Cotton, Capitalism, and Coercion: Some Comments on Sven

Beckert’s Empire of Cotton

Peer Vries

Journal of World History, Volume 28, Number 1, March 2017, pp. 131-140
(Article)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2017.0006

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/663553

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 Cotton, Capitalism, and Coercion:
Some Comments on Sven Beckert’s
Em­pire of Cotton

peer vries
International Institute of Social History, Netherlands

B eckert has writ­ten an im­pres­sive, highly praised, and highly read­

able book. Or rath­er, he has writ­ten two closely interconnected
books: one on the his­tory of cot­ton, on which I am not an ex­pert and
which I leave to ex­perts to judge,1 and an­other one, a sub­text less sys­
tem­at­i­cally presented and documented, on the his­tory of cap­i­tal­ism. My
text is not an ex­haus­tive re­view but rather a set of com­ments, which
are con­fined mainly to mat­ters re­lated to the na­ture and his­tory of cap­i­tal­
ism and its role in the Great Divergence. I as­sume the reader is fa­mil­iar
with the book. My com­ments are partly crit­i­cal and partly sug­ges­tions
for fur­ther anal­y­sis and there­fore can eas­ily con­vey a more neg­a­tive
im­pres­sion of my opin­ion of the book than I ac­tu­ally have. I read it with
great in­ter­est, and it made me think. I con­sider it a must-read for ev­ery
his­to­rian in­ter­ested in global his­to­ry, but in my view it is bet­ter as a
story on cot­ton than as an anal­y­sis of cap­i­tal­ism.
With regard to the his­tory of cot­ton, I con­fine my­self to a cou­ple
of com­ments that re­late to the fact that Beckert tends to over­es­ti­mate
its im­por­tance for the econ­omy of in­dus­tri­al­iz­ing Britain. He writes: “In
1770, cot­ton manufactur­ing had made up just 2.6 per­cent of the value
added in the econ­omy as a whole. By 1801, it accounted for 17 per­cent,

1
  For the his­tory of cot­ton, I ad­vise the reader to also read Giorgio Riello, Cotton:
The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), an
ex­cel­lent book, in my judg­ment, with a dif­fer­ent ap­proach that fo­cuses much more on the
his­tory of cot­ton as a com­mod­i­ty.

Journal of World History, Vol. 28, No. 1

© 2017 by University of Hawai‘i Press

131
132 jour­nal of world his­to­ry, march 2017

and by 1831, for 22.4 per­cent” (p. 73). That is in­cor­rect, as com­mon
sense would al­ready sug­gest. Cotton tex­tile pro­duc­tion was a very
im­por­tant sec­tor of manufactur­ing but it never accounted for more than
10 per­cent of Britain’s GDP dur­ing the nineteenth cen­tu­ry. When on
that same page he writes, “In Britain, as early as 1795, 340,000 peo­ple
worked in the spin­ning in­dus­try,” that in my view re­fers to all­spin­ners,
not just those in cot­ton as he implies. His claim, again on that same
page, that “by 1830, one in six work­ers in Britain la­bored in cot­tons”
must re­fer to one in six work­ers in manufactur­ing.2 For Beckert the re­la­
tion­ship be­tween the ex­pan­sion of manufactur­ing and ex­ports and the
strength­en­ing of the state is “mu­tu­ally reinforcing” (p. 79), and, I must
as­sume in sup­port of that claim, he adds that in 1800, “fully one-third
of tax rev­e­nues came from cus­toms” (p. 80). That may well be true
but of the to­tal tax yield in the pe­riod 1793 to 1815 of £542 mil­lion
only £9.8 mil­lion was col­lected on cot­ton, to be more pre­cise on cot­
ton fi­ber.3 These er­rors could have been avoided. A fi­nal com­ment:
The pro­duc­tion and ex­port of cot­ton tex­tiles took off only late in the
eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry. Let me quote Giorgio Riello: “The Brit­ish cot­ton
in­dus­try was in­sig­nif­i­cant com­pared to wool­ens un­til the 1780s, it grew
rap­idly un­til the end of the Napoleonic Wars and ex­panded at mi­rac­u­
lous rates over the next quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry.”4 That means that cot­ton
was quite ir­rel­e­vant for most of the pe­riod that Beckert char­ac­ter­izes
as the pe­riod of war cap­i­tal­ism! The ques­tion of how typ­i­cal cot­ton’s
his­tory was for cap­i­tal­ism’s long his­to­ry—my an­swer would be “Not
very”—should in any case have re­ceived more at­ten­tion. Some ta­bles
in­di­cat­ing the im­por­tance of cot­ton for all­countries discussed would
have been wel­come (see how­ever pp. 140 and 180).
Regarding the “new his­tory of global cap­i­tal­ism”—con­sid­er­ing the
fact that it is so cen­tral to his book, it is strik­ing that Beckert pays
hardly any at­ten­tion to de­fin­ing cap­i­tal­ism.5 He in any case does not
come up with a gen­er­al, ab­stract def­i­ni­tion. Instead his book pro­vi­des a

