton. throughout the world ever more people begin to use ever more cotton textile, notable in areas that came late to cotton such as the continent of europe revolutionizing of people dressed and also how they kept going. from the perspective of the century as a whole from the 19th century as a whole cottons and boards can only be compared to the boards of oil in the 20th century. even today and perhaps that's somewhat more surprising to you cotton is still important. last year in 2013 2014, about 124 million cotton balers were produced throughout the world. and one of them weighing approximately 400 pounds, in of cotton to produce 20 t-shirts for each human on this planet. if one would put these videos is on top of one another they would

make a power 40,000 miles high. globally, up to 350 million people work in today's cotton industry in one way or another. a number that has never been reached in human history at which we present about three to 4% of the entire human population. huge cotton plantations can still be found around the world from china and india to the united states from west africa to central asia. 75 million acres of land are used today for the growing of cotton. those tightly pressed raw fibers are still shipped to factors from the were hundreds of thousands of workers spin and weave them and eventually turns into clothing. the finished product is sold everywhere from remote country stores to stores such as wal-mart, and in the cotton goods are among the very few products that can virtually be

acquired anywhere. and thus, times history demonstrates the impressive an unprecedented increase in human productivity and human consumption that industrialization in particular and capitalism more generally have enabled. as an advertising company in the h-net estates said quite accurate cotton, the fabric of our lives. "empire of cotton," the book tells the history of cotton during the past 5000 years but it focuses in particular on the 150 years between 1780-1930, the years when cotton was central to the unfolding of industrial capitalism. it focuses on these years because "empire of cotton" does not tell the story of cotton as an end in itself. indeed, a truly comprehensive history of cotton would take many thousands of pages and it

would tax the patience of readers to an unbearable degree. "empire of cotton" instead try to do something slightly different by focusing of cotton to engage one of the most urgent issues of the modern world namely the issue of capitalism. the book that is not just a history of cotton bud and especially it is a history of capitalism. if you might have observed and as you also mentioned earlier during the past few years there have been few topics that have animated the chattering as much as the issue of capitalism. in the wake of global economic crisis of 2008 questions about the nature, the cost and the viability of capitalism appeared on tv talk shows and newspapers throughout the world. it was not just the british queen who was interested in the future of capitalism.

the discussions across most political boundaries with conservative newspapers in the united kingdom and in germany for example, running stories on what they called the future of capital, as if in doubt there was such a thing why others marketed a way of capitalism destructive tendencies. this discussion continues with unabated propensity today crossing all political ideological and as we've seen professional with even pope francis make discussions of capitalism a central theme of his apathy. a discussion which has a french economist, i think rockstar status by publishing a 70 page book chock full of tables and statistics with unsexy things but an unsexy title, capital. this vibrant debate i think is to be welcomed. it has become harder to understand our contemporary word we need to understand, we need to come to terms with

capitalism. but are thinking about capitalism urgently needs the voice of historians within this debate. capitalism has a history and by now even a very long history. the social and geographic expansion of capitalism is now a millennium in the making, and the tendency of capitalism to revolutionize society, technology, states as well as many aspects of our lives post would never question which which can only be answered from a long historical perspective. in that analysis i think historians have certain advantages over economist who often deal with these questions, not least because all too many economists, nokia but also all too many economists have at times an unfortunate tendency certain economic arrangements and then to search for the laws that explain them after which

allegedly mathematical precision when mode of thinking is not commonly associate with the mode of thinking of the stories. fortunately,. "empire of cotton" and contrast tells the story of capitalism through the history of one of its most important commodities cotton, and emphasizes both the historical necessity of capitalism and also how it changed over time. namely quite drastically and this will become clear any moment. we will never be able to know if capitalism could have developed differently than it actually did, but we do know that cotton stood at the center of capitalism's history for an awfully long time. "empire of cotton" does not dissect the abstract so-called nature of capitalism but tries through detailed empirical analysis to understand the actual functioning of capitalism, or what i call capitalism in action. and as you will hear later that

capitalism in action worked quite different from the capitalism you might encounter in many economic textbooks. "empire of cotton" is not an abstract meditation on the alleged loss of capitalism but the history of really existing capitalism. just as much as reading karl marx is not the way to understand the history of the soviet union, reading adam smith's army of today's economists does not allow us to understand properly the history of capitalism as it actually unfolded. capitalism is by no looking back on fibers years of history and it is the history that at the epicenter of this book. "empire of cotton" as the subtitle says is of course also a global history. as you know and as i mentioned earlier most history that's been written in the past 150 years has focused on national history

and to be the anti-discipline of history is organized along national lines but we publish books on particular national histories we teach courses on particular national history such as french, chinese, american history and we join professional associations that are dictated to the study of particular natural history. this is not surprising as history as an academic discipline itself grew up in hand with the nation-state and his you played the nation-state and his you played an important role in the very constitution of nation-states. "empire of cotton" breaks with these traditions and a fundamental argument of the book is that we can neither understand the history of capitalism nor for that matter the history of cotton if we don't from the perspective of just one place, one region, or even one country. we have hundreds of books on the history of cotton plantations in

the americas, on the history of spinning mills in lancashire, they history of weavers in india, physical history of the german organize capitalism are the so-called sprouts of capitals and in china. "empire of cotton" draws very much on these studies and could've been written without them, but also leaves them behind i instead focusing on connections between development different parts of the war. in the book we get to no central asian patients -- peasants and enslaved workers in the american south, demanding consumers in west africa china confidential. groups of people usually do not find mentioned in the same book or not even in the same section of the library. "empire of cotton" does this very global in scope, but it combines discussions of very local developments with a very global perspective.

