EMPIRE OF COTTON

This volume is an examination of global connections and of capitalism, told through one key commodity: cotton.

Professor Sven Beckert shows how, in the 19th century, cotton captured the imaginations of the adventurous, the ambitious and the visionary, and drew them, along with many others, into an enterprise which linked people, institutions and economies in unprecedented ways.

Based on wide-ranging research in international archives, and told through the lives of a range of colourful characters, this title reminds us that any story of global transformation is really a mosaic of many individual tales.