2
  I base my com­ments on in­for­ma­tion dis­tilled from B. R. Mitchell, Brit­ish Historical
Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
3
  Patrick Karl O’Brien, “The Triumph and Denouement of the Brit­ish Fiscal State:
Taxation for the Wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1793–1815,” in The
Fiscal-Military State in Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. Christopher Storrs (Farnham, Surrey:
Ashgate, 2009), 169–71.
4
 Riello, Cotton, 252.
5
  For other re­cent def­i­ni­tions see Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History
of Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), chap. 1; Jürgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short
History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016); and Larry Neal and Jeffrey Wil­
liamson, eds., The Cambridge History of Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014), 1:2–4. Personally, I pre­fer the def­i­ni­tion by Kocka.
Vries: Cotton, Capitalism, and Coercion 133

de­scrip­tion of what he regards as “cap­i­tal­ism in ac­tion” (p. xv). In that

de­scrip­tion two el­e­ments stick out. The first one is the heavy em­pha­
sis on the role of the state. That ac­tu­ally is not en­tirely new. Already
in the 1970s, Fernand Braudel wrote: “Capitalism only tri­umphs when
it be­comes iden­ti­fied with the state, when it is the state.”6 To my sur­
prise Beckert never discusses the ex­ten­sive an­a­ly­ses of cap­i­tal­ism by
this fa­mous scholar whose ideas in sev­eral re­spects are so sim­i­lar to his.
Even though the state plays a fun­da­men­tal role in Beckert’s cap­i­tal­ism,
we find no con­sid­er­ation of how cap­i­tal­ist states func­tioned, who ran
them, or what made them so strong and “suc­cess­ful.” Dealing with such
top­ics would have re­quired some space, but it would un­doubt­edly have
been help­ful and there is plenty of lit­er­a­ture avail­­able that Beckert might at
least have re­ferred to.7 His the­sis about the mu­tual de­pen­dence of state
and cap­i­tal­ism (p. 440), which is cer­tainly in­ter­est­ing, re­calls Charles
Tilly’s claims in his book on co­er­cion, cap­i­tal, and Eu­ro­pean states.8
Another mat­ter of note is that Beckert ac­cords to cap­i­tal­ism the
in­te­gra­tion of a va­ri­ety of la­bor forms—in­clud­ing, and with a very
im­por­tant role, un­free, co­erced la­bor—within a func­tion­ing di­vi­
sion of la­bor.9 Again, this ac­tu­ally is not new. It is the very es­sence
of Im­man­uel Wallerstein’s in­ter­pre­ta­tion of cap­i­tal­ism as a his­tor­i­
cal world-sys­tem: “Free la­bour is the form of la­bour con­trol used for
skilled work in core-ar­eas, whereas co­erced la­bor is used for less skilled
work in pe­riph­eral ar­eas. The com­bi­na­tion thereof is the es­sence of
cap­i­tal­ism.”10 Here too more trib­ute to an au­thor intellectualis would