a great danger of writing a very global history is that it describes the world as a network of a globally connected actors in which local or national distributions of power or local interest in some ways are inconsequential because the focus is just on the global. i'm arguing very much against such a perspective. instead argue that the global and not be understood without the local, and the local not without the global. for that reason the book describes the global word of cotton from constantly shifting perspectives. sometimes from the perspective of an ant sometimes from the perspective of somebody flying in a helicopter and sometimes from the perspective of a satellite. in one chapter we might encounter the biography of an eight year old girl forced to work in a cotton factory in the early 19th century, to then

look at the global process of the emergence of wage labor, to then charge -- chart judicial framework in which labor unfolded in the united kingdom. and another chapter we might encounter in indian industrials building a cotton mill to then the spread of cotton international session throughout the world during the 20th century, and to then discuss actions between japanese bureaucrats and cotton mill owners to forge political economy of domestic industrialization. so there are very many different levels of analysis in play at most times. while it is certainly true that the local conditions the global, is also to the global constraints the options available to local actors. in many ways one of the arguments of the book is that the local and the global cannot be kept strictly separate one another as social classes unfold on a range of different but

always connected spatial scapes. and last but not least "empire of cotton" is also a book that analyzes history over a very long time period, namely 5000 years. it chronicles developments unfolding over many decades or even centuries centuries and it try to come to ever shorter time horizons of our thinking polluting of our historical thinking as to other historians which have recently argued. it shows that the history of the modern world cannot be understood from the perspective of history of the past few decades or even the past century alone. if we try to do so, if we look at history in short time chunks, we might seriously misunderstand some important development. for example, if you look at the past 50 years alone it would hypothetically be speaking, hard to tell the history of capless as his of expansion of human

freedom. it shows that slavery colonialism and violence which is as important to the long history of capitalism as human rights, emergence of legal system or democratic institutions. the history focus on only the passages and on the continent of europe plus north american could be written as a history of industrialization and that's a reasonable assessment but it would miss and affect the most significant wave of industrialization that ever happened in human history just another part of the world. "empire of cotton" in contrast is a book that argues for the importance of thinking not just on large spatial scales but also in terms of longtime friends. by describing "empire of cotton" as i just did i hope to have provide you with at least a

certain impression of what kind of book is expecting you when you open it later this week. and at least in passing i have given you over some idea of what some of its major arguments are. before ending a want way to quickly explain some of these arguments that emerge from his whirlwind tour through many different parts of the world that "empire of cotton" is. first and foremost, "empire of cotton"" as it should become clear by now already argues the geographic spread and social deepening of capless as one of the most important historical processes of the past five integers. it argues we cannot begin to understand the history without paying great attention to the history of capitalism. the expansion of capitalism integrated ever more people, ever more territories and ever more parts of our lives. that capitalism did not emerge

in a natural way buddy was created to determine actions of merchants, statesmen, presence, workers, industrialists and many others. second, "empire of cotton" argues that when we think about the capitalism we should all look at industry, but we should look at the countries and that agriculture. the countryside was an enormously important source of raw materials come of labor and markets and continues to be so good and a very large part of the history of capitalism is exactly that. how capital owners and powerful states tried to revolutionize the countryside into integrated into the global capital economy. so much of the book is actually on agriculture and what's happening in the countries. third, "empire of cotton" suggests a different explanation for the so-called great

divergents. the great divergence as many of you might know was a moment in global history of the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century when a very small part of humanities suddenly came to enjoy much faster economic growth. in the 1000 years before 1800 to the best of our knowledge, economic growth in all regions of the world was negligible basically nonexistent around 0.1% on average per year which meant that economic output doubled approximately every 650 years. that was outside the experience of anybody. that would change dramatically after the year 1800. after 1800 in some regions of the world especially in the north atlantic region, economic growth accelerated and also became continuous. growth became the new norm and not the exception.

why that is so is one of the four questions of history one of the most important questions that a historian can possibly ask. some authors have argued that great divergents was the result of a favorable climate of the continent of europe, embracing protestant by europeans, or of europe's peculiar institutions. my argument is very different. i show how europeans after 1500 created ever more global connections and then came to dominate these global connections. they succeeded in integrating distant regions of the world into the european economy and they did so by engaging in violent trade in asia, by exporting his life workers from africa to the americas and by capturing huge expanses of land in both north and south america. it is at this one in the history of capitalism which was previous to industrial revolution, before

1780, the cold war capitalism to this workout was was characterized by the violent expropriation of territories in the americas cup of labor in africa, of markets all over the world. wore capless was a world in which private ontiveros could get land and labor and blow competitors out of the water. it was based on the largely unrestrained actions of private individuals, the domination of masters over slaves at effrontery capitalist over indigenous inhabitants. this system was enabled by expanding states whose scale and scope consistently widened and deepened. but at the same time it gave space to private capital owners who ruled this territory such as the east india company, and dominant flavor without the day-to-day provisions of state. it was this war wore capitalism i argued that generate the possible of industrial revolution in europe and thus the great diversion.

and industrial pollution is one of the wages of war capital some. wore capitalism was a particular importance to the time and she because it allowed europeans to dominate the global networks of cotton production and trade. that was in many ways surprising since europe in contrast to very large parts of asia, africa and latin america had very little experience with the growing and manufacturing of cotton. cotton was alien to the continent of europe and there were indeed europeans believed in the middle ages believed that the cotton plant was like a plant on which little sheep were attached to intimate been down at night and would drink and that's how they imagined this is to grow. showing how little they knew about cotton and how remote it was. but with a global expansion of your pimp out in the 16th century, european merchants

could import and they could dominate top manufacturing in parts of india. they could rule cotton growing territories as well first in the caribbean and in brazil and later in the american south. they could mobilize workers through the transatlantic slave trade. at the same time they opened the markets for cotton goods markets the first to emerge to the importation of indian textile. it was that domination of global networks that suggested to europeans the possibility of dominating production of cotton textiles as well. europeans became important to the global network of cotton before they ever really engaged in the manufacture of cotton. that came relatively late. but they saw this as a way to power and profit. it was exactly at the point that the decisive new machine emerged in the newly industrializing factors -- factors of you.

it catapult the continent to unprecedented economic growth on the profits of the earlier war capitalism and it was exactly this point that the great diversion emerged. forth and directly related, the book argues for the great importance of slavery to the history of capitalism. for all too long many historians have seen slavery and capitalism as mutually exclusive systems of organizing economic activity. the history of capitalism was described as a history without slavery. and slavery is essentially noncapital. instead of describing slavery as it unfolded on the cotton plantation as the modern institutions that it really was they described as premodern. violent but unimportant capless modernity that put a brake on economic development in surviving artifacts of an earlier world that was done away with by the capitalist

revolution itself. this is not completely wrong but i'm also arguing against this particular moment in time. "empire of cotton" are too stupid it is he's slavery as modern, profitable expensive and in some ways at the very core of the expansion of industrial capitalism in england, the united states and other parts of the world because it was slaves who produced the most important raw material for production. slavery stood at the center of what was by then the most dynamic and far-reaching product production complex that have been created in human history. a british bureaucrat noted when the observed quote the greater part of our cotton is raised by slaves. in manchester and liverpool, it is owing to the suffering of the negro as if his hand had

