Author(s): Sven Beckert

History

Winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Philip Taft Prize

Cotton has created vast empires, powered the industrial revolution, generated huge wealth - and unimaginable suffering. As Sven Beckert's gripping history shows, this humble product is at the heart of global capitalism, and its story is the story of how the modern world emerged.

'A major work of scholarship that will not be soon surpassed as the definitive account of the product that was, as Beckert puts it, the Industrial Revolution's 'launching pad'.' Adam Hochschild, The New York Times Book Review

'Illuminating, memorable, rich and diverse . . . One of the new elite of genuinely global historians.' Daniel Walker Howe, Washington Post

'Beckert is a big-order thinker. His book offers a masterly picture of the empire of cotton as an economic system that held together myriad different parts . . . impressive indeed.' Stephanie McCurry, The Times Literary Supplement