6
  Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism (Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 64–65. For Braudel’s in­ter­pre­ta­tion of cap­i­tal­ism see
my “Europe and the Rest: Braudel on Capitalism,” in Aufbruch in die Weltwirtschaft. Braudel
wiedergelesen, ed. Guillaume Garner and Matthias Middell, (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitaets
Verlag, 2012) 81–144.
7
  For lit­er­a­ture from a more his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive I re­fer to my State, Economy and the
Great Divergence: Great Britain and China, 1680s–1850s (London: Bloomsbury Academic,
2015). For lit­er­a­ture about the “de­vel­op­men­tal state” from a more eco­nomic per­spec­tive,
see in chro­no­log­i­cal or­der: Ha-joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy
in Historical Perspective (London: Anthem Press, 2002); Erik Reinert, How Rich Countries
Got Rich . . . ​And Why Poor Countries Stay Poor (New York: Carrol & Graff, 2007); Joe
Studwell, How Asia Works: Success and Failure in The World’s Most Dynamic Region (New York:
Profile Books, 2013); Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford Delong, Concrete Economics: The
Hamilton Approach to Economic Growth (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Business Review Press,
2016).
8
  Charles Tilly, Coercon, Capital, and Eu­ro­pean States, A.D. 990–1990 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Basil Blackwell, 1990), 58-62.
9
  Im­man­uel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 4 vols. (Berkeley: California Uni­
versity Press, 2011); the first three vol­umes were orig­i­nally published in New York by Aca­
demic Press in 1974, 1980, and 1989, re­spec­tive­ly.
10
 Wallerstein, Modern World-System, 1:127.
134 jour­nal of world his­to­ry, march 2017

have been due. I—and I guess Beckert, too—can only en­dorse these
com­ments by Seymour Drescher:

Capitalism was su­premely ag­nos­tic and plu­ral­is­tic in its abil­ity to co­ex­

ist, and to thrive, with a whole range of la­bour sys­tems right through
the ab­o­li­tion­ist cen­tury af­ter 1780: with slav­ery; with in­den­tured ser­
vi­tude; with sharecropping; with pe­nal la­bour; with sea­sonal con­tract
la­bour and with day la­bour; with pe­nally constrained or un­con­strained
free la­bour. In the lon­ger run, we can see more clearly than [Eric] Wil­
liams’s gen­er­a­tion that the “rise of free la­bour” dur­ing the con­ven­tional
age of in­dus­tri­al­i­za­tion was, in some re­spects, a myth.11

Beckert, in my view cor­rect­ly, points to the role of co­er­cion and vi­o­

lence in cap­i­tal­ism. Here too, he has pre­cur­sors. Marx, whose name is
men­tioned only six times in the en­tire book, al­ready claimed that force
is an eco­nomic power and that “in ac­tual his­to­ry, it is a no­to­ri­ous fact
that con­quest, en­slave­ment, rob­bery, mur­der, in short, force, play the
greatest part. In the ten­der an­nals of po­lit­i­cal econ­o­my, the idyl­lic
reigns from time im­me­mo­ri­al.”12 For Marx, force seems par­tic­u­larly rel­
e­vant in a spe­cific phase in cap­i­tal­ism’s his­to­ry: that of prim­i­tive ac­cu­
mu­la­tion. For Beckert, too, even though his po­si­tion in this re­spect is
not en­tirely un­am­big­u­ous, vi­o­lence and co­er­cion seem to be es­pe­cially
rel­e­vant dur­ing a spe­cific pe­ri­od, that of “war cap­i­tal­ism” pre­ced­ing
in­dus­trial cap­i­tal­ism. He leaves no doubt that they were fun­da­men­tal
to the cre­a­tion of cap­i­tal­ism. Markets and pri­vate prop­erty are cen­tral
in­gre­di­ents of all­ known in­ter­pre­ta­tions of cap­i­tal­ism. But mar­kets are
not the spon­ta­ne­ous out­come of what Adam Smith calls a pro­pen­sity in
hu­man na­ture “to truck, bar­ter and ex­change.”13 They must be cre­ated
and maintained. The com­mod­i­ties ex­changed on them are not nat­u­ral
phe­nom­ena ei­ther. A cap­i­tal­ist mar­ket econ­o­my, for ex­am­ple, re­quires
the ex­is­tence of dis­ci­plined pro­le­tar­i­ans. Their cre­a­tion in­volved a lot
of co­er­cion. Nor did pri­vate prop­erty rights spon­ta­ne­ously emerge in
a co­er­cion-free pro­cess in which existing rights were sim­ply fixed and
se­cured. They were cre­ated and enforced in a pro­cess in which many
peo­ple lost prop­er­ty. Expropriation is an im­por­tant el­e­ment in cap­i­tal­
ism in ac­tion, not just dur­ing “prim­i­tive ac­cu­mu­la­tion” and not just