excavated it in fabricated the engine. nearly all cotton arriving in european cotton ports entered in agencies would was grown by slaves. without the unpaid labor of enslaved africans the vast expansion of european cotton production as well as the domination of the global cotton trade and thus the emergence of industrial capitalism would have been very difficult to envision. fifth, "empire of cotton" as i mentioned before embraces a global perspective but it also argued that is your cotton can only be understood from this particular perspective. i just want to give you one example to illustrate the analytical possibilities of such a global perspective and how it would shift our thinking in history. the question is how the united states came to become the world's most important cotton

growing power, question that most in the message to argue because this is just taken for granted, the next it's gross cotton and it provides it to the markets. and they would argue that the united states in some ways was particularly suited to cotton agriculture for largely natural reasons. and while it is shortly to the cotton grows extremely well in our large areas of the united states, if you look at it from a global perspective you see that this is just as true for many other parts of the world but they're also extremely well-suited for the growing of top and. so why was it the united states became so important for the global cotton industry? we have to see first that in the 19th century, and as a fiber was unique in that it was nearly exclusively grown in great to graphic distance from most important manufacturing center,

namely the continent here. this arrangement was sent reports to the government of european cotton industry. it was essential because among other things the expansion of cotton plantations is not disturbed entrenched interests in the european countries and. in the '70s and 18th centuries, raw cotton delivered to the european cotton industry that arrived from the ottoman empire. but the inability of european merchants to recast the social structure encourage merchants to look elsewhere for cotton for european industry, and by the 18th century, by the mid-18th century planted in the caribbean and brazil increase workgroup cotton for european markets. they violently dominated both come effectively removing the native population and forcing africans to work the plantations. that was very different than what was happening in west

africa or in india. it was indeed this military agricultural cotton complex that eventually migrated to the united states. the origin of this move from the west indies to brazil as been found in the 1791, when slaves rebelled in the caribbean, caribbean's most important on the island, what is today haiti. just at the very moment when the european the cotton industry suddenly demanded vast increased quantities of raw cotton for its factors. this is also the moment when the united states for the first time comes to global production. before 1793, very little you is cotton was produced for trade and very little was exported to britain. indeed, so little that when in 1785 american grown cotton arrived in small quantity in the port of liverpool the british customs authorities confiscated

that cotton because they argued it could not possibly be the product of the united states. shortly thereafter and especially after the invention of the cotton gin he never stays cotton captured world markets, dominating them for the next century and beyond. in 1800 already 25% of cotton landed in the port of liverpool, originated from united states. 20 years later that number increased to 59% and by 1850 it was 72% conference and in britain and other european cotton industries was produced in the united states. so what was the competitive advantage of the united states? win in the 1790s and demand exploded in europe at the same time production diminished because of the revolution in haiti, the united states was the one territory in the world in which land and labor existed in

as were part -- cotton was to typical, no powerful and a trench social structure needed to be dislodged. workers were forcefully moved in. indeed, 1 million of them were forcefully moved and. a kind of social -- ascended upon the north american country. they could then recount nature as well as organization of work as they wished. it is hard if not a path to imagine such a rapid increase in land and labor for cotton could have been affected anywhere else in the world. when the british tried to increase cotton production and exports in india which by that point i also began to control in 1820s and 1830s they largely failed in this project. production in other parts of the world such as the west indies brazil and the ottoman empire were to expand, not because european factory owners and

statesmen and such a preference for slave grown cotton and saw that cotton could not be taken from this part of the world but because they lack at this point administered from legal, illiterate and infrastructure capacity to recast as agriculture to the degree that they required in the powerful and social and even lyrical structure which has the ottoman empire. finally, when the british economist considered in 1857 what he called quote the connection to an american slavery and the cotton manufacture committee concluded that quote is not and never has been any considerable source of supply for cotton which is not obviously an exclusively maintained by slave labor. sixth, another important argument of the book is that states played an exceedingly important role in the developing of cotton and of capitalism. in here you hear an echo.

it has become fashionable in some circles in the past two years to see state intervention as somewhat contradictory. the more states the less capitalism, so the argument runs. looking from of all historical perspective, this is just plainly wrong and and teachers the opposite is the case. state simply an enormously important role in the development of capitalism, and especially in the development of international capitalism, something i'm not going to look up so much i would be happy to talk about more in the q&a. queue at it. states have protected industries from unwanted imports. for several the textile industry in the united states. states have created legal systems, they have had mobilize workers, concord distance markers, created infrastructures and have supported industries in many different ways. indeed a map of strong states

and states that experienced early and customization is nearly identical. one only has to think of great britain itself the first industrialized or that pioneer in the can is cotton production which was a powerful state in the 18th century which was nearly any continued state of warfare the sustaining high levels of taxation, estate to get him involved in the subject and estate that was certainly not democratic. that state governed a huge empire but it created barriers to the imports of indian textiles. it forbade the export of its newfangled cotton manufacture machine and it also disallowed the emigration of its skilled cotton workers. in some ways one could argue that capitalism is not so much a result of the parts of the owners of capital but the powers of the states. owners of capital created the revolution of capitalism with the support of strong states

states that have become stronger as a result of the ever more productive and daschle economy that these capitol owners have created. it was that symbiotic relationship, a relationship that allowed workers who came to play an ever important role in this distribution has recovered to improve the wages and working conditions. it have also a complicated impact on the spatial discretion of cotton starting in the two century but for a different set of reasons. these large and many arguments anymore embedded within the narrative that "empire of cotton" tells. the book takes you to the huge range of places and were in the globe, or nearly everywhere and it take you to many centuries of history to explore how the present world came about. along the way you will be meeting child workers in cotton mills in new hampshire, new york merchant families hiring slaves

for the american south the japanese bureaucrats time to build a clone of cotton growing complex in korea. west african farmers struggling to retain control over their crop struggling, struggle between brazilian slaveowners and brazilian industrialists over tariff regimes come and injection and daschle is trying to build the cotton industry under the condition of colonialism. but i want to come to an end. in many ways the history of cotton is a sobering history. it is the tale of millions of people being shipped across the atlantic to toil on slave plantations. it is the telepresence on india africa and central asia seeing they can't destroy by colonial officials. it is the tale of unbelievable violence descending upon the cotton workers in mexico, congo or george in the united states. it is the tale of tens of

thousands of indian comp resilience and egyptian peasants starving to death because the cotton of the crew could not pay for the food that they need. it is the tale of women and children working under horrible conditions and often against their own most and factories from lancashire. it is the tale of spectacular private and government repression destiny on workers who chose to struggle for improved working conditions and wages. millions of lives were literally spent serving interest of those who gained profit, power and reputation from the empire of cotton. however, i want to end on a somewhat more hopeful note. if you want to draw some lessons from the history of the empire of cotton, and the globalization of capitalism we can and we should. we can learn, for example, the shape of global networks just like today was not only

