Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism

A fascinating subject and I learnt a lot. The author has backed his sources with a huge 140 pages of footnotes. The text itself is “only” 448 pages.

Coming in I could not wait to start but in the end found myself happy to end. In my opinion as informative as this book is the author is not that good a writer. His lack of economy in his words and his ability to repeat himself became annoying. For example “the white gold” was used instead of just “cotton” so often it became a distraction. Very early I actually thought at times it read as a translation such was the convoluted text and the length of some sentences. To have to reread long tracts just to get the point was disappointing to say the least.

After reading the Acknowledgment's I suspect that the author may have done most of his own editing and I think that that was a mistake. I like to think that, even though a lay reader, dense tomes such as this do not bother me but sadly this one just became at times tedious.

In the end though this is no doubt a more than a useful book to any that have an interest in the global history of cotton and how it fits into the capitalist world. It is a book that is an indictment of colonialism, forced labour, slavery, child labour, etc. Unfortunately, as the author highlights towards the end of the book, there are still issues in this area in cotton production to this very day. For all my editing complaints I can see me delving into this book periodically to reinforce certain points of view I may have.