11
  Seymour Drescher, “Capitalism and Slavery af­ter Fifty Years,” Slavery and Abolition 18,
no. 3 (1997): 220–21. There are only two ref­er­ences to Eric Williams’s work in Beckert’s
book.
12
  Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (Harmondsworth: Pelican Marx Library, 1976), 874.
13
  Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (India­
napolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 25.
Vries: Cotton, Capitalism, and Coercion 135

in its more ob­vi­ous forms, but also in the form of gov­ern­ment de­fault,
de­base­ment, or tax­a­tion with­out rep­re­sen­ta­tion.14 Beckert il­lus­trates all­
this for the his­tory of cot­ton, but it applies to the his­tory of cap­i­tal­ism
in gen­er­al.
The im­por­tance of vi­o­lence and co­er­cion in the eco­nomic his­tory
of the West is be­com­ing a mat­ter of in­tense de­bate. Several schol­ars
now dis­cuss the eco­nomic im­por­tance of war. What I learned from their
work and what can cer­tainly be made to fit in with Beckert’s ap­proach
is the ex­tent to which in the West war itself was big busi­ness.15 In their
over­view of the world econ­omy of the last mil­len­nium Ronald Findlay
and Kevin O’Rourke ex­plic­itly claim that “no his­tory of in­ter­na­tional
trade can ig­nore the causes or the im­pli­ca­tions of mil­i­tary ex­ploits.”
According to them, the greatest ex­pan­sions of world trade have tended
“to come . . . ​from the bar­rel of a Maxim gun, the edge of a scim­i­tar, or
the fe­roc­ity of no­madic horsemen.”16 It is of­ten hard to draw a sharp
dis­tinc­tion be­tween trade and the power play of pol­i­tics and war, cer­
tainly in the early mod­ern era. For the Dutch East In­dia Company mil­
i­tary ex­pen­di­ture in the East dur­ing the pe­riod 1613–1792 was about
30 per­cent of all­its over­seas in­vest­ments.
Beckert thus cer­tainly is not alone in study­ing the vi­o­lent as­pects of
Western eco­nomic his­to­ry. I would have liked him to be more ex­plicit
about how ex­actly those as­pects fit into the rise of the West and of cap­
i­tal­ism and how they re­late to other con­stit­u­ent el­e­ments of cap­i­tal­
ism. To em­pha­size the im­por­tance of vi­o­lence Beckert even in­tro­duces
the term “war cap­i­tal­ism” for a spe­cific stage in cap­i­tal­ism’s his­to­ry. One
may won­der whether that is a good idea. His war cap­i­tal­ism in my view
is (all­but) iden­ti­cal to what is normally called “mer­can­til­ism,” the term
used to de­scribe the eco­nomic pol­i­cies of Europe’s fis­cal-mil­i­tary states in
the early mod­ern era. This means that “war cap­i­tal­ism” re­fers to al­most
ex­actly the op­po­site of what most peo­ple would con­sider cap­i­tal­ism—
just as in the case of Braudel’s cap­i­tal­ism!—and to an al­ready in­ten­sively
stud­ied phe­nom­e­non.17 Beckert con­sid­ers this war cap­i­tal­ism as in­stru­
men­tal in cre­at­ing Eu­ro­pean dom­i­nance in Asia al­ready in the early