dependent on the interest in wings of capitol owners and state bureaucrats. instead the collective individual action of the peasants, workers and others may at times and decisive difference in the shape of the empire of cotton. the refusal of rule cultivators engaged in wage work on plantation had a very significant impact on the shape of particular incorporation of vast areas of the world's world land of the global cotton economy. as we have seen the shape of the globe depends very much on the activities of states, states that today in much of the word have become subject to democratic politics. if we want to draw a lesson from the history of cotton then it is that the shape of global networks like everything else is not a fact of nature but it is the product of human agency of human conflict and human negotiation. mini narratives of the rise of capitalism have the effect of

dividing the words of people searching for essential differences, differences that all almost presented as facts of nature. even well-meaning advocates have argued essential of particular groups of people within global capital, assigned into him to the center or the periphery, for example. yet history is more complicated. after all, only 150 years ago it would have been unimaginable to british political administrative city in the city of calcutta before tax and cotton farmers that one day china would emanate the growing come spinning weaving and manufacturing of cotton. they could have imagined even less the end he would be a major presence on the world cotton market. and the possibility that that little island off the continent of europe, eventually turned its remaining cotton factories into

museums, that might or might not entertain the children of unemployed formal millworkers and one of these dreadful rainy weekend for the only imaginable as a nightmare. thank you. [applause] >> okay, everybody. so my name is brian weathers. we are going to have a q&a right now but we do not have a mobile microphone to we have a microphone right here. we have microphones over the. the reason why i applaud but microphones is because this is being recorded and would like to be able to capture your lovely voices angel of the questions. if you do have one, if you could make your way to the front and we will take one of these microphones out of the stand and you can ask it. feel free to make your way up to the front to ask questions.

>> thank you. justin jackson at nyu. one of the things i really thank you for the talk, applicable to reading the book. one of the things i would like about the book is the concept of war capitalism as you are trying to advance. ..

about war and capital in the 20th century? >> this are really excellent and very complicated questions and the short answer is i think that the book does not address in specifically the issue of war and capitalism in the 20th century. indeed it doesn't even talk that much about the relationship between war and capitalism in the 18th century or the 19th century. the idea of war capitalism, does not rest on the idea of war between states. the idea of war capitalism, it is basically the wording emerged because it was clear that there was a very important moment in the history of cap cotton and capitalism previous to the emergence of industrial capitalism and some ways

foundational to that later history. historians have called that moment in the history of capitalism mercantile, merchant capitalism and other such words. this is perfectly fine with me, except it struck me writing history, after done with the book it struck me this doesn't capture es tense of what was actually happening in the world in this particular moment. and, this is, and what was really happening in the world at this particular moment was this enormous degree of coversion and violence that descended upon many of the world's people which seems to unlike the workings of capitalism ascribed in economic textbooks as i mentioned earlier. and so, therefore the war capitalism is meant to describe this moment in which slavery the expropriation of the lands

violent trade is really at the center of the expansion of european european capital. of course wars come into that as well but they're not the central element in what i see as war capitalism. i see it much more as an emphasis on the coercive violent aspects of tallism in this particular moment and also, also an emphasis on that this is, you know, that this is a moment in the history of capitalism quite different than history of capitalism in the 20th century. i'm worried about transferring that easy aisle in the modern here a. we have a war moment of war capitalism and then industrial capitalism and one moment replaces the next. that is not my argument.

i'm arguing i'm not able to do as much in this talk but able to do in the book, but the transition into industrial capitalism replaced war capitalism. it intensifies the war capitalism. it puts so much pressure especially on slave labor in the united states but at the same time, something new emerges. and, this is, new ways, for example, new ways of mobilizing labor in the countryside without enslaving the worker begins to emerge at this particular moment. eventually, you know, for example, slavery becomes, there is no significance to the empire of cotton after the 1860. in some ways what that conceptual louse me to do to argue for the importance of slavery this particular moment of capitalism but allows me to

explain why slavery is not important anymore in the history of capitalism even though i am aware there are enslaved workers in the world today and not at central to the economy and that is a huge difference from 1840 or 1850. >> thank you. also terrific. i share the overall concept of history of capitalism but i have a question about the history of cotton in that history. seems you referred to cotton two different ways in your talk. one you use it as a general symbol of you know, capitalism, and you did that for a lot of the talk and i don't i actually don't find that convincing. when i think about markets historically the duray the

local markets, the main commodity or main exchanges is food. when i think about the early capitalist world systems among goal and so forth waller stein i mean cotton is really not so important. i think about the rise of england as well, even in the high point of cotton, when you think about a country like the united states, it is not clear that cotton is leading is the most important commodity. usually people say land and slaves are the most important commodity. now they're related to cotton but, right but they're not the same. they are not the same as cotton. so it is, you know. so part of your talk i really found very interesting and very convincing was the specificity of cotton and when you related it to the relationship between

local elites that have already presupposed market long market developments medieval europe china, so forth long market developments, especially europe, their ability to organize at a distance which is what happens i'm thinking about the great essay on the crisis of the 17th century where he talks about a crisis that is going on for several centuries that is basically resolved by the rise of america, the colonization of america. that i think i found very convincing. that is not the same as kind of uses cotton as a symbol for capitalism throughout 5000 years. >> right. okay, good questions. again very big ones. i guess the book encourages these kind of big questions but let me say at first, i don't think capitalism has a 5000 year-long history. cotton does.

capitalism is still long but somewhat shorter. maybe approximately 500 years. look i totally agree with you. there are, this is not the only thing that there is in the history of capitalism. there are many, many other things and in particular i think, you know if you look at the, if you look at the at the later period which i didn't mention, but if you look at the 20th century as i tried to explain, cotton doesn't matter significantly but i don't think it is at the core of modern capitalism in 20th century or second half of the 20th century so i agree with you there. but it is still striking though how central cotton is in very long moment in that history of capitalism. and in some ways the most important, you know, if i would be forced to identify one really crucial moment in the history of capitalism, that the

real turning point is the industrial revolution. this moment when we suddenly invent new ways of manufacturing things and machines that are vastly more productive. and, you know, capitalism brings us that. and, we are all wearing much better textiles because of it but at this moment, cotton is really key central not just in the united kingdom but also in france or italy or mexico or egypt or the united states or elsewhere. so i think that is the particular importance of cotton in the long history of capitalism. then when it comes to the united states, you know, certainly a lot of money was made in land and, and in the slave trade but it is, you know, the value of the land and value of the slaves

was directly, immediately related to the expansion of cotton agriculture without expansion of cotton agriculture the value of slaves, for example, would have been much, much, lower and if you look, i mean i don't think anybody really knows the exact if you look at the american economy as a whole in first half of the 19th century nobody has really calculated what the precise percentage is of the cotton-growing industry in the american south as a part of the entire national economy but i have seen estimates of approximately 20% of total economic activity in the united states was related to the growing of cotton but if you look at, for example the foreign trade of the united states until the 18 '60s, the majority of exports from the united states was cotton. the united states mattered only to the global economy because of

its cotton exports. that is how the united states claim to place that importance. this was literally entirely on the backs of slaves. >> so i have had the pleasure of reading the book. i don't want to give too much away in my questions and i have lots of them and nothing but tremendous respect and admiration for the work but just maybe a couple. one of the central historical issues you're trying to engage with here is the great divergence right? you introduced this argument a little bit in the talk that the great divergence required a certain kind of state right? that europeans had and other political structures did not have in other regions of the globe. so it made me wonder a little bit, first of all, are you sort of implying there that, kind of other political formations are incapable of the same sort of violence that european states

are capable or that perpetuate to create cotton capitalism? but also, it would, because you have so much emphasis on this very active very violent states, in creating this world i'm sort of left wondering, what you thought, how you kind of think about liberalism? does it really matter at all? is it just simply like an idealogical cover for a few people that really has very little historical significance if you want to look at actually existing capitalism as it develops in history right? and then i will just leap way forward in time because i was reviewing a book recently that was discussing post-colonial movements in some of these regionses that you talk about in your books namely egypt and india. the books talk about even at the beginning of the 20th century as anticolonial radicals are debating debating what a

post-colonial world would look like thinking about liberalism, capitalism imperialism or con low noised status together -- colonized. and the book i was reviewing was really focusing on is rejecting the question of was rejecting colonized status, would it mean rejecting liberalism and what would it mean rejecting capitalism or could you keep some of these elements in a post-cone y'all world, would you want to? my question would be to sharpen that a little bit and say in after the decomization -- decolonization, as economies contributed cotton export as important part of their economy do you find actors questioning cotton as a commodity in general or the way its organization and distribution are structured in any kind of sort of meaningful way? is that an important component of the post-colonial moment we

haven't paid enough attention to? >> good, good questions. let's start with the anticolonial movement and the postcolonial moment. this is superb topic we have not focused on capitalism because we're so on jessed on the ideas of core, periphery why the third world the global south why it has been underdeveloped that we often haven't traced the history of capitalist entrepreneurs in the global south and the history of cab tallism within the global south and that comes to haunt us. if you look at world today the most dynamic capitalist places clearly once upon a time was once called the third world. there is really interesting history of capitalism and emergence of industrialism out there in places like china

egypt, brazil nigeria, elsewhere we need to take much greater account of and the book tries to do some of that. and what strikes me as important in this story clearly the cotton, the conversations on cotton are very important to nationalist conflicts especially in places like india and egypt but also other parts of the world and there are certainly kind of a veneer of, of, there is a veneer of, you know, kind of like gandhi, like leaving the industrial world behind, coming back to spinning in the home and weaving under the tree. but you know, the people who really were quite instrumental in the struggle for independence in india were actually mill owners who were in close contact

with gandhi himself. of course what actually happens with independence is, is that indian cotton production skyrockets. industrialization especially in the cotton industry expands quite significantly. and interestingly enough, by and large i think the kind of colonial mechanisms that had been developed in the 19th century, for example how to transform the countryside to make it more conducive to producing cotton in large quantities to be shipped to factories, in a way they become radicalized. this is also very visible in the soviet union. the soviet union obviously as such an anti-capitalist project but in some ways if you look just at the continue industry which is narrow perspective but in some ways the imperial

project in central asia becomes radicalized, becomes also quite violent and perhaps even more violent and i found this beautiful story in a german archive. you might know germany had a few colonies in africa but in 1914 they lost them but they had used these colonies to produce cotton for german industry but these experts who knew how to do these these kinds of things found themselves unemployed in 1914. there was no colonial empire. but the soviet union in 1920s, ah, there are people in berlin know how to do this so maybe we should consult with them. so they consult with them. great russian cotton society yet context people in berlin asked for advice to turn peasant as culture in central asia to turn

it around. obviously the national liberation project went often along with an anticapitalist project. but i see also, just enormous continuities between the too. sometimes i said even radicalization of this, of this project. i know this goes against the grain of 20th century political history as we've seen it. maybe that is slightly overdoing it but still think all-knowing that continuity matters a great deal. the question, now we're moving earlier into the 18th century and 19th century about liberalism. and look, this is, again, a very, very important project. very important to think about this question. obviously, the creation of a capitalist society was utopian project. and it very watches driven, they

were important thinkers who were very. emphasized the -- very much emphasized the importance of markets, of contracts the rule of law of wage labor these were ways to increase human freedom. and in many ways it did increase human freedom. there were feudal dependencies that characterized european countryside certainly were done away with. the arbitrary rule of the lord over his peasants came to an end. sometimes took a while but it came to an end. and so human freedom clearly clearly expanded and this is very important part of that history of, of capitalist but at the same time, if you actually look what i call capitalism in action, if you look actually at the history of capitalism, you

see this idealogical project goes along with what i describe as this enormous degree of violence that descends upon millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people all over the world which has nothing to do with this enlightenment inspired project of increased of human freedom. one interesting question i think is how we ever persuaded him to write this real history of call tappism, out of power conceptual thinking of the world of capitalism. a lot of wording must have been done to make that possible. as an historian going to the archives looking at those documents it strikes me there is disjunction between this idealogical project and this and this, and the actual real history of capitalism. >> hi greg bartels, new school for social research. your book was recently reviewed

in the ws. the reviewer was basically complimentary of the book, but being "the wall street journal" at the end he felt you had to take away anything about capitalism with a capital c in your book and his argument in a nutshell, hope i'm not making a straw man about it, slavery, violence, these were all regrettable things, no doubt but none of them took place entirely in isolation from political context political graft, social bias, what have you, therefore you can't lay any of these purely at the foot of capitalism. the reviewer finished with a quip that capitalism hasn't been tried and failed but simply hasn't been tried. i hear this form of argument all the time, chicago school of economics, "reason" magazine, i think you might have anticipated a little bit in your last answer. wonder if you could clarify for