14
  See my State, Economy and the Great Divergence, chap.1.
15
  For in­for­ma­tion on these sub­jects and ref­er­ences see ibid., 311–23.
16
  Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World
Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), xix,
xviii.
17
  For re­cent lit­er­a­ture de­voted to “mer­can­til­ism” see in chro­no­log­i­cal or­der: Sophus
Reinert, Translating Em­pire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011); William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 1 (2012): 3–70;
Philip Stern and Carl Wennerlind, eds., Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early
Modern Britain and Its Em­pire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Philipp Robinson
136 jour­nal of world his­to­ry, march 2017

mod­ern era (pp. 35, 46, 49, 64, 95). In eco­nomic terms, whether we
look at pro­duc­tion or trade, that does not make much sense. Moreover,
he seems to be of two minds. In 1800, he writes, “less than one-tenth
of 1 per­cent of global cot­ton cloth pro­duc­tion came from ma­chines
invented [and at the time still over­whelm­ingly used only] on the Brit­ish
Isles” (p. 80). Later, how­ev­er, he says: “By 1800, Britain was flooding
world mar­kets, exporting huge quan­ti­ties of cot­ton yarn and a smaller
pro­por­tion of cloth” (p. 150). To speak of po­lit­i­cal or mil­i­tary dom­i­
nance is also quite ex­ag­ger­at­ed, con­sid­er­ing the un­di­min­ished strength
and isolationism of, for ex­am­ple, China and Japan till de­cades into the
nineteenth cen­tu­ry. Britain in­deed over time be­came a ma­jor mil­i­tary
and po­lit­i­cal force, rul­ing, with other Western pow­ers, over large parts
of Asia. Beckert does not tell us how that was pos­si­ble. How could tiny
Britain with only a frac­tion of their pop­u­la­tion con­quer so much of
In­dia and beat China in the First Opium War? Here again back­ground
in­for­ma­tion about the na­ture of Western and Asian states and the
agen­das of their rul­ers would have been help­ful. The only con­ti­nent
where Eu­ro­pe­ans were ac­tu­ally dom­i­nant dur­ing the pre-in­dus­trial era
was America. In par­tic­u­lar Spain and Portugal ruled over huge tracts
of land there and cheaply ac­quired enor­mous rev­e­nues and re­sources.
That, how­ev­er, made them nei­ther wealthy nor cap­i­tal­ist. It is strik­
ing that Beckert’s “glob­al” cap­i­tal­ism ac­tu­ally is al­most ex­clu­sively an
An­glo-Saxon At­lan­tic cap­i­tal­ism.
Whether war cap­i­tal­ism, con­sid­er­ing its enor­mous costs, ac­tu­ally
brought much wealth to the countries of the war cap­i­tal­ists be­fore
in­dus­tri­al­i­za­tion is de­bat­able. Very prob­a­bly, in a world of fairly sta­ble
tech­nol­ogy with­out great in­creases in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, it was a “sen­si­ble”
strat­egy to try and en­rich one­self on the back of some­one else.18 In my
view, though, such rent-seek­ing was not a re­li­able en­gine of sustained
growth. Using co­er­cion in or­der to ac­quire rev­e­nue and re­sources is as
old as the world. Modern eco­nomic growth that is sub­stan­tial and sus­
tained is not. It emerged only with in­dus­tri­al­i­za­tion. In the pe­riod since
the First Industrial Revolution, more­over, there have been nu­mer­ous
in­stances of growth with hardly any ob­vi­ous co­er­cion, such as, for
ex­am­ple, the hey­days of cap­i­tal­ist growth in the West in the pe­riod
1945–1973. Put suc­cinct­ly: There has been co­er­cion with­out growth and
growth with­out co­er­cion. So what ex­actly is the role and con­tri­bu­tion

Rössner, ed., Economic Growth and the Origins of Modern Political Economy: Economic Reasons
of State, 1500–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2016).
18
  See Graeme Donald Snooks, The Dynamic Society: Exploring the Sources of Global Change
(London: Routledge, 1996), chap. 10.
Vries: Cotton, Capitalism, and Coercion 137

of co­er­cion in the two suc­ces­sive va­ri­e­ties of cap­i­tal­ism Beckert distin­

guishes, war cap­i­tal­ism and in­dus­trial cap­i­tal­ism?
The rel­a­tive im­por­tance and weight of dif­fer­ent fac­tors of growth
may not be ex­actly quan­ti­fi­able and com­pa­ra­ble, but an­a­ly­ses of mod­
ern eco­nomic growth unan­i­mously re­fer to in­creased pro­duc­tiv­ity driven
by con­tinu­ing in­no­va­tion as by far its most im­por­tant cause. The First
Industrial Revolution, to re­main with that ex­am­ple, cer­tainly had an
in­sti­tu­tional and in­sti­tu­tion­ally co­er­cive side, as shown in Em­pire of Cot-
ton, but also a tech­no­log­i­cal-en­ergy side, about which one could write
an “Em­pire of Carbon.” In my Escaping Poverty I have tried to shed some
light—and not more than that—on their rel­a­tive im­pact by es­ti­mat­
ing the amount of la­bor power that be­came avail­­able to Great Britain
thanks to the in­tro­duc­tion of steam pow­er, mea­sur­ing it by the num­ber
of so-called steam slaves or la­bor-equiv­a­lents of adult male la­bor­ers. For
1840 their num­ber was 17 mil­li­on; for 1870, 121 mil­li­on; and for 1896,
411 mil­li­on. Per in­hab­i­tant of Great Britain that is 0.9, 4.5, and 11.7
“steam slaves.”19 The ef­fect of just this one tech­no­log­i­cal in­no­va­tion
un­doubt­edly dwarfed the growth ef­fects of all­forms of co­er­cion.
In Beckert’s book at­ten­tion is al­most ex­clu­sively paid to in­sti­tu­
tional ar­range­ments that cre­ated cheap re­sources. But the avail­abil­ity
of cheap re­sources—and cheap la­bor—can­not in itself be an ex­pla­na­tion
for de­cades of growth and di­ver­gence. It can be in­stru­men­tal in cre­at­
ing mod­ern eco­nomic growth only when those re­sources are processed
with in­creas­ing ef­fi­ciency in in­no­va­tive ways. Even cheap im­ports, so
im­por­tant for Britain’s cot­ton in­dus­try, are not free. They must be paid
for.20 Between 1785 and 1833, the sin­gle Chi­nese prov­ince of Guang­
dong, imported, on av­er­age, each year six times as much raw cot­ton from
In­dia as all­of Britain used an­nu­ally at the time of Arkwright’s first wa­ter
frame.21 In 1805 and 1815 the amount of cot­ton shipped from Brit­ish
In­dia into Canton was about equal to the retained im­ports of wool-
cot­ton into Great Britain.22 On top of that, China pro­duced enor­mous
amounts of cheap cot­ton at home. There nev­er­the­less emerged no Chi­
nese Lan­ca­shire. The United States pro­duced huge amounts of cot­ton,

19
  See my Escaping Poverty: The Origins of Modern Economic Growth (Vienna: Vienna
University Press, 2013), 292.
20
  See ibid., 290–305 for a cri­tique of the way in which cheap imported re­sources and
ghost acre­ages are turned into fac­tors explaining mod­ern eco­nomic growth.
21
  Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chi­nese Past (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1973), 312–13. That wa­ter frame was pat­ented in the 1760s.
22
  Huw Bowen, “Brit­ish Exports of Raw Cotton from In­dia to China,” in How In­dia
Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and
Tirthankar Roy (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 115–16; Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Review Article:
The Great Divergence,” Past and Present 176 (2002): 283–84.
138 jour­nal of world his­to­ry, march 2017