me the logic of that argument. how your book aims to, to, go beyond it. or transcend it through historical research. >> can you just summarize what you see as that core argument? >> if, if negative effects don't follow from capitalism alone but only capitalism in conjunction, eg bought interference we have no way of isolating effects of capitalism from the effects of government interference. >> right. look i think that an interesting argument. as you know, and as you just mentioned you can encounter that frequently. that doesn't make it right but but it is, but it's still very much an argument the that is out there. again i think that relates to my previous comment. you know the kind of capitalism

that you find described in economic textbooks or the kind of capitalism envisioned by some enlightment thinkers, is a utopian project and it is beautiful. it is very attractive. we're all going to get richer and we'll all going to get freer. that is a beautiful idea and i don't think anybody in the room would object to that. however, it is not an accurate description of the unfolding of the history of capitalism in the past 500 years and and so i would, you know i think i said that at the beginning it is no, the capitalism, it is, we don't know if there would have been some other possible history of capitalism that would have been,

you know had, would have had not had a history of slavery and colonialism and expropriation and warfare and all that. maybe it is possible but you know, as an historian i can only say the historical record is very very different. and you know the historical record is so persistently different that i think that makes me think that maybe there is something wrong with the model, you know, the utopian model. but the ideas are beautiful yeah. >> hi. how, if the all were you influenced by eric williams' book capitalism and slavery? >> so eric williams is very, very important to my argument

because as most of you probably know he published a book in the '40s on capitalism and slavery which he argued that the expansion of slave labor in the caribbean was important to the history of british indus strellization and and that is very much the story i'm telling as well. the particularities how we tell the story is a little different. so, for example, eric williams focuses very much on the profits out of the slave trade being reinvested into the manufacturing enterprises. and historians have, you know economic historians have looked at that very closely and they have concluded that the capital investment in manufacturing in england that derived directly from the slave trade was quite

mine no so it can not really explain the industrial revolution and ai agree with that. that is not the persuasive part of eric williams -- the other reasons i described to you earlier in great detail. but he is very, very important. and, you know, but you know, that tells us tells you a lot about the distribution of the power to interpret the word because writing from the 1940s as african caribbean was not a position from which many people would listen to you. and i think his work has been largely, you know, has become now i believe again quite prominent and our students read it again but for a long time that has not been the case. again, this links in a way to your questions about liberalism

and the you tobyian character of capitalism. i mean, who had actually been able to tell the history of capitalism? it is a very select group of people. very small slice of humanity and has found an audience in doing so. many african-american intellectuals, many intellectuals in the global south, gandhi, among them, he wrote an entire book on cotton which has some of the argument i'm making in it. they have made these argument as long, long time ago but, they are not the ones that interpret capitalism for us. >> hi. such a rich discussion, i'm very eager to read the book and i think that the questions that have been asked are really

intriguing. i, i think i want to follow up on some of the themes that others have already mentioned. so your concept of war capitalism and the striking phrase you used, the military as cultural cotton complex, so all of this sounds to my ears, evokes a language of primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession as sort of the absolutely essential not only original accumulation of capital making possible a more developed system of capitalism in the early phases but, you know, possibly still sort of ongoing kind of development. and i am just curious really about your title. that you used the word empire in your title but am i wrong not the word capitalism or is that in the subtitle? anyway, could you say a little

bit more about what, what the force of that term empire is here? i mean i just i don't know, of course it has a great sound and it is evocative but i'm wondering for you also some sort of a determinant conceptual place in your argument? that would be, one point. and, if i could just raise another related point. i was really struck by two other things that you said that i'm still trying to kind of digest. one is this idea of the tabular the importance, the almost describing something like nimby don't do this in our backyard where we'll get people upset. do it sort of far away where you don't have social organization basically. i mean, i don't know anything

about anitoli, you gave me there was some sort of capacity for social organization among the peasant at this there, that would have made things very messy, and this tabular, la rasa idea is interesting to me and like to hear more about it. . .

over whether, i mean, it's the plantation system that did they vote for me this idea of organizing something that is just completely -- whatever forms of social organization. and just engineer it. can you say something about -- i know that was incoherent. >> thank you. there's a lot to be said about this and this is basically the second half of the book. look, i tried to explain, so basically in the moment you saw european cotton industry you need a lot of raw material. indeed ideally falling prices so you can sell these goods to an

expanding market. the problem was that stuff just doesn't grow in europe. the french revolutionaries try to grow it because they thought he could reinvent the world including agriculture in a fundamental way but they fail. it didn't grow in europe. it had to come from somewhere else. account the damage i can firms or else he didn't have to do anything to the european country so. the european countryside has definite social relations. when you disturb it too much the peasants would rebel and you and political problems on your hands. it came from the outside, but where it came from i don't think any manufacture cared much. they were very much opposed to slavery. they would much prefer to have cotton grown by free labor, by slave labor. the problem was throughout the world there were millions of farmers who grew cotton in india, africa and central

america. a group for their own domestic production and cotton had a definite place within the total dissipation of crops that the crew. they food -- they grow food crops so they wouldn't die. but they grew the cotton as well for producing their own and exchanging them a more kids but they were very very reluctant, just to produce external markets and then be at the mercy of the market. to have a preference first producing enough so they and their families could survive. youyou would have had to disrupt that and eventually it will be disrupted in the later part of the 19th century but indeed 18 sentient early part of the 19th century european colonial states did not have the capacity yet or european merchants to disrupt that. they encountered political structures such as even in india but also, but also because they

couldn't really, they have a problem bringing european capital to the countryside. the europeans were very much on the outside. they were in the port city to the only way they could get cotton is purchase it from a merchant. they were very far removed from the production. i could tell in great detail how the british tried to make that happen and that they filled in the 18th was 1830s. they failed because they cannot get the labor cheap to do this. the importance of the americas preparation and of slave labor comes in. because here they can do they can reinvent the world because they have the power and that has a lot to do with the social structure of north america and caribbean and so when.

so that's a very short answer to a very complicated question. i'm sorry, i didn't speak very much about this. in the later half of the 19th century the power of the european capital on the european states in the global countryside increases tremendously. it increases partly because the resources accumulated in the first part and then it's contract law the railroad that come into the global countryside. the growers are no longer enslaved. it's spectacularly successful. expansion of cotton agriculture in the world after the evolution of slavery it continues even though in 1850 or 1860s for the american civil war many factory owners in europe were convinced that if slavery does away with the industry would be also done away with. but that did not happen.

so the title of the book empire come i don't think there's much conceptual currency and using this term except to can suggest that leads into me different parts of the world and the subtitle is "a global history," same book published in the uk and the title is the global, the origins of global capital. different market. talking about a capitalism. >> i think if we have one last question, we probably have time for a brief final question. would you like to come up and use the mic? >> this might be a good last question because it's slightly cheeky. suppose i just brought a little bit that capitalism of cotton along two dimensions, smaller and then the large.

one of the most important organizational forms of capitalism is the factory. the use of wage labor, and so when i was a kid i remember being trotted off to see the mill which is part of the cotton industry which fits the faces. i was also trotted off to see the derby foundry where they started smelting iron ore and coke in 18th century the factory didn't depend on the cotton industry. we would've got that in any case but and then coming at the same issue and the large, the process of production transforming input and output. one part of the theory of production is the question as to whether not the basic commodity something that enters into the production of anything and that you therefore need to produce everything that you actually produce. so i've never heard of cotton as a candidate for basic commodity.

in the 20th century normally oil gets nominated. in the 19th century normally cold gets nominated. if you push the boat out a bit i would bet that if he took i had and still out of the input output matrix of britain and the 19th century you'd have a hell of a time keeping the economy afloat. so if i put my tongue in my cheek ear and i say cotton -- we would've gotten a capitalism in any case. what would -- >> i think it relates very much to the earlier debate that we had. there are other industries obviously that matter to the history of capitalism to a matter increasingly and the british economy, by the 1830s their increasing investment in railroads and iron industry, the steel industry, and mining and all that becomes very, very important. but still at the moment of industrial revolution i would

still want to maintain that cotton is at the very center of this particular move. there were large production units in the parts, including large workshops in barley, but the factor as a know it is kind of a private way of organizing human production is clearly a result of the expansion of the cotton industry and it is not just some in the uk but also the united states and egypt and india and brazil and other parts of the world. so again is it possible to imagine the history of capitalism without cotton? maybe, maybe but the real history of capitalism clearly cotton is very very central to that history, and they think that's not just kind of a coincidence. it's not just that something has

to be at the center. it's cotton but there is systemic reasons for that some which i just tried to explain in my previous answer, partly that it was connected to the americas and two south asia and all these other places. this is not like a flourish, a flourish in history of capitalism that we like to read about and talk about because somehow it's kind of exciting, all that global connectedness. no, i think this is kind of at the core, the essence of it and, therefore, i think cotton does matter a great deal. >> we are find it very hard to depart the "empire of cotton." [applause]

>> thank you everyone for attending, and thank you for fess up record. >> thank you -- professor beckert. [inaudible conversations] >> is there nonfiction off the book you would like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail to booktv@c-span.org, tweet us at a booktv or post on our wall facebook.com/booktv. >> here's a look at some of the upcoming book fairs and

festivals happening around the country. and less of about book fairs of vessels happening in your area and what happened at into them to our list. e-mail us at booktv@c-span.org. >> welcome to columbus of georgia on booktv. located on the chattahoochee river, the river serves as a major trading post in created a booming textile industry in the city's early history. >> the votes would come up the

river and brain finished goods like furniture or machinery our agriculture implements, and the farmers from east alabama and was georgia would bring their produce, ma especially cotton into columbus and it would be shipped down the river. our port on the gulf is apalachicola, and from there the cotton would be shipped mainly to england or to the textile mills in the north. >> with the help of our media comp artist for the next hour we explore columbus' literary scene starting with local author dan crosswell as he recounts the life in are of general walter bedell smith. >> basically i said i was a good guy. what he needed was a bad cop and smith was ideally cast for that role because he was a hard driver. he had a very sharp edge. churchill, the english bulldog, called smith the american bulldog because he got results.

he joined the national guard because he always wanted to be a soldier. says he was old enough he went down to the armory in downtown indianapolis and signed up. that begins his military career in the indiana national guard and then world war ii, american entry into world war i, given his prior experience he was allowed to go to officer candidate school, became a 90 day wonder or sears and roebuck lieutenant. served in the first american offensive and was wounded within 24 hours. stayed in the army, pretty dull prospect for very limited in the warfare to we remained lieutenant and the captain for a very long time. which is his career, interestingly was in columbus georgia, forbidding. they went to the dance infantry school, then was asked to stay

on the staff and one day he gave a lecture and general marshall was the assistant commandant andy was very impressed with the presentation. went back to his main office and talked to one of his assistants, then major bradley and said that an intended to would be a wonderful instructor. well years later marshall is now chief of staff of the army and bradley was -- nobody else in this secretary was so remembered smith, is very insightful mind. ansa marshland very bad memory and then remember the episode he didn't remember smith but just on the advice of bradley they brought smith into the secretary and that launched his crib because he becomes not only the secretary eventually of the general staff, but at that time pearl harbor american entry into the war churchill arise.

basin crap the combined chiefs of staff. smith is only a major at that point, soon to be lieutenant colonel, but he is one of the main architects of the structure of the combined joint chiefs of staff. network ned smith virtually indispensable to marshall. but eisenhower was kind of floundering as a theater commander in england and the allies were still fighting over whether to launch a direct attack against france in 1942, really in 43. the british wanted to conduct a peripheral strategy. nothing was what happening this is all contingent upon the american buildup in the uk and that was installed. and so marshall sacrifices smith two b., eisenhower's chief of staff.

he begins as chief of staff to the north african campaign sicily italy and then joins him in london in december-january of 44 to 43 44. and as chief of staff of headquarters into the other were. so smith was the only chief of staff but he was essentially foreign minister for the supreme headquarters. not only with the british but also with the french. it's interesting because eisenhower doesn't sign the italian capitulation, beatles that does. eisenhower doesn't sign the german to pick chelation. beetle smith does. in both cases eisenhower was afraid it would be repercussions, or it would wash back on them. smith did a lot of the dirty work, the heavy lifting. that allowed myself to be above it all and be effective leaders that he was. when it came right down and eisenhower was forced to make a

decision, he was always reluctant to make decisions, the last person he turned to was beetle smith. and the most dramatic example of that would be d-day. the weather, it was the worst storm in seven years, and if they push back the invasion for a month that would shorten the campaign season with very dire consequences. everybody was already at a fever pitch to get this thing going. a lot of the ships were at sea because they were being staged out of northern ireland. and so they're sitting and was called telegraph cottage and sitting around the fireplace having some sherry probably. they're looking up at the windows and they are being pelted by rain. it looks like they're going to have to delay again. and this meteorologist who

worked for the raf with a very scottish accent came in and said, there's a window of perhaps 72 hours, probably less where it'll allow for the invasion. and so eisenhower walked over looked at that rain building on the window, then he turned to his air commander, naval commander, turned to montgomery who was ground commander and eisenhower is, if i were you ike, i'd go. then he turned to beetle said you know ike the weather might work in our advantage. the germans will make the same assumption that we are making, that the operation can't be staged. and so i agree with montgomery to go.