too. For de­cades, how­ev­er, much of it was exported to Britain, rather than
be­ing processed in the United States itself. Coerced la­bor and cheap
re­sources from Spain’s and Portugal’s col­o­nies, as in­di­cat­ed, did not
lead to cap­i­tal­ism and growth in ei­ther coun­try. In Central and Eastern
Europe there were mil­li­ons of serfs. No one has ever con­sid­ered them
a cap­i­tal­ist as­set. In that re­spect of course it is also in­trigu­ing that slav­
ery in the United States, which was very prof­it­able and cap­i­tal­ist, was
nev­er­the­less abolished.23 One can­not ex­pect Beckert to dis­cuss—and
solve—all­these is­sues in his book, but they do chal­lenge any gen­
eral story about a tight con­nec­tion be­tween cheap re­sources, co­erced
la­bor, and cap­i­tal­ism. What one might have expected Beckert to do is
pro­vide an ex­pla­na­tion why, of all­places, Great Britain man­aged to
be­come the first in­dus­trial and for about a cen­tury the most suc­cess­ful
cap­i­tal­ist na­tion. This fun­da­men­tal ques­tion, how­ev­er, is never sys­tem­
at­i­cally discussed.
To a large ex­tent my com­ments in the pre­vi­ous par­a­graphs re­late to
the scope of Beckert’s claims with regard to global cap­i­tal­ism. For what
pe­riod in his­tory and what parts of the world are they val­id? What do
the pat­terns he shows tell us, for ex­am­ple, about in­dus­tri­al­iz­ing Germany
or Japan in the nineteenth cen­tu­ry? What about later cases of emerg­ing
mod­ern eco­nomic growth? Are some kinds of “cot­ton” and “co­er­cion”
nec­es­sary in­gre­di­ents of ev­ery cap­i­tal­ism? What has be­come of the role
of war, or rather co­er­cion in in­dus­trial cap­i­tal­ism, do­mes­ti­cally and
abroad? These ques­tions im­me­di­ately lead to fur­ther ques­tions about the
im­pli­ca­tions of Beckert’s find­ings for our think­ing about how cap­i­tal­
ism ac­tu­ally func­tions and how growth is gen­er­at­ed.
His find­ings con­tra­dict many of the cen­tral te­nets of main­stream
eco­nom­ics that un­der­lie the grand nar­ra­tive of the rise of cap­i­tal­ism
and growth as caused by the spread of prop­erty rights, mar­kets, and good
gov­er­nance en­abling the op­ti­mal func­tion­ing of those mar­kets.24 I con­
fine my­self to re­cent work by Douglass North and his co-au­thors and
by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. North and his co-au­thors in
their Violence and Social Orders claim that growth is likely to emerge in

23
  Beckert discusses ab­o­li­tion but I do not find his ex­pla­na­tion very con­vinc­ing. When
it comes to the prof­it­abil­ity of slav­ery and its cap­i­tal­ist or­ga­ni­za­tion, I was sur­prised to
find no ex­plicit ref­er­ence to the path-break­ing work of John Meyer and Alfred Conrad,
“The Economics of Slavery in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Political Economy 66, no. 2
(1958): 95–130; Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of
Amer­i­can Ne­gro Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974); and Robert Fogel, Without Con-
sent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of Amer­i­can Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989).
24
  Again I re­fer for ex­am­ples to my Escaping Poverty and State, Economy and the Great
Divergence.
Vries: Cotton, Capitalism, and Coercion 139

“open-ac­cess-or­der” so­ci­e­ties—that is, so­ci­e­ties with wide­spread po­lit­

i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion, the use of elec­tions to se­lect gov­ern­ments, con­sti­tu­
tional ar­range­ments to limit and de­fine the pow­ers of gov­ern­ment, and
un­bi­ased ap­pli­ca­tion of the rule of law.25 Post-1688 Britain in their view
was the first coun­try in the world to pass the thresh­old to be­come such
a so­ci­e­ty, which it did be­tween 1800 and 1850. Acemoglu and Robinson,
in their Why Nations Fail, paint an even more idyl­lic, co­er­cion- and
em­pire-free pic­ture in which mod­ern eco­nomic growth emerged in the
West thanks to its in­clu­sive in­sti­tu­tions. In pol­i­tics such in­sti­tu­tions
“dis­trib­ute po­lit­i­cal power widely in a plu­ral­is­tic man­ner and are ­able
to achieve some amount of po­lit­i­cal cen­tral­i­za­tion so as to es­tab­lish
law and or­der, the foun­da­tion of se­cure prop­erty rights and an in­clu­
sive mar­ket econ­o­my.” In eco­nomic life they “en­force prop­erty rights,
cre­ate a level playing field, and en­cour­age in­vest­ments in new tech­nol­
o­gies and skills.”26 Beckert re­fers to the book by Acemoglu and Robin­
son once (p. 471, n. 38), but sur­pris­ingly enough does not re­ject their
the­sis, even though the “cap­i­tal­ist” in­sti­tu­tions and pol­i­cies he re­fers to
are ex­actly the op­po­site of the ones cen­tral in their work.
Recently, sev­eral dis­tin­guished eco­nomic his­to­ri­ans have reem­
phasized the role of the “free mar­ket” in cap­i­tal­ism and growth. For
Joel Mokyr the tran­si­tion to the free mar­ket, “the mother of all­in­sti­
tu­tional changes,” is a nec­es­sary pre­con­di­tion for eco­nomic growth
to be­come “the norm rather than the ex­cep­tion.”27 Similarly, Deirdre
McCloskey claims: “No cease­less strug­gle for sur­viv­al, pros­per­i­ty, and
pre­dom­i­nance backed by ships and men and mon­ey, by jin­go, ex­plains
Brit­ish eco­nomic suc­cess, now or in 1970 or in 1792.” In her view a
pa­cific and free-trade Britain would also have benefited from Eu­ro­
pean en­gage­ment with the rest of the world: “If Manchester had been
the right place to spin cot­ton be­fore the in­ven­tion of air con­di­tion­ing,
then Eu­ro­pean events would have put it there, re­gard­less of whether
Britain won at Plassey or Québec or Trafalgar or Waterloo.” She points
out that sev­eral Eu­ro­pean countries be­came quite rich with lit­tle or

25
  Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry Weingast, Violence and Social Orders.
A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge, UK: Cam­
bridge University Press, 2009).
26
  Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Pros-
perity and Poverty (London: Profile Books, 2012), 429–30. See my crit­i­cal re­view of this
book in “Does Wealth Entirely Depend on Inclusive Institutions and Pluralist Politics?”,
Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis 9, no. 3 (2012): 74–93.
27
  Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1850
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), 8.
140 jour­nal of world his­to­ry, march 2017

no “war cap­i­tal­ism.”28 John Nye too thinks Great Britain would have
been bet­ter off with­out its in­ter­ven­tion­ist state.29
In my view, how­ev­er, there also ex­ist much more con­vinc­ing, al­ter­
na­tive in­ter­pre­ta­tions of the rise of Western cap­i­tal­ism and the or­i­gins
of mod­ern eco­nomic growth, not just by econ­o­mists as in­di­cated pre­vi­
ous­ly,30 but also by eco­nomic his­to­ri­ans. Their dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives are
nicely il­lus­trated in the words of William Ashworth, who in explaining
Britain’s in­dus­trial de­vel­op­ment, re­fers to “a pol­icy of nur­tur­ing do­mes­
tic in­dus­try be­hind a wall of tar­iffs, skill in im­i­tat­ing and sub­se­quently
transforming for­eign (es­pe­cially Asian) prod­ucts, un­par­al­leled ex­ploi­ta­
tion of Af­ri­can slave la­bour, rich re­sources of coal, a mo­nop­oly of trade
with Brit­ish North America, ag­gres­sive mil­i­tary prow­ess and, not least, a
rel­a­tively ef­fi­cient body for the col­lec­tion of in­land rev­e­nues.”31
Ashworth is just one among sev­eral eco­nomic his­to­ri­ans who of­fer non-​
main­stream, non-laissez-faire in­ter­pre­ta­tions of an im­por­tant phase in the
his­tory of cap­i­tal­ism. Ronald Findlay, Kevin O’Rourke, Patrick O’Brien,
Da­vid Ormrod, Prasannan Parthasarathi, and N. A. M. Rodger are oth­
ers. In the de­bate on the or­i­gins and driv­ing forces of mod­ern eco­nomic
growth and the emer­gence of the Great Divergence Beckert’s work can
and should play a ma­jor role. We can only hope that he writes a fol­
low-up in which he sys­tem­at­i­cally and ex­plic­itly en­gages with the main
po­si­tions in that de­bate and in­di­cates and ar­gues his own stance.

28
  Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 216, 224–25.
29
  John Nye, War, Wine, and Taxes: The Political Economy of An­glo-French Trade, 1689–1900
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 24–25.
30
  See above, note 7, for lit­er­a­ture in which in par­tic­u­lar the pro­ac­tive, in­ter­ven­tion­ist,
and of­ten mar­ket-disturbing role of de­vel­op­men­tal states is high­light­ed.
31
  William Ashworth, “Revenue, Production and the Early Modern En­glish/Brit­ish Fiscal
State,” in La Fiscalita nell’economia europea. Secc. XIII-XVIII, ed. Simonetta Cavaciocchi
(Florence: Florence University Press, 2008), 1047.