and eisenhower thought for a second, and he says, it's a go. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> he was not your traditional u.s. general in terms of, you know, of the heroic leadership style. he was a manager. he was a manager of people. that was his great strength. and then when people fell out he'd stick beetles on them, to beat them back into line. in 1947 of course they create the cia. and it was not it did not gain any traction. they needed somebody was going to go in there and kick butt and take names. and also restructured the cia.

and clearly truman thought that beetle smith was the guy. so essentially brings beetle lynn, gives them carte blanche and deal goes to work. the structure he puts in place was an entirely functional structure. americans don't like functional structures, or whatever reason. i could explain that but it would take a long time. smith learned from the british example and the way their staffs worked in world war ii that the functional approach was far better. and what he does is, well the structure he puts in place survived until after the cold war when clinton made some small changes. but essentially the structure that smith put in place still survives. the other thing he didn't like was that a lot of the people who were in the cia were, well they were two types. one the dominant type and these were from privileged families in

the northeast who went to prep schools, went to ivy league school, many of them have spent some time on wall street and were in it for the adventure. they did things like drop oversized condoms over the soviet union to convince the russians and americans were he-man. they also have a program where they would float in propaganda on balloons. smith said if any of you sons of coming here again with any kind of project dealing with rubber, so we tried to explain these things, to professionalize these amateurs. the other side were the hard-core analysts, and he shifts the focus from covert operations, which were universally failures because they were amateurish, and placed that over to the people who drove fords not mgs. the analysts i. sogeti profound impact on these

guys. great men took advantage of people, and eisenhower knew exactly beatles strength, his weaknesses. and he employ beetle to achieve what the objectives were put what of those adjectives of course was eisenhower's rise eventually to the white house. beetle just thought payback would've been just to place him as army chief of staff. sit in a chair of his real hero was not dwight d. eisenhower, it was george marshall. that was denied in and that was why he became so bitter. one of his reasons his legacy is so important is that he, along with eisenhower but on different tracks, was key in relief ceiling that relationship between the british and the americans and making it work. and that lasted obviously in the postwar period.

that legacy continues. >> and now i'm booktv a literary tour of columbus, georgia, would help of our local cable partner media come. during our trip to close we spoke with virginia -- virginia causey author of "red clay white water, and blues" which provides a companies of of the city. >> i have lived in columbus for 40 years and was a teacher and a professor and to really interested in the history of the city as historian, but nobody had ever done a comprehensive or analytical history. you have to think about how to organize it in a way that makes sense to as a researcher i am riveted about the history. i find it passing but have to think about what a general reader would be able to take from history and understand. what i've done is try to organize it around three themes basically. one of the themes is that

columbus is situated both physically and sort of metaphorically on a fault line. the fall line is a geologic feature in southern rivers and north of that line the rivers become rapids and waterfalls. so that at the fall line that would be the farthest inland point of navigation back in the 1820s, 185016 those would come up the river and the fall line was as far as they could come. so columbus was found in 1828 as a trading down on the chattahoochee river. we were located at what was then called the false. the indians have long to live in this area and so whites had traded year a new about it. in 1826-27 georgia had forcibly removed all of the creek indians from the status of that opened up western georgia for

settlement. the state reserve this land around the fall line because they knew it would be valuable and wanted to have a town there. so the idea from the beginning about columbus is that it would be this mercantile center, a trading down the boats would come up the river and bring finished goods like furniture or machinery or agriculture implements, and the farmers from east alabama and west georgia would bring produce, especially cotton, into columbus and it would be shipped down the river. our report on the gulf is apalachicola and from there the cotton would be shipped mainly to england or to the textile mills in the north. the other advantage of being on the fall line is all that water as he comes down the river creates great potential power. above columbus for two and half miles to river falls 125 feet and it creates potentially 66,000-horsepower. so really quickly industry began

to be built along the river and would use the river for power especially textiles. but columbus was pretty diverse economically. we had iron foundries. we had grist mills, shoe factories, furniture factories. but textiles especially by the late 19th century dominate the city's economy. weird one textile mill, the eagle and fumes, one of the biggest mills in the south 60% of all the city workers worked at the one who. early on in its history the river was critically important and development of the river was important. we just didn't really have people who were completely competent at engineering dams and doing what needed to be done. in a guster, for example they built the canal which allowed them to control the flow of the river. the city help pay for that.

it was a public works project. here all of the default with private capital, privately done, and the first dams built were not very effective. and high water they would blow out. so i think had we had a little more engineering expertise, the early history and the development might have been more successful. in 1850 we do have a guy come in who knows what he's doing, william h. young caine and he's the one who built the eagle mill which becomes after the war it was burned in the war and he becomes the eagle in phoenix, it rises from the ashes. the civil war was probably columbus is finally our actually because the demand for war goods caused our industry to convert. the textile mills turned out uniforms and backpacks.

the eagle milkmaid india rubber which they used, that was the raincoats that they had. other stores converted to shoot factors. we had one of the largest shoe factories in the confederacy. the iron works here became a producer of steamship boilers for the confederate navy. we had a confederate naval yard that wasn't all that successful. it only produced one ship and it never did get finished never did get into the war. but the industry, we had a famous sword factory. so lots and lots of industry during the civil war. the population of the city booms during that time. there's a lot of wealth that is generated by the war. it does create an ill feeling at the same time because there were people who felt that profiteering was going on as these industries were overcharging the confederate seat for their good and

overcharging the civilians for what they had to get to georgia had a law that if you grew cotton you had to sell it to the confederacy. there are at least six seven, eight of the postwar fortunes that i found that were based on cotton that these men hid from the confederacy, and once the war is over were able to sell it at high prices and that gave them the capital to rebuild after the war and keep going. ..

agricultural slavery. an urban slave might have been a skilled worker. he we had a lot of slaves that worked in the industries. they did carpentry brick laying blacksmithing. and sometimes their workers their owners allow them to rent themselves out and keep part of the proceeds. so you had a little bit more independence. the newspapers in the 1840s and 50s are always complaining, slaves are in to in, setting up a business and selling stuff on the streets and there was no white person controlling them. so i think there was a little bit more independence of system of slavery when it was an urban system. we had a couple of kind of famous, at least famous